Recommend AUSTRALIA - Figure out which climate you are in

[Mandy Onderwater]

Good day all,
Especially for those of us new to gardening, figuring out what climate you are in can be extremely beneficial! There is a very helpful page which can help you figure all of this out!

What climate zone is my garden in

greenharvest.com.au

 

[Grandmother Goose]

Good day all,
Especially for those of us new to gardening, figuring out what climate you are in can be extremely beneficial! There is a very helpful page which can help you figure all of this out!

What climate zone is my garden in

greenharvest.com.au

I must admit, that map does my head in a little bit, all climate maps related to gardening in Australia do, as does seed packet info. The map works perfectly fine for almost everyone in Australia, I will say that...
...but the reason it annoys me is "desert" and "grasslands" - that tells you nothing that you actually need to know. Grasslands can be lush and green all year long, be dry and often brown and covered in harsh tough spinifex type grasses, or be covered in snow and ice for months every year. Desert is an even worse description, because there are deserts in tropical zones, in subtropical zones, in temperate zones, in cold zones, and in arctic zones. What the climate maps are supposed to tell us is information regarding the temperatures that plants need to survive and thrive in. That's what all the other zones do - equatorial, tropical, subtropical, temperate, and arctic are all about average minimum temperatures so you know whether you need low chill fruit trees or can plant high chill, whether you're planting your tomatoes outside in August or having to wait until November, it has nothing to do with rainfall or what has grown there since we cut down all the trees. I'm in the "desert" area, but I'm also in the subtropical band, but because the desert winters do get a bit colder than the coastal subtropical areas due to being dryer here, it does warrant its own description, but "desert" or "arid" alone doesn't suffice. It should be "arid subtropical", or "arid tropical" or "arid temperate" or whatever the zone actually is. Give a plant enough water in the desert and you can grow anything in my part of the desert. That might not work so well up northside of the same "desert" area, because it doesn't get as cold in winter up there, and further south it gets colder. But of course the only person that would know that well enough to complain about it is that tiny minority of the population that actually does dare to garden in a desert... 😇, so like, it only affects me, so don't worry about it, just be aware that if you move to live in a desert, you'll have to learn to ignore all the gardening advice and experiment.

 

[Mandy Onderwater]

That is very interesting @Grandmother Goose . I'm guessing they had to cut corners because otherwise for each little spot they would have to put in names. That would make those images very hard to read.
Sadly that link is outsourced, and the pictures copyrighted, so I cannot make additions/edits to this. I would if I could

 

[Grandmother Goose]

That is very interesting @Grandmother Goose . I'm guessing they had to cut corners because otherwise for each little spot they would have to put in names. That would make those images very hard to read.
Sadly that link is outsourced, and the pictures copyrighted, so I cannot make additions/edits to this. I would if I could

I just wish they'd at least name it something different and not "grasslands" and "desert", that would at least be a start in the right direction. Most of our deserts are in the subtropical zone, it's only a few spots at the top and bottom and in the grasslands areas they may need to separate into new zones, or do something like what the US does and name them with numbers and letters, like 9a and 9b, where the number is the climate band and the letter is whether it's arid or not, that would work just as well, better in fact. Come to think of it, that might be a long-term project my son might be interested in doing with the right help, he's a cartography nut.

 

[Mandy Onderwater]

You mean like the link below? Sadly it clashes with how the US zones work, the higher the number the hotter. Here it seems the other way around. I think I *technically* live in climate zone 11b by US standards, but I looked this up ages ago so I don't know how true that is either. According to this map I am zone 2.

https://www.yourhome.gov.au/getting-started/australian-climate-zones

 

[Grandmother Goose]

That map makes a lot more sense to me. Funny that you found it on a building related site rather than a gardening one. Yes, it's back to front to the US, for some reason everyone likes working top to bottom on any page, but we're opposite to the northern hemisphere in that the further north we go the hotter it gets. According to that map, I'm in zone 4 "Hot dry summer, cool winter", which is exactly right. If I was in the US, I'd be in their climate zone 10... but whether it's 10a or 10b I don't know, whichever version is the dryest of the two, but they only have a few tiny spots of that zone and all of them aren't overly dry, because they're all located pretty close to oceans. The US further away from the equator than we are, which is also why they have a lot more colder areas than we do.