Zone 5, but...
Gardening in Zone 5 in Illinois has its own challenges. Winters can be arctic with high winds from Canada and far less snow cover than more northern zones. Summers can be tropical with high humidity and monsoon-like downpours.Abrupt weather changes are the norm. The saying about Illinois weather is, "if you don't like it, just wait five minutes".
For the last few years, both summers and winters have been more moderate than average, so if the pattern holds, you may get to ease into the climate a bit.
The Rain on the Plain
Our average rainfall is 40" a year, the same as London and Seattle, believe it or not, but can be delivered 2-3" at a time in torrential summer thunderstorms. Late summer and early fall can typically get dry enough that unwatered bluegrass goes dormant.
Prairie Winds
Winds are predominantly from the west and southwest. If you live outside the shelter of a town, you find yourself humming "where the wind comes sweeping down the plain" a lot and buying only really heavy garden furniture that won't end up half a mile away in your neighbor's field.Out in the country, there is such a thing as a day when it's too windy to garden. Gusts to 35mph and higher are not uncommon during the windy season.
Country gardeners are familiar with the "prairie effect" felt in exposed locations. Expect your country garden to lag behind city gardens by 2-3 weeks.
What Swarms
If you are moving from an area that isn't beset by Japanese beetles, you'll be in shock during your first June here. In some years, populations are low and damage is light. In a bad year, their favorite food plants - birches, linden, roses, among others - can be left with skeletonized leaves. Entire mature trees can be left stripped.Asian lady beetles feed on soybean aphids and were first introduced as a beneficial insect. A wet growing season that favors aphids, also encourages lady beetles population. After the harvest, they seek winter shelter. In your house. White houses on a rise are particularly vulnerable, apparently reminding the beetles of the white cliffs of their ancestral home in Asia.
Some years they are barely noticable. 2004, a very wet year, was their best (and our worst) year yet. Octagenarian farmers remembered nothing like it in their lifetime. Homeowners were vacuuming them up by the thousands.
Black Dirt
Illinois' black topsoil is among the richest and the best in the world, a product of wind-blown deposits of loess and tallgrass prairie that covered most of the state after the glaciers receded. Deep silty clay loams rich in organic matter predominate in our area.The clay is a so-called "swelling" clay. Drainage can be a problem in some spots. Because of the high clay content, our garden soils are very prone to compaction due to puddling of the clay if worked when too wet.
The quality of your garden soil will depend a lot depend on what area of town you are moving to. Older neighborhoods tend not to suffer the same problems as the newer subdivision where developers carted off the topsoil and sold it, leaving the hapless homeowner with a few inches of topsoil on top of nasty, badly compacted, rocky clay subsoil.
May 11, 2005
Karen Fletcher, out in the wide open space in a Zone 4 microclimate where the
'prairie effect' rules
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