I started some salal from seed a couple of years ago and, because they’ve been so small, I’ve kept the plants inside for the last two winters, but I’d ultimately like to get them established outside.
I’ve seen pictures of severe damage on salal at -12 C, but also heard reports of maximum hardiness anywhere from zone 5 to zone 8. So does anyone have success stories from colder areas?
I expect they’ll survive to the snow line at least, but we sometimes get temperatures down to -17 without snow cover in January and February. I’d really like to get a few berries one day.
I’m in zone 8 but surrounded by salal. I checked its observed range on inaturalist and it does very well with precipitation between 50 and 450 cm annually, average temperature of warmest month between 30 C and 15 C, and average temperatures of coldest month between -10 C and 6.8 C.
I made a quick map in qgis. Green is ideal, light green is too dry, red is to hot, blue is too cold, light blue is too dry and cold, purple is both too hot and too cold, yellow is too dry and hot and grey is too dry cold and hot.
ok, so the coldest places that salal grows is high in the north cascades. Lightening Lake (zone 6a) is a convenient example. Lightening Lake has snow records collected since 1947 and the snow depth in February is consistently about two meters deep. Snow looks to start accumulating in mid October so it is probably only one meter thick for the coldest weather in December. That gives an R value of about 36, straw is supposed to have an r value of 1.5 per inch so I would expect two feet of straw would be enough for 50 year freezes in zone 6a
