Weatherproofing your plans for your garden

[patandchickens]

Thought about starting this thread from related comments in other current threads. Longtime food gardeners probably already do all this, but there seem to be a lot of people on the forum relatively new to it, also I'm always interested in hearing others' suggestions.

IMO you should plan your garden based on the assumption that the weather will be just terrible. (Always, not just this year). The thing is, you cannot predict in which WAY it will be weird weather. Maybe droughty, maybe wet; maybe hot, maybe cold; maybe a late cold spring but then a hot dry summer; maybe there will just never *be* any summer heat because it will be overcast for two months running; who knows.

Yet even with this uncertainty, there are things you can do to prevent weird weather from totally wiping you out:

Base a good portion of your garden on things you know do well, historically, IN YOUR PARTICULAR AREA AND SOIL. This could be from personal experience over the years but for newbies it should be from quizzing neighbors and coworkers and the local garden club. Do not trust seed catalog descriptions to really convey what will be happy in your garden and what won't.

Choose things so that there is likely to be SOME crops that are happy with your conditions. Plant more than one variety if possible, not based on "hey this sounded sexy in the catalog" or "everyone on the internet is talking about this particular heirloom", but rather based on "here is a variety that likes hot and here is another that likes cold" or other similar tradeoffs.

Also spread the risk with your *crops* this way -- don't plant all things that require a hot summer if sometimes your area doesn't get hot summers, like up here I would not devote too high a percentage of my garden to peppers, eggplants, long-season tomatoes and long-season beans, because every few years those will all fail.

Try to grow some extra-early crops and some late ones that will store in the ground for a while (e.g. carrots, beets, late potatoes, leeks), not just the main-growing-season usual suspects.

Listen to the weatherman, not just for tonight's weather but the extended forecast, and if possible, plant a portion of most crops extra-early if conditions seem plausible. If they get zapped by frost or rot in cold ground, oh well it will soon be apparent and you can use that area for something else (have this planned in advance); but if they do NOT get zapped then you will have a longer and possibly better growing season. This works better with some crops than others, Know Thy Plants.

Be prepared with a plan for drought. This means having the garden laid out in such a way that it can easily be mulched and watered (and have a plan for how to obtain water by any alternative means available)

Be prepared with a plan for late spring or early fall frosts. This means having frames/bedsheets and cloches and cardboard boxes *already sitting htere in the garage ready to use*, because typically you only have a few hours' notice.

Figure you will have a few major huge windy thunderstorms; design windbreaks and trellises appropriatly so as not to have any more of your garden flattened than necessary. (Hail will do very bad things to a garden but there is seldom much you can do about it other than cross fingers and try to live a pure life )

If possible, don't plant all of one crop in one part of the garden, spread it out. This won't work for corn, and is not usually practical for sprawlers like pumpkins, but for most other things it will help reduce the chances of a disease or insect pest wiping you out totally.

The better you've got your soil, the more resiliant your garden will be to WHATEVER happens, be it weather or pests or etc.

Note that many of these things (certainly the risk-spreading-among-crops type items) may mean that if the weather is *ideal*, you may get slightly less harvest than if you'd planted all crops/varieties ideally suited to whatever your weather turned out to be... However at least you will get SOME reasonable harvest of SOMEthing, as opposed to getting badly skunked (which is not only annoying, as it means you have to buy the food you haven't grown, but can be very *discouraging* for future years' gardening). IMO it is a lot better to get some reasonable amount of produce every year than to have super years but also near-blanks.

WHat else am I not thinking of here, in this list?

Pat

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

This year the onion beds will be long and skinny, and will have a frame roof that I can pull plastic over, if we end up with weeks long rain periods like we did last year.
We are not able to stagger crops with our short season.
I really wish we could put up two huge hoop houses to rotate crops and animals through.
Someday

 

[Wifezilla]

If you want training for weather disasters, come garden in Colorado for a few seasons

A biggie here is hail. It can easily wipe out your entire garden.

 

[Rebbetzin]

With our recent increase in water prices, I am thinking I will not plant a summer garden this year at my house. I have planted a few things at the congregation garden. It is a nice little walled courtyard that gets shade most of the afternoon. And had the added bonus of being on a well instead of city water.

 

[HEChicken]

How high did your water prices go? I would hate to not be able to have my garden, but I am also conscious of the cost of water to maintain it. Last year I invested in a soaker hose and a timer. I had it set to turn on for 1 hour every three days and my garden did great. My MIL is currently moving and offered me another brand new soaker hose for free this year. I also have some extra straw bales, so I plan to mulch really well with the straw this year.

Several years ago, when my parents lived in an area that was in severe drought, my dad invested in a large plastic tub that he put in the bottom of the shower stall. They collected all the water from showers, and lugged it out in buckets to put on the garden. I haven't found a tub that will work in my odd-shaped shower stall, but I do collect as much water as I can. For example, if I'm running water to do dishes, and waiting for it to get hot, rather than let it go down the drain, I catch it in an old milk container, and use it to fill the dog's water bowl, the chicken's water bowl, or pour it directly on my garden.

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

One way to retain extra water for the garden, is to switch to garden safe soaps for personal and dish use.
Then open up the drains under all the sinks and place buckets under them.
Find a tub that will fit in your shower as well, and stand in that while showering.
All that water can then go in the garden.

And mulch, mulch, mulch.

ETA I guess part of my post is redundant

 

[i_am2bz]

Good things to think about, Pat, thanks for posting this!

I have 2 55 gal rain barrels under 2 downspouts in front, so far I've rarely had to water using "hose water." But now that I've expanded into the back yard, I have to get something under the gutter back there. :/

I kept all my wooden stakes from last year that I used to set up my rows (you know, the ones DH told me to "just throw away, what will you ever use those again for?")...guess what, I kept them neatly stacked in a pile next to the garden, & there they were when I needed them to hold up the sheets to protect the lettuce from the frost we had last night! Yay!

 

[savingdogs]

Patandchickens, thank you for starting this thread. I don't have many pearls of wisdom except I've been one of those folks discouraged by the vagaries of weather in the Pacific Northwest, so these ideas are falling upon fruitful ground, so to speak.

I put a lot of time and effort into my tomato seedlings last year and got about three tomatos total before the first frost hit. For that much money and effort I could have bought a nice giant bag of tomatos from the store in several varieties.

I'm hoping to improve on that this year, but we have had very little warmth the last two summers. I'll be especially interested in ideas to keep things warm vs. watered...we don't usually have any problems keeping things wet.

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

Patandchickens, thank you for starting this thread. I don't have many pearls of wisdom except I've been one of those folks discouraged by the vagaries of weather in the Pacific Northwest, so these ideas are falling upon fruitful ground, so to speak.

I put a lot of time and effort into my tomato seedlings last year and got about three tomatos total before the first frost hit. For that much money and effort I could have bought a nice giant bag of tomatos from the store in several varieties.

I'm hoping to improve on that this year, but we have had very little warmth the last two summers. I'll be especially interested in ideas to keep things warm vs. watered...we don't usually have any problems keeping things wet.

Start you tomatoes early, and then plant them in tires stacked up.
Make sure and put oyster shell or egg shell under each transplant.

The tire trick works well in Alaska

 

[patandchickens]

Yeap, for places with cool-summer or short-season problems, I'd suggest all of the following simultaneously for tomatoes:

1) plant short-season-cool-weather varieties (mainly or exclusively), such as Siberia or Sub-Arctic Plenty or Early Girl, or some of the fastest cherry tomatoes.

2) start them REALLY EARLY in wall-o-waters or the equivalent, note that this means you need to start a few indoors real super early to PUT in those wall-o-waters. Wall-o-waters are good down to at least 20 F and potentially lower if you cover them further or do funky things. And if worst comes to worst and you lose early wall-o-water tomatoes in a freak cold snap, you should have a second cohort coming on in the house to replace them with so there is no really serious loss. Put the wall-o-waters out there at least a week before you set tomatoes in them, or cover the area in question with clear plastic for a coupla weeks first, to prewarm the soil.

3) leave the wall-o-waters on as long as feasible, this can be hard if you live in (e.g.) Philadelphia and get 90 F in early May but do what you can. Don't leave them on if it's really hot as excessive heat seems to permanently stunt young tomato plants IME.

4) consider growing as many as possible in VERY LARGE SELF-WATERING containers in a 'heat trap' location such as against the south-facing wall of your house, preferably containers that are not too large to move if you absolutely have to. This way you can accommodate heatwaves as well as cool snaps. Container tomatoes can also potentially be put in a garage etc overnight to protect from frost, although admittedly it is a nuisacne.

5) If you get a long stretch of cool cloudy weather, consider draping floating row cover loosely over the tomato plant (works best if it's small and is caged, or if you add some stakes to help support the row cover), to create a warmer microclimate inside the floating row cover 'tent' to help the maters grow better.

6) don't let them get so big and sprawly you can't cover them during early frosts. Big cages and/or stake assemblies help a lot. Even if you lose the outermost foliage to a frosted sheet thrown over them, the inner/lower parts of the plant are usually *fine*, and that sort of protection can give you sometimes *weeks* longer for things to mature.

7) consider nipping off all new flowers and small fruits when the season gets late enough they'll have no hope of maturing, so the plant's energy can go all into maturing what fruits it *has* set.

8) pick everything, every last tomato unless it is truly miniscule and dead-green, before your definitive killing frost. Even house-ripened tomatoes are a lot better than store-bought (and of course are free ), and for ones that are not going to ripen indoors there are still lots and lots of yummy things to do with green tomatoes. It's a real waste to let them just get frosted. (In a short season climate I mean. In warmer climes the killing frost can be a *blessing*, lol)

9) for getting small tomato transplants 'going' better in a cold spring, I've had good luck planting a big rock or cinderblock on the N side and a smaller (like lunch-plate sized) rock on the S or SW side, both of them very close with the transplant sandwiched in between. They help buffer the baby plant against cold nights and excessively hot days and (to some extent) drying winds.

Pat