I’m a wannabe Westerner, a city girl in search of greener pastures, always climbing trees just to get high, climbing the mountain to see what I can see. My father claims that my first word was “horse,” an unfortunate choice on my part since I grew up in Manhattan—not the town fifteen miles from where I live now in Bozeman, Montana, but the island between the Hudson and East rivers.
So it’s got to be one of life’s great ironies that here in the wide open West, I’m struggling to raise vegetables on a small urban lot with more than its share of trees. Is this fair? Is this right? I mean, really. I spend my NYC childhood reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and dreaming of the West, and I finally get here, I make it, I SUCCEED, and here I am, in a quintessentially Western town, all ranches and skiing, and I have less space than I did at my halfway-to-Montana house, in Minnesota.
Nonetheless, I persevere—bravely, nobly, humbly.
—Kate Gardner
themanicgardener@gmail.com
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Hello,
I enjoy your gardening website and thought you and your readers might be interested in an interactive version (using google maps) of the current USDA zone hardiness map at http://www.plantmaps.com/usda_hardiness_zone_map.php
There are also detailed interactive zone maps for each US State such as Montana for example:
http://www.plantmaps.com/interactive-montana-usda-plant-zone-hardiness-map.php
There is a detailed zipcode to zone search using the latest US postal service zips and giving the reader their zone down to the sub zone level (a or b). By entering your zipcode you can also get first/last freeze, Heat Zones, drought conditions and annual climatology for your area.
You can also embed the zip to zone search in your website using the plantmaps widget at http://www.plantmaps.com/hardiness-zone-zipcode-search-widget.php
Thanks
Humbly? Humbly? HA!
Love, Sally