Midsummer garden, a heatwave, and lessons in resilience

 I cannot believe it's already mid-July, but here we are. Still managing to trudge along.

A month or so ago, just before the infamous heatwave, I began reading Carole Deppe's "The Resilient Gardener". It's about growing food in the face of adversity, whether that be climate change with its variable weather, or family responsibilities (she mentions gardening while taking care of her mother through her final illness which yes, I can relate to that), or food allergies and intolerances. Mostly she focuses on five main crops that most home gardeners can grow (potatoes, squash, corn, eggs, and beans) but much of the book is applicable to most foods we grow.

One of my blueberries, which as you
can see got scorched in the heat.
I'm just happy that, unlike some
gardeners in OR, I didn't lose all
my berries, which in some cases were
cooked on the bushes by the heat.

I won't bore you with a full rundown of the book, and I don't agree with everything she says, but it has slightly changed the way I've been viewing my own garden. In particular, the heatwave threw a big curveball at everyone around here, and made the imperative for resilience feel a bit more urgent. Many of my plants were, naturally, quite heat stressed. Even trees around here were (and are) showing signs of heat stress. In June. So my poor annuals, and my berry bushes, and some of my flowers, were quite unhappy. I only have two rain barrels (so far), which is better than nothing. The last big rain we had got my garden through about 3 weeks, with nothing more than spot watering from the rain barrels. And it was hugely productive during that time. But then, the heatwave hit right at the end and I was irrigating every evening from city water, desperately trying to keep my plants alive.

But not all of my plants disliked the heat. While my potatoes almost universally laid down in their "kill me" pose, meaning they're about ready to be harvested (again, in June), my corn made it through without any signs of poor growth or heat stress.  Some of my garlic was ready to be picked early, but only a couple of weeks early so that wasn't so bad, and most of the garlic stayed in the ground until its usual time for harvest (about now, mid-July). The ones that died back early were universally the ones that were weakest anyway. The healthy garlic plants made it through the heatwave just fine, making them an excellent, albeit small, crop to grow here. Irrigated for free by the rain all winter, a pest deterrent, and harvestable just when the worst heat is generally starting. (Also, delicious. So delicious.)

My tomatoes, peppers, and sweet potatoes were the real standouts, naturally. They greeted the heat like a lover. While I babied my main garden, the peppers and sweet potatoes in their bags were back there like, "Nah, we got this. No worries." I hardly watered them and they thrived. I looked it up and found out that over-watering sweet potatoes is actually a bigger problem than under-watering them. Which also makes them an excellent plant to grow in our increasingly dry summers. Since the leaves are also edible, that adds yet another type of resilience. I can get two crops from one plant.

Which is not to say that I'll stop growing regular potatoes. The point of resilience is that my garden will be prepared to weather whatever nature throws at them. (Sorry, I had to pun.) Because while our summers are increasingly dry, that doesn't mean we won't still have wet, cool summers in the future. Sweet potatoes would hate those, and my regular potatoes would thrive.

Sweet potato vines growing in 
a bucket I found for free. The leaves
do not taste like anything special
but they would make a nice garnish
or addition to a salad.

One thing I've realized this year that I am still plagued by an Alaskan gardener's mindset. Up there, you get one shot for everything and one shot only. You plant everything as soon as you can in May and hope that it all thrives before August gets wet and chilly, and then the first frosts come soon after.

I can't do that here, because some things just don't grow well in all seasons. I thought I sucked at growing broccoli but, turns out, I don't. It just doesn't want to grow in the summers here. Summer grown broccoli develops small heads and goes to flower very quickly. Fall, winter, and spring broccoli, OTOH, do beautifully. It forms large heads and is basically no work, since it doesn't require irrigation in those seasons. Just plant it, then harvest when it's ready. Since the pests that plague brassicas aren't usually a problem in fall and winter, you don't even have to worry about them.

I tried my hand at winter gardening last year, but it was small and mild because I was uncertain of what I was doing. This year I'm going to expand, hopefully by quite a lot. Resilient gardening means having things I can harvest all year, not just relying on my food storage. Why should I, when I can grow fresh things in every season? And popping out to the garden for a head of cabbage or broccoli in winter is still a marvel to us, especially if the broccoli is then turned into broccoli cheddar potato soup. (All of those veggies and herbs are now available from my own garden!)

I'm still learning more about when to plant things to take advantage of the climate. Particularly, the free irrigation in the form of winter's rain. Garlic is a great crop for that, and surprisingly so are onions. If it was a bit colder here the onions wouldn't be a winter crop, but as it is last year I planted onion seeds in fall and these are the best onions I've grown in years, large and healthy. Now that I know the secret to growing onions here, it will be so much easier to grow a lot of them. They, like other plants in the allium family, are also a great pest deterrent, keeping even things like rabbits out of the garden.

Grapes on a trellis. It's still too young to
produce fruit, but next year it should.

Another way to gain garden resilience is to plant multiple varieties of your crops. We have four different types of raspberry now, since that's one of our favorite fruits. They fruit all summer and fall, so even if disease, heat, or unexpected cold kills off some of the berries (and the heatwave actually caused my berries to get sunscald) we'll have plenty more and won't be without raspberries. I've done the same with grapes, of which we now have three varieties, and blueberries.

I planted two types of corn this year, a "Tom Thumb" popcorn that only grows to be about 3 feet tall, and a bantam sweet corn. Corn is a drought tolerant (with some irrigation) plant so I'm not terribly worried about it failing, but having more than one variety covers multiple seasons. The sweet corn is going to be lovely and mostly eaten fresh, with perhaps some of it frozen for winter (if there's enough). The popcorn is going to be our main source of corn in winter, however. Last winter we ate so. much. popcorn, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. It's fun, it's easy, and it's a sociable thing. The kids love to watch the corn pop, and it's a reasonably healthy snack or dessert, depending on how you prepare it.

My peas, which prefer cold, 
got scorched and many died. I plan
to grow a fall crop, however, and
see if I can overwinter some in my
greenhouse.

I chose both varieties of corn in part because they're smaller, and thus better suited to a home garden, but also because they're short season varieties. I'm hoping that next year I can plant the popcorn early enough to get two crops of it. For this year, when some of it didn't come up, it was easy enough to replant and I knew it would still have time to grow corn. Having a few different short season or long season crops can help resilience because, again, you're prepared no matter what the weather does. If this year had been unexpectedly cold and rainy my corn would be irrigated for free and I still wouldn't have to worry about early frosts due to its early ripening.

The last way to gain garden resilience is to plant based on needs. I wouldn't plant nothing but slicing tomatoes, nor would I want to plant nothing but cherry tomatoes or paste tomatoes. Sure, they can do double duty in a pinch, with slicers being cooked down (way down) for sauce, but really you want the correct tomato for the job. Same thing with berries--some of mine are better for fresh eating, others for jam. When ordering seeds, good seed catalogs will list the pros and cons of each variety, including the best storage methods (canning, freezing, drying) and how it stores (will it root cellar or go off quickly?). They will also give information about what sort of climate (hot, dry, wet, cold tolerant?) and whether it's more suited to northern or southern latitudes, since some crops are better suited for longer days while others are for shorter days, longer seasons vs. shorter seasons. 

Things that "don't grow well in the north" often have varieties that do, in fact, grow well even in shorter seasons and colder climates. I'm growing King of the North bell peppers this year for that reason, and my sweet potatoes are a shorter season variety recommended for planting even in places with cold winters and early frosts. (Though they are in bags so I can drag at least some of them into the greenhouse to stretch out the growing season.) Since sweet potatoes need several months in storage before they reach their full flavor potential, it also stretches out your food storage. If you're getting sick of regular potatoes by Christmas, then after the New Year you can switch to sweet potatoes for a while and change things up. (Although, if you're getting sick of regular potatoes...who even are you?)

Post heatwave peas: deformed, with few actual
peas, and lots of worms. 

I know my pumpkins won't last all that long into the fall, so I'll need to cook and freeze them quickly, but I've had a butternut squash that lived on a windowsill for nine months before I cut it open and it was still perfect. With this, I can plan and prioritize what needs to get eaten, when, and in what order. It seems like a lot of work but now that I'm in a routine of doing this it's second nature. Just as I prioritize eating the frozen foods before the canned foods (so we can unplug the chest freezer), I know which of my vegetables will last until spring and which are best eaten fresh.

Seed Saving

I'm slowly narrowing my list of "forever plants" -- the varieties that I want to grow year after year. I'll still leave room in the garden for messing around with shiny new varieties that tempt me, but having a core of crops that I can reliably count on is so beneficial. Ideally, I would like to start saving seeds, which is its own form of resilience.

I've always thought that seed saving sounded difficult and intimidating. However, this year quite a lot of my garden ended up being self-seeded. I let a bunch of chard go to seed a couple of years ago and then, this spring, in that corner grew an abundant patch of self-seeded chard. I didn't intend that, thinking that I had collected all the seed I wanted and tossed the plants before they dropped any, but who am I to argue with crops that will plant themselves? 

A leek flower with a beneficial
wasp hanging off the bottom

Many of my potatoes also self-seeded. Unless you get every last teeny tiny little tuber, they will grow back. Well, it's hard to get all of them so I have two extra rows of potatoes this year.

I always try to let a few of my fall/winter carrots go to seed the next spring not to collect the seed (which I do need to start doing) but because they attract so many beneficial insects. I also let a few weeds grow up because they were attracting all the aphids (which didn't bother the surrounding plants), and the combo of aphids and carrot flowers attracted clouds of ladybugs.

My leeks are currently setting seed and they too have attracted large numbers of insects. So, letting a few plants go to seed both helps the current year's garden, by attracting pollinators and predator insects, as well as providing seed for future years.

Letting my garden seed itself is great for the lazy gardener. While it looks chaotic, messy, and as if I've just let the whole thing go, it's actually increasing the productiveness of the garden. And, it saves me time the following spring when plants start popping up on their own.