Gardening in central Pennsylvania isn’t exactly a simple, witless past time for the easily amused.
As any experienced local soil jockey will tell you, growing a decent landscape here can be, well, “challenging,” to say the least.
Drought-Killed Spruce
With our shale and clay soils, intermittent droughts and monsoons, Japanese beetles, marauding deer, assorted blights and fungi, surprise frosts and much, much more, it’s not easy to grow a decent tomato or petunia.
It doesn’t help that so many of our homes are built in heavily graded subdivisions, which starts out many a gardener with little more than 4 to 6 inches of that lousy shale and clay on top of even worse compacted subsoil.
Since few people have had any schooling in the fine art of yard care, most end up winging it and learning by trial and error. What happens is that people foul up three or four landscapes along the way, learning more and more each time. But by then, they’re 70 years old, have a bad back and are on the waiting list at the retirement village.
Our hope is that you’ll pick up enough good information here to avoid that scenario. If not, there’s always concrete. Lots of concrete.
Subsoil in Pennsylvania
Anyway, we’d highly suggest improving your soil before trying to plant anything anywhere. Even good soil can be made better by working 2 or 3 inches of compost, mushroom soil or decayed leaves from the municipality into the 10 or 12 inches of loosened existing soil. If you don’t attempt to improve your alleged subdivision “soil,” you might have better results planting directly into the asphalt driveway.
Think in terms of improving whole planting beds rather than digging individual holes. The above improvement plan will give you slightly raised beds that both improve drainage and give those young plant roots lots of nutritious breathing room to spread out in all directions.
Much tougher to solve is our weather. It’s erratic. Central Pa. looks great on paper when you average it all out. A typical June day averages out to a daytime high of 81 and an overnight low of 61. Very nice.
Our average annual rainfall is about 44 inches. Again, not rot city like a rainforest or perpetual drought like Death Valley. But to get those beautiful averages, we’ll have 15 straight June days over 95 degrees, followed by a freak cold wave that sends lows down to the eggplant-threatening mid-30s. Or we’ll arrive at 6 inches of rain in July by going the first 30 days without a drop and then getting all 6 inches within 2 hours on July 31.
Fall Foliage in Pennsylvania
On the bright side, central Pennsylvania has four very distinct seasons.
Many like the changes throughout the year – especially those blooming trees after a long winter and our glorious fall foliage.
On the down side, we can have all four seasons on the same day. It’s not terribly unusual to have snow or even an ice storm before the trees have dropped their leaves in fall (to devastating consequences) or to have a surprise snowy dumping in April, weeks after we’ve been lulled into thinking it’s spring (euphemistically called the “onion snow”).
Although it’s not quite as common, our area has seen temperature swings of as much as 60 degrees in one day.
For the record, we’re in USDA hardiness Zone 6. Toward the southern part of central Pennsylvania (York, Lancaster, Franklin, Cumberland and much of Dauphin counties, for example), our zone is further subdivided into Zone 6B, meaning typical winter lows bottom out in the zero to -5 range. Farther north in central Pa. (Schuylkill, Centre, Union, Northumberland, etc.), the zone becomes 6A for lows bottoming out in the -5 to -10 range.
But since the weather doesn’t pay any attention to the USDA zone map, it’s possible to push the envelope and get away with previously “borderline-hardy” nandina, crape myrtle, hardy camellia, cherry laurel and even some Zone 7-rated plants.
On the other hand, our all-time low is -22, so it’s always possible for that one winter to come along that’ll drop down low enough to not only kill the borderline-hardy stuff but even some of the plants “safe” for Zone 6.
The lesson: Have fun experimenting, but be prepared to roll with the punches.
