Ferret is making an appropriate choice to center the limits on the equator. Most of the time that is what is wanted.
Specifying an interval of 20 on VLIMITS gets a tick at the southern end:
yes? fill/vlimits=-20:5:20/hli=5:20:5/l=1/k=1 temp ! blank plot but whatever
Then it is a simple matter to draw a tick on the northern end:
yes? ppl window,off;plot/vs/over/nolab/line=1 {5,4.8},{5,5}
Seems like it takes a lot less time to do that than to try to come up with a workaround.
For more than a few ticks, it's pretty easy to use a REPEAT loop to draw ticks and labels manually.
Am I missing something?