How do you adapt your gardening to cooler, damper conditions?

[Joel_BC]

The problem that's been developing in my area west of the Rockies in recent years has been that we've had an extended grey & rainy season (into July this year). Some of our "old standby" veggie varieties have not been working out.

If you're in an area that has had more than usual wet, humidity, overcast skies, and maybe cooler summer nights, what approaches and methods (including veggie variety selection) have you been finding helpful?

Let's put our experience and minds together on this strange situation. :/

 

[Hinotori]

This was my first year attempting a non pot garden here. Tomatoes did not do well. Peas did awesome. I'll plant tons of peas when the rains start again. I love garden peas. Just shell and eat. I need to try different leafy veggies and find what works best with our conditions.

I planted a lot of fruit plants this year and found where a lot of wild ones are on and around the property. I'll be getting more blueberries next spring. I want to order cranberries and marsh gooseberries and put some of the damper spots to work as well.

The Himalayan blackberries are actually ripening this year. I collected enough for one batch of jam out of the first ripe berries. Last year the green berries just rotted on the vines. I'm propagating and encouraging trailing blackberries in several different spots since they are a native berry and ripen in cooler rainy weather. I picked those blackberries well over a month ago, but there wasn't enough to do more than just eat outright.

The rain this year was insane. We haven't dried out completely this year. What was bone dry in July last year still has water right now. I'll have to put my rubber boots on and go in that area. I need to dig out the yellow flag that has started growing there, now that I know what it is and how invasive it is.

 

[Joel_BC]

Hinotori, approximately where are you located?

Anyhow, I can say that if our tomatoes hadn't been started early and put into a greenhouse, they would not have done well. So did the cukes we have planted in there.

Bell peppers did well outdoors (but again started indoors under fluorescent lights in first-rate starter soil). The plants that do well in regions down toward Mexico did not do well for us: for instance, corn was terrible, jalapeo peppers did lousy, squash was very late to develop vines (hence fruit, too). It wasn't just coolish, damp days - it was lack of warm nights, as the warmth didn't develop any momentum and accummulate over a stretch of weeks.

Berries, potatoes, lettuce, radishes did well... onions, garlic, and cabbage family did okay. Thank goodness.

 

[so lucky]

I had just the opposite here in SE Missouri. Hot hot days and hot nights. No rain for 3 months. Tomatoes did not very well, pole beans are just now producing, cucumbers did OK. If I had cool days and cool nights, I would try growing peas, carrots, greens of all kinds, turnips. I have often wondered if the days of successful home gardening are over for my area, without having to go to extreme measures. I know when I was a kid, summers were hot, but the nights cooled off and we didn't have the yearly drought. We didn't have the torrential rains and the extremes of weather we have now. At least not yearly, like we get now.
Getting small greenhouses may help some. I am willing to do that, to start earlier and go longer into fall. May have to forget a summer garden altogether and garden around the edges of summer.
In your area, if you had a greenhouse with supplemental lighting, that might help.
Pretty sure nothing is going to help when we get the 90 mph winds, tho.

 

[ORChick]

Joel, if you don't know about it already, you might want to check out "Territorial Seeds", out of Cottage Grove, Oregon. They pride themselves on seeds and information for growing things west of the Cascades. I like their catalog just for the information it contains, and do buy some of my seed from them as well.

A book I have found useful and informative for our region is "Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest" by Binda Colebrook. Published in 1984, but still with a lot of good information. I found it on Amazon, I think. She covers the area from the north end of Vancouver Island down to the very northern parts of California - at least that is what the map shows. I know that isn't exactly what you asked, but, given that winter is generally cooler and wetter than what we like to think of as summer, it may give you some ideas.

As for me, since moving to Oregon 10 years ago it has been an ongoing learning experience in the garden. I was gardening for 20+ years in zone 9, and was familiar with my mother's garden in zone 10 - and here I am now in zone 8. Not a huge step down, but sufficient that a lot of what I "knew" doesn't really apply any more. About 7 years ago I finally took the step that I had been avoiding for most of my gardening years, and started a garden journal. Nothing big, mostly just the min/max temp. for the day, and what the weather is like, as well as what was planted/harvested, and other little details that I wanted to note. I keep each day's notes all together in one spot, so I can compare this year with the last 6 years. I seem to be getting a better handle on this particular micro climate now - though these last 2 years have rather messed with my mind

I won't give any examples from this year's garden, as it has been almost a total flop.

 

[Hinotori]

I'm on the southeast side of Graham, Washington. I'm East of Olympia and West North West of Mount Rainier, just on the west side of the Puyallup River. Average about 50 inches of rain a year.

I've had great success growing tomatoes in pots out of the rain here. Lots of good sized tomatoes. Next year I'll have them in pots again. I have a great spot that gets sun all day and is under the carport so that it will keep the rain off them. I'm thinking of building a short wall of white metal roofing (already have it) behind them to reflect light onto them.

I don't have an overhang against the back of the house so they won't do as well there. I have the grapes there instead since the rain doesn't bother them as much. It gets very warm against the back of the house if the sun is out.

 

[Theo]

It was a cabbage year for sure where I live in the Willamette Valley. We had rain right into July, and the hot weather didn't really get going until August. We've had nights in the upper 40s, too. Last year was another wet and cold spring. I've heard that we are in the grips of a 30 year La Nina cycle, which will mean more stormy and cold weather with short summers.

I am getting ripe tomatoes, but friends who live a little higher in altitude are not. I also used a clear plastic mulch with the tomatoes, which I think got them off to a good start. I will consider covering the rows with plastic if we get an early frost.

My adaptation has been to learn to love cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts. They grew quite well right up to now, and I'm ready to plant starts more to overwinter.

 

[Hinotori]

Cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts. Some of my hubby's favorite things.

We've been down to 36 at night this last week. Trees are starting to lose leaves.

 

[moolie]

Living and trying to grow a garden in a zone 3-4 caught between the Rocky Mountain Foothills and the Prairies, I often have to deal with cool conditions (slow warm up in spring, early frosts in late summer/early fall (we can start getting night-time frosts mid August, most years our first frosts are around Sept 1) so I'll be reading along in this thread for ideas although I'm not sure I have much to contribute.

In the spring we start our plants from seed in the last couple of weeks of March (tomatoes, peppers, celery) with a few things starting earlier (cardoon should have been started in February but we didn't get the seed on time, and next year I will start the celery in February as well although it seems to have done ok in the greenhouse despite low germination--only 2 plants out of 12 pots planted). We keep the seedling trays under fluorescent lights till we can start hardening them off and putting them outside during sunny days in May, and plant out (hopefully) first week of June. Other than these more tender crops we tend to stick with cool-weather veggies like radishes, beets, carrots, onions, brassicas, lettuce, peas, beans etc. which we plant directly into the garden mid-May.

The only problem with June generally being frost-free is that June is our rainiest month, and the "rainy season" can extend well into July like it did in 2011. Last year we dealt with it as best we could by using water-filled "kozy koats" or "wall-o-waters" to keep our tomato and pepper plants warmer than the cool ambient temps, and using row covers. Last year's rains kept washing my bean and pea seeds to the surface, resulting in low germination in those plants. The extended weeks of cloud cover and cold seemed to work ok for the beets, but lots of our radishes and onions actually rotted. The tomatoes recovered as we came into more summery temps and did well, mostly because we were able to extend our season.

As we crept into fall last year we built our first version of our plastic covered hoop-style greenhouse to extend our season and keep tomatoes ripening on the vines well into October. This past spring we beefed up our greenhouse based on what we learned trying to keep it upright throughout the windy/snowy/cold winter months and feel we are set to deal with fall even better this year.

This year we tried corn, again. Hubs has a real yen to actually harvest an ear even though he's tried it several times in the past and I keep telling him that we just don't have the space or the climate to pull it off. Last summer I read an article in Mother Earth News about Floriani Red Flint corn, an Italian heritage variety bred at higher altitudes in the mountains. So we ordered a packet and waited till the ground was well and truly warm in June. There is no way we could have planted corn last year due to the cold wet spring/early summer we had.

As of this past weekend we actually have half a dozen corn plants flowering so we are very optimistic that this variety will actually result in us harvesting a few ears. Hubs is ecstatic and wants to order more than one packet of seeds for next year, I still say let's wait and see how big these ears turn out to be. This variety is not a fresh-eating variety, but rather a type that is dried and ground to make corn meal. I still need to check if we dry it on the cob or off, I assume on the cob, but we've never done this before.

 

[Joel_BC]

It was a cabbage year for sure where I live in the Willamette Valley. We had rain right into July, and the hot weather didn't really get going until August. We've had nights in the upper 40s, too...

My adaptation has been to learn to love cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts. They grew quite well right up to now, and I'm ready to plant starts more to overwinter.

I understand adapting by "making the best of the situation" - we've done that in the past, but nowadays my wife has had it with that approach and will spend lots of $$ on buying imported corn or whatever fails in our own garden. It's not just the extra household expenditure that bothers me, but also the feeling of being defeated in aspects of an art (gardening) that I have nearly lifelong experience with.

The only problem with June generally being frost-free is that June is our rainiest month, and the "rainy season" can extend well into July like it did in 2011. Last year we dealt with it as best we could by using water-filled "kozy koats" or "wall-o-waters" to keep our tomato and pepper plants warmer than the cool ambient temps, and using row covers.

I wonder whether the row cover (if made using clear plastic sheeting, not remay cloth) could help with the early development of sweet corn? I've had fair to very good results with sweet corn for over 25 years, using mostly hybrid varieties - but all that changed with the change in weather. This year, we started a lot of our corn (three varieites, for hope/experimentation) in the greenhouse using 38-cell styrofoam starting trays. We ran out of room to start all our corn in the greenhouse. But the plants that were started in the g.h. outperformed the ones directly seeded into rows in the garden. But still, probably 90% of the direct-seeded corn rotted rather than germinated, and the g.h.-started plants did not develop all that well once they were in the garden. Overall it was a terrible corn year.

This year we tried corn, again. Hubs has a real yen to actually harvest an ear even though he's tried it several times in the past and I keep telling him that we just don't have the space or the climate to pull it off. Last summer I read an article in Mother Earth News about Floriani Red Flint corn, an Italian heritage variety bred at higher altitudes in the mountains...

As of this past weekend we actually have half a dozen corn plants flowering so we are very optimistic that this variety will actually result in us harvesting a few ears. Hubs is ecstatic and wants to order more than one packet of seeds for next year, I still say let's wait and see how big these ears turn out to be. This variety is not a fresh-eating variety, but rather a type that is dried and ground to make corn meal.

I still want to figure out how to succeed in years such as the last two with sweet corn. We like to eat it off the cob, or blanch the kernals and freeze them for winter soups, enchiladas, etc.

Well, this is starting to be a good discussion. Let's not give up!