Transplant Shock
Submitted by Carleen Madigan Perkins C. Colston Burrell Photographs by Ben Stechschulte on June 1, 2007 - 12:06 am
To summer visitors, the Adirondack Mountains of northeast New York offer warm, pleasant scenes at every turn. Rustic lakeside camps, where log cabins nestle amid colorful flower beds and boast overflowing window boxes, suggest living (and gardening) here would be so easy. But year-round residents like Pamela Dore, a landscape designer in the small town of Au Sable Forks (near Lake Placid), know this setting’s challenges. This coastal California transplant to USDA Zone 3 has had to learn the tricks of making plants grow in a climate that sees its last frost the first week of June and its first frost at the beginning of October.
"It’s definitely a challenge," Pamela says, "especially coming from California, where they grow everything." She and her partner, Ron, garden on three and a half open, sunny acres surrounded by the foothills of the Jay Mountain range, where winter temperatures plunge low (-45°F is the coldest she’s seen since she moved to the region in 1987). With just over 100 frost-free days in the growing season, Pamela has learned to cope by growing varieties of vegetables that mature quickly, planting the hardiest perennials she can find, and giving her seedlings and container plantings a jump start in a warm place: the greenhouse she and Ron built from recycled windows.
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