Blog Action Day: What's Cookin' in Your Garden?

Blog Action Day (10/15/09) invited anyone, and that means everyone, to talk about:

What Climate Change means to them.

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It's taken the USDA 16 years (?!) to publish a new growing zone map. Perhaps they didn't want to stir up trouble. This new one confirms what savvy gardeners have known for quite some time. Our gardens have warmed up, most by a full growing zone:

I'm a 2!
What are you?

The bright red spots over Utah are the reason I gamble with gardening zones. I used to be a USDA zone 5. These days, I have good luck growing USDA zone 7 flowers.

My Utah mountains have leapfrogged from zone 5 to zone 7. I can plant prettier flowers than ever before!

Which are subsequently destroyed by armies of grasshoppers, pine beetles, and bugs that never visited this high altitude garden before.


One step to reversing this trend is easier than you might think. Do you know the environmentally friendly move that's more helpful than...?

• Changing your light bulbs
• Driving a Prius
• Conserving on water
• Recycling most anything

What could it be?

Planting a tree!

"The net cooling effect of one healthy tree is equivalent to 10 room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day." - U.S. Department of Agriculture

There are tons of valid, complex reasons for climate change but here's something that's fairly easy to fix: Brick, mortar, asphalt... the concrete jungles of our cities warm the earth. Trees cool it down. Trees, and other greenery, would happily grow on the rooftops of any structure we build.

"One acre of forest absorbs six tons of carbon dioxide and puts out four tons of oxygen. This is enough to meet the annual needs of 18 people." - U.S. Department of Agriculture

Now if someone could please invent house shingles that are tiny solar panels I think we'd be A-OK.