By Tom Dayton
A winter without snow is a blessing? While many consider the lack of snow a blessing, it is not. Snow has a profound insulating factor not only for ornamental plants but for crops like winter wheat. In the year 2011, Ohio had an abundance of snow but not China in which sixty percent of the wheat crop was lost.
Admittedly no one likes to drive or shovel a significant snowfall but the benefits far out way the risks. Another factor of snow is that it is the primary way that the ground water is replenished as summer rains are not able to do the job. In fact, at the nursery a front came in during the week of January 5th of 2014 resulting in a significant loss of plants for customers as well as in winter storage as the temperatures plunged to 12ºF below zero with a forty mile an hour substantial wind and no snow .
Strangely enough, at the first of April when we began moving plants out of winter storage, they were still frozen to the ground. In addition, our perennial production house on the southwest corner rendered the man door immovable for about two weeks as the post even in the ground forty eight inches had heaved up!
At the Peoples bank in Norton, even normally hardy junipers were damaged and so much so that some had to be removed. Just remember, a cold winter without snow while convenient is not a mild winter but one that can have devastating consequences for us and for food and water supply.
So with the snowfall don’t dismay. As the song goes, “for when it’s raining, oh don’t regret as remember, it’s raining violets”!