My husband and I moved from Harvard, Massachusetts (Zone 6a) to Brunswick GA (Zone 9a) in November 2022. We traveled abroad for the first half of 2023 so I didn’t realize that in SE coastal Georgia, spring goes from February to April and I completely missed spring planting for 2024.
My timing was better this year, and I was able to harvest arugula, radishes, mustard greens and sugar snap peas at the end of April which is when I would be planting those seeds up north! I harvested potatoes by the end of May (as opposed to August in the Zone 6) and planted sweet potatoes, which will take about four months to mature. Because those have such a long period before they mature, when I planted sweet potatoes in Massachusetts it was primarily to eat the green leaves.
I find that even though it rains a lot here, I have to do a lot more daily watering then up north. Unfortunately the water/rain takes all the nutrients right down through the sandy soil and I find I have to fertilize much more frequently down here. The afternoon heat is debilitating for several of my favorite vegetables (heirloom tomatoes, purple pole beans and delicata squash), but I am hopeful I will get those sorted next year. Alas, neither peonies, rhubarb, nor lilacs grow in zone 9a although these thrive in Atlanta, Zone 6a, five hours away.
Lots of folks have tropicals in the ground here including bananas, bougainvillea, bromeliads, citrus, ginger, hibiscus, lantana, palms, plumeria as well as epiphytes (air plants) growing on the trunks of ginormous live oaks. Then below freezing temperatures will arrive for three days or even an ice storm, and the blackened stumps of frozen banana trees will remind us that a humid subtropical climate is not the same as a tropical climate.
After trying desperately, but ineffectively, to cover tropical plants for a winter or two, most of my gardening friends in Brunswick now shrug and say to their plants: “You’re on your own. If you come back, that’s great.” I’m almost at that point, except I will continue to haul my potted six foot tall plumeria inside, and cover the lovely lemon tree whose fruit I use to make some pretty potent limoncello.
Bonus, I was able to graft a pink plumeria branch to my yellow plumeria, something that I couldn’t do successfully up north (see photos).
Are the invasives in Zone 6a different from those in Zone 9a? Oh my, yes, but that’s a subject for another day.