I thought I might add, Rutabagas are harder to grow here from spring plantings, except very early plantings, if possible. when the weather is still "iffy" here. Plantings later in the spring suffer from the heat and pest attacks and seldom do well and quality of any harvested roots are often less desirable. I usually plant in August early September for most reliable results. West Tennessee area has hot and very humid summers and wet, and unpredictably cold weather sometimes in winters. Lows about 5 degrees F the last two winters, usually lowest about 12 to 15F, rarely below zero, but not to be unexpected a few times in a lifetime. Do not believe the new USDA climate zones baloney! They put us in zone 8 last year, after traditionally being zone 7. I have lived here all my life and we do not have a warmer climate! Hot and cold years have come and gone repeatedly with no trend one way or the other observable by me, plants or animals living here. WE had our hottest summers in the 1970's here and our coldest winters in the sixties and nineties here. Temps in my lifetime have ranged from about 109F down to about 10 below 0F. That low occurred about 1989 or 90 as I remember, in early winter, before Christmas. My fig trees and certain other plants that can or may not grow here successfully are good indicators of weather change. In zone 8 before the change some olive trees do ok, but will not survive in zone 7 of old. That is still the case this year. Cultivated Olive trees will not survive in west Tennessee now or in the recent past! Our climate has not changed , only an arrogance and the cherry picking of data supports a USDA climate zone change for west Tennessee! My Turkey figs in unsheltered locations burn to the ground every winter for decades here while my Celeste figs burn down some years and sometimes has not for seven or eight years in a row in the past. The last ten years they have burned down to the ground seven out of ten years! That indicates growing cold trend not a warming trend. Just an old gardeners view of this as he sees it recorded in his life of tending plants in the outdoor environment. This was a hot summer, but in the seventies we had even more sustained excessively hot days a few years. Hard to lie about the weather and crop zones to an old gardener. The record is in my life of lived experience and not from an academic making decisions based on select data that fits their objective, that they wish to find. Sorry about the rant, talking about crop and weather specs triggers me about the USDA and their decline into unreliability.
