When the weather doesn’t cooperate

For much of the southern US, it’s been a wild, unpredictable spring.  Warm weather is a good month late, we had a late frost and just when you think it’s safe to put out the tender crops, here comes another cold snap.

It’s a perennial pastime to complain about the weather forecast.  In truth, though, the weather forecast is pretty accurate.  Getting hung up over 2 degrees difference or misunderstanding what a 30% change of rain means only shows how dependent we’ve become on the reliability of the forecast overall.

When you are growing food, 2 degrees can mean the difference between a killing frost and a cold night, so when the weather is abnormal you look at that long term forecast and make plans.  Unfortunately, the farther out in time, the less accurate that forecast is.  So what’s a gardener to do?

First, you be patient, however hard that is.  (And it is.)  Getting tomatoes or peppers or squash out in the garden when the soil is too cold or the air temperatures are going to drop below 50F or so at night only stunts and damages the plants.  You don’t get tomatoes any sooner, and you will probably get fewer and smaller of them.  Here it is May, and my tomatoes and peppers are still in pots.  It was 84F yesterday, but it’s going to be in the 40′s this weekend.

Second, when in doubt, wait the weather out.  No matter what else you do, nature always bats last and summer will come in it’s own good time and not a day before.  Unless you live somewhere with a very short growing season, you have plenty of warm enough weather ahead of you.  Enjoy the extended season for lettuce and other cool weather greens while you can.

Lastly, when you make a mistake and there’s a sudden dip in the temperature, protect your plants.  Floating rowcover, depending on the thickness, can protect about 1-5F degrees.  Old sheets and towels will do fine, too, just be sure you don’t squish your plants but providing hoops or something else to support the heavier material.  Stake or tie it down good — cold nights are often windy nights and protection blown away is a painful sight in the morning.  Avoid plastic unless you are 100% sure you are going to be able to take it off before the sun warms up the plastic too much in the morning.

These protection methods work by trapping a bit of the earth’s heat underneath them, so don’t bundle up plants like you would yourself.  When you dress yourself warmly, you are trapping heat you generate yourself, plants need the heat from the earth.  So be sure your protection covers an area wider than the plant(s) and goes all the way down to the ground.  The same applies to trees; gathering the material around the trunk is no protection at all.  Think of a tent, not a jacket.

When all else fails and you lose plants, or you feel your plants have been seriously stressed, plant some more seeds.  Plants get lost sometimes to weather or bugs or disease; it’s just a fact of gardening.

Now I need to go back to reminding myself not to plant those tomatoes yet!

 

Planning a new garden

For gardens where the growers tills up a section of yard each year, the garden design is pretty straightforward — you make a big rectangle leaving room for the tiller or tractor to maneuver around the edges.  Crop rotation is not really feasible on a small scale, since the dirt is being vigorously turned over each year and mixed up.

For permanent beds, a little planning is necessary.  First, where?  Look around your property and note what spots get morning sun, afternoon sun, all day sun.  Are there places that get more or less sun during different parts of the year?  For example on the northern side of my house, there’s a wide strip that gets no sun at all until about the spring equinox, and then gets ample sun there until about the fall equinox.  On the other hand, I have a spot up near the woods that is full sun all winter and then mostly shade in the summer.  As you make your observations, will will help to draw a map of your property and note any special characteristics through the seasons.

Unlike a tilled up garden, you are looking for permanent spots, and they don’t have to be rectangular or contiguous.  You can make round, oval or triangular beds.  You can take advantage of a small strip here and there.  You do want to be sure that the spots you are picking are easily visible and that they are near the spots you normally go.  You aren’t going to run out to snag a few lettuce leaves for your sandwich if the bed of lettuce is 250′ from the kitchen.

When locating the beds, try not to make your lawn chores more difficult.  Placing garden areas next to a fence or other permanent structure will reduce the amount of edge you have to mow or edge around.  If you don’t use a bag on your mower, you also want to verify you can mow without throwing weed seeds into your planted areas.

Finally, avoid planting in areas next to roads, driveways, drainage ditches and other places near pollution and toxic materials.  (This may include areas right up next to your house.)  Save those spots for ornamental, rainwater tanks or other non-edible uses.  If at all possible, try and place your garden near your kitchen and outdoor living areas and make it roughly contiguous so there is one spot that gets routine attention, at least for the annuals.

Now that you have selected growing areas, you want to construct the bed edges.  You can use large rocks, big tree branches, edging stones or whatever you have handy, or buy lumber.  Modern pressure treated wood is safe but older pressure treated wood is not, so avoid reusing old pallets or stacks of old lumber unless you are sure they are not treated with arsenic.  If you don’t want to use use even modern pressure treated wood, you can extend the life of untreated lumber by generously applying linseed oil to all sides.

There are two common mistakes to avoid: don’t make the beds so deep you have to walk or lean into them, and don’t fail to leave enough room between beds.  If a bed is so deep you have to walk in it to reach the soil, you are compacting the soil and defeating the purpose of raised beds.  For most people, 2′ is about the limit of their effective reach — young and tall people have a bit more, shorter and older people may have less.  Design for the smallest person in the household who will be doing regular work in the garden.  If this includes young children, you may want to designate specific smaller beds for them to care for that you can expand or place as they get older.  However, you can have have a 4′ wide bed that’s 20 feet long, provided you can get to both sides, so you can still have very large beds.

Space between beds is also important.  I frequently see designs with 12″ of space between them.  If you have a very small space to work with, this may be unavoidable, but 36″ of walkway is best.  This leaves room for wheelbarrows, garden carts, spillover from large plants like squash (which will not respect the boundaries of its bed!), or even you on crutches if something happens.  When you have room to work without fear of crushing your plants, time spent in the garden will be easier and less stressful.

In this diagram of my backyard, one whole fence line has been taken up by landscaping, herbs, fruits and the raised bed garden, making mowing easier and limiting the incursion of creeping weeds to as small an area as possible — bermuda grass from the lawn and creeping charlie from the field on the other side of the fence.

 

Row Crops and Raised Beds: Systems for Larger Spaces (Part 2)

In Part I, I discussed the history of row cropping and a bit about how and why this became the “standard” for home growing.  And despite the modifications that have been widely accepted for home growing (like hills and trellis’), almost every packet of seeds you see or scholarly write-up on a variety refers to 100-foot rows.

When you look at kitchen gardens of the past, however, they were much less focused on rows and more on practicality; there was no Piggly Wiggly down the street.  It is unfortunate that most attention on growing history focuses on heirloom vegetables, and to a lesser extent, heirloom fruits, when our foremothers were using floating row cover, cold frames, forcing and other techniques that have lately become trendy.  (Suggested: Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way.)

For those new to historical method, one surprise is that fact that defined beds — usually raised — were the standard for the kitchen garden.  Much of this is probably from sheer practicality: the mule and plow couldn’t maneuver in a small space and they didn’t stop and start gardening all at once that way many backyard gardeners do today from frost to frost.  (Ignoring all those lovely cool season vegetables.)  Another reason, no doubt, is that the line between “vegetable” and “ornamental” was less strict than today.  Today we grow borage as an ornamental, but the flowers not only attract pollinators but make excellent edible garnish.  So mama’s prized hand-me-down perennial was in the kitchen garden, and you don’t want to plow over that.

Raised beds are another kind of gardening technique which is sometimes viewed as new or trendy, but it’s not.  The “new” part is paying several hundred dollars for a kit to build one, when old lumber, fairly straight tree branches, rocks or any number of materials will do.  They also tend to be associated with gardening systems like square foot gardening, but they work equally well for other spacing techniques, including so-called “traditional” row spacing.

While there are advantages to the “raised” part — particularly for gardeners in wet spots, with heavy soil or in cold climates — it isn’t strictly necessary.  The major benefits to a defined bed is 1) you don’t walk on it and compact the soil, and 2) you can focus on just amending and improving the growing area.  It is possible to grow in beds without edges at all, but a token and highly visible edge is useful.  Otherwise, over time, toes and hands tend to creep in and reduce the bed size.

If there is a downside to raised beds, it is that you must plan ahead and be sure you have beds to suit all the plants you would like to grow.  Next time I will talk about planning a garden of defined beds and how those bed edges can be used to assist with shade cloth, row covers and even low tunnel hoop houses.

 

Row Crops and Raised Beds: Systems for Larger Spaces (Part I)

(What?!  Raised beds for large spaces?  Yes, really, but I’ll come back to that.)

Row cropping is a growing method primary for large agricultural operations for crops which need minimal manual care during the growing season.  Wheat, corn, soy, cotton, peanuts, tobacco and many other major crops are grown this way.  Crops are grown in rows for the convenience of mechanical seeders and equipment.

In the home garden, “row cropping” works a little different.  A home gardener can plant some things in rows where it’s appropriate, like pole beans on a string trellis, and some things in mounds, like squashes, and some things in blocks, like baby greens.  This pattern is a mixture of attempting to replicate large scale farming with historical kitchen gardens.

Ye olde kitchen garden, with herbs and fresh vegetables, was generally enclosed and rather small, and located as near to the house as possible.  It often included ornamental flowers.  The members of the household working it were generally the children and women, and in towns the gardens space might be shared.  Raised beds — or at least beds with a border — were typical.  The bulk of their diet, the staple crops, were grown out in the fields and was the task of the men.  (Suggested: The History of Kitchen Gardens.)

Our split personality in our methods in modern home gardens is, I think, largely is due to two things.  First, many of the original “home gardens” in this country were in the yard next to the slave and sharecropper homes.  Many slaves were permitted to grow gardens and keep poultry to supplement their diet and sometimes to sell for profit.  They typically had small place in which to work, and therefore focused on high-yield easy to grow crops.  (Suggested: Slave Garden Plots and Poultry Yards)  Pooling their knowledge, they could draw from experience growing crops in their home countries (in the early years), and slaves who worked both kitchen gardens and large fields for their owners.  After emancipation, this pattern was unchanged for many sharecroppers in the South, only now they either had to purchase their staple rations or grow them themselves.  Historic photos of African-American gardens look like almost any rural garden you will see in the southeastern United States today.  (Suggested: “African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South” by Richard Westmacott.

Second, there was a great wave of home gardens during the Victory Garden eras of World War I and World War II.  The pamphlets and instructions provided to households referred them to their state agricultural colleges for information.  Used to providing instructions to farmers, these were the primary resource for information to patriotic (and hungry) citizens and are written in terms of 100 foot rows and other farm nomenclature.  The information provided by the Agricultural Extention offices in much of the country still is.

Strangely enough, this split personality system works very well, because it allows the gardener to give a particular plant the growing conditions it needs.  Potatoes, for example, work best in rows so you can hill them up.  Tomatoes need rows for easiest harvesting.  Large rambling plants like squashes need large mounds.  Small root crops like carrots can be planted in rows, but it’s a waste of space and are better planted in blocks or wide rows.  Widely spaced plants can develop larger healthier root systems to scavenge for nutrients and water without competing with each other too much.  Mulching, if used, can help reduce water evaporation and rainwater runoff.

As practiced by many, a row crop garden is generally turned or disced by a tractor in the late winter to break the soil and kill weed seeds and bug larvae.  It this area, it’s not unusual for the neighbor with the tractor to come by and do everone’s gardens on a Sunday afternoon.  Some gardeners then use a tiller to work the soil; others use a rake or another hand tool.  The garden is laid out into blocks and rows with small pathways between them.  During the growing season, either a hoe is used to weed or the gardener runs a tiller very shallowly between the rows to cultivate and kill weeds.  (Or both.)  At the end of the season, the garden is either cover cropped or gets it’s cover crop naturally via weed seeds and grasses.

Despite its advantages, this style of row cropping has disadvantages, too.  It requires space, for one, and annual access to mechanical equipment that a new gardener probably doesn’t own.  (Hauling in bags of soil for a square foot garden requires equipment, too, but most household already have a car.)  In arid climates, natural rainfall may be insufficient for the crops even when they are given more space, and water may evaporate too quickly.  And aggressive running weeds like bermuda grass will not be killed by tilling, only trimmed back — tilling alone will never eliminate these weeds.  Finally, over the course of growing season, the walkways tend to get wider and wider, compacting soil around the roots.

In part II, I’ll discuss some of the ways to mitigate the disadvantages of row cropping while preserving the advantages.

 

Gardening systems for tight spaces

First came French Intensive gardening in the late 19th century.  In 1929, the theory of permaculture was introduced by Joseph Russell Smith in “Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture” and was followed up by work by Toyohiko Kagawa in the 1930′s and others through the decades.  Then, in 1974, John Jeavons published “How to Grow More Vegetables” and introduced America to double digging and intensively spaced plants while using larger spaces for the organic inputs and compost to retain soil fertility.  In 1981, Mel Bartholomew published “Square Foot Gardening,” which is intensively growing plants in a soilless media.  Following Bartholomew’s book there have been numerous books written on the theme using smaller and smaller space increments, and I have no doubt right now someone is pitching “Square Millimeter Gardening” to a publisher.

The concept of layering plants and spacing them closer together to achieve a higher yield per area (although a lower yield per plant) is not a new one.  If you look at a space allowed to grow by nature, you’ll see shrubs under trees and herbs under shrubs and vines climbing over all of the above, often blooming and fruiting and different times to share the space not only physically, but through time.  Not every species needs the same root zone or amount of light.

Intensive gardening has its uses, but it also has it’s drawbacks.  Double-digging, for example, is extremely labor intensive and if your soil is already of moderately good tilth the double-digging process will destroy it.  If your soil is really compacted and poor, the work of double digging gets harder and can even be impossible.  Square foot gardening instead relies on going up instead of down — essentially creating large shallow pots on the ground — leaving inadequate room for normal healthy root development.  All forms of intensive gardening require a much higher amount of water and fertilizer inputs than wider spacing; in return they provide a smaller area to take care of and theoretically reduce weed competition.  In the case of going up via the Square Foot Gardening method, you not only need to acquire materials for your bed, you need to purchase the soilless media (or the components thereof) and haul them in.  This needs to be continuously added to as you switch out crops.  In Jeavon’s method, you use other large tracts of large to grow legumes and other green maure to provide these inputs.

You might tell I am not a particular fan of the more extreme intensive methods.  I’m not.  They either require too much labor or too many external inputs to be cost-effective.  There are times and places, though, when it’s the best option.  For a hobby or casual gardener who wants a few vegetables in the summer, its helps keep them from overwhelming themselves with a large garden.  As an introduction to growing food for a novice gardener, the strict rules and plans can help them succeed and gain confidence.  And most of all, for people who just don’t have much space, it’s a way to grow at least some of your own produce.  I’ve been there: I used to have a condo with a small patio.  It was intensive gardening or no gardening — but I am sure I spent more on dirt and bed materials and drip irrigation parts than I possibly harvested.

Proponents of these kinds of systems will insist that they are superior to so-called “old fashioned” or traditional methods like row cropping in all cases.  They will insist that row cropping is labor intensive and difficult and requires kneeling and bending.  Well, yes, you may have to bend or kneel down, but you will also need to do that to reach your box 6″ off the ground.  Row cropping is not necessarily more labor intensive but the labor is spaced differently.  They are criticize row cropping saying you will have more weeds.  That may be true in some areas, but in this area, weed seeds fly through the air and root where they want, and aggressive running weeds are undeterred by a raised bed; they just go over or under it.   Weeding is a fact of gardening; even greenhouses get weeds.  If you plant intensively, pulling out weeds are more likely damage the roots of your food crops, and you are less likely to be able to use a stirrup hoe or other implement of weed destruction to quickly remove weeds.

Conclusion:  Intensive methods can the right tool in some cases, but if you have ample space they are not cost effective systems.

Next, we’ll discuss row cropping methods and raised beds: what they are and what they are not.

 

Gangster Gardeners

Inspirational:

 

Pushing the season

It happens every spring.  The weather hands you a lovely warm and sunny spell, the sap rises up in the gardener in you and you start thinking about planting those tomatoes early, even though your average last frost date is still 3 or 4 weeks away.  You peer at the long term forecast and wonder if you should gamble.

Garden centers and nurseries, especially the big box ones, love this season.  They can sell you plants now and pretty much guarantee they’ll double their sales when you have to come back and buy another.  Here, we call it “blackberry winter” — the near surety that after it gets warms, nature is still going to throw you a late cold spell, usually about the time the blackberries are blooming.

It was 78F here last week; it’s going to snow Friday.  Spring is fickle.  And the blackberries aren’t blooming yet.

Even if warm weather arrives early and even if you protect seedlings from dying, planting too soon rarely pays off.  The weather may be warm, but has the soil warmed up yet?  A soil thermometer is one tool every gardener should have.  While you can’t ignore the calendar, the soil temperature trumps all.  If the soil is too cold, your seeds won’t germinate and your transplants will be stunted, sometimes permanently.

So if you have the itch and you know it’s early, hold off.  The sole exception is if it’s something you are succession planting and you have lots of backup plants, where an early crop is a bonus and dead or stunted plants are no loss.  Otherwise, be patient.  Summer is truly coming, it’s just not here yet.