Planting with Drought in Mind

When I plant my vegetable garden, I follow a modified version of what is often called Intensive Spacing. Square Foot Gardening is one example of a garden method that relies on intensive garden spacing.  It does not use farm-style rows; instead, plants are set into the garden in a grid-pattern, and they often are placed very near to each other. (Note: The Square Foot Garden book has helped a lot of new-gardeners find success in growing food, and in many ways it is pretty awesome.)

My version is modified in that the spacing I use is a bit roomier than in some of the grid-style intensive planting schemes I have seen. There is more than one reason for my spacing plants a bit farther apart than is sometimes recommended.

The intensive planting guide that I started out with, John Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables , suggests starting bush beans at a 6-inch spacing, and that is what I tend to use, but for big varieties like 'Provider' bush beans I make the spacing bigger.  The Square Foot Gardening book I read (early edition, so it may be changed now) suggests a shorter distance - fitting as many as 9 bean plants into a square foot of garden. My version fits 4 (or fewer) plants into one square foot of space.

The theory supporting tighter spacing is that even though there may be fewer beans per plant, the overall productivity of the square foot of space will be higher. That makes total sense.

However, when the tops grow to maturity and are making beans galore, the dense tangle of leaves and stems make the beans hard to find. For me, the convenience vs. exasperation factor is a consideration.

This tangle of growth can be a problem for more plants than just the bush beans. Following the suggested spacing for many crops in intensive planting systems can result in a mess.

The second reason for wider spacing is related to drought and the time required to water a garden. When plants are spaced more closely together, their roots cross into each others' soil-space. The roots of several plants will all be pulling nutrients and water from the same chunk of soil.

In a drought, in hot weather, a mature garden with big plants will need a lot of water. If those plants are very close together, all trying to get moisture from the same little bit of soil, they may need to be watered every day. Plants in raised bed gardens (which dry out faster than in-ground gardens) may need to be watered twice a day. Do I have time for that? No.

Steven Solomon, whose book Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, has a tip for growing food in drought conditions. The tip is to make the plant spacing even wider when rain is scarce.

If the original spacing was fairly close, and the rains have stopped indefinitely, he suggests pulling some of the plants out of the garden. The remaining plants will have less competition for water, and the gardener will need to water a little less often.

My sister in Louisiana plants her bush beans 9 inches apart. Since her area is hotter and drier than mine,  NW of Atlanta, this spacing makes sense for her garden. She doesn't have time to water every day, either.

For gardeners who need high productivity and who can get plenty of water out to the garden in a long, hot, dry spell, the closer spacing patterns will be a better choice.

For the rest of us, if our upcoming summer gets as hot and dry as the last one, and if watering the garden becomes a seemingly endless chore, you might consider pulling up a few plants to see if Steve Solomon is right.

'There Never Was a Spring Like This'

Peach flowers opened in February. PHOTO/AmyGWh

The flowers pictured to the right were on a peach tree at the community garden on the grounds of a church in Marietta. I took the picture a couple of weeks ago, at the very end of February.

On warm-enough days, I sometimes take my lunch to eat at a picnic table by that garden. It isn't too far from the office, and it is a beautiful place.

These flowers are beautiful, too, but I was not as happy to see them as I might have been in another spring.

The problem is that the flowers opened too soon, triggered, I would guess, by a February that felt a lot like April. Unfortunately, we are about to have two nights in a row of temperatures around 25 degrees F.

Even though bees and other tiny insects buzzed all around the open flowers, working their pollinator magic, the little fruits forming as a result of that work are at a high risk of damage from the impending cold. Apple and plum trees in my neighborhood have done the same thing, blooming too soon.

This is one of those times when I think of the poet Countee Cullen, and the poem that starts "I cannot hold my peace, John Keats; There never was a spring like this." Of course, he meant it differently, but this is definitely a spring that I have not seen before.

Spring Veggies to Harvest Now, or Soon, and Delayed Planting

We've been bringing in asparagus, green onions, and radishes, and there are little bits of lettuce to add to salads, but it will be a few more weeks before the beets and spring-planted carrots are big enough to add much mass to a meal.

The peas, though, will be ready sooner. The vines are in that covered-with-flowers-and-tiny-pea-pods stage, so I am pretty hopeful that we'll have some peas with our meals in ten days or less.

After the Big Freeze...

It's been well over a week since the Big Freeze (when the temperature dropped to around 12 degrees F), but I only just today worked up the nerve to look under the covers in my garden, to check on the broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. The results of my efforts to protect my crops were mixed.

In the good news category, the unharvested broccoli under the heaviest cover looks amazingly good. I am hoping that growth will continue and I'll be able to harvest heads that are larger than 2 inches diameter (the size they are now). The cabbages under the thinner cover also look good, but under both weights of covers all the cauliflower -- the least hardy of the group -- have died. The few remaining broccoli under the thinner cover didn't completely die, but the flowering heads that I had been hoping to eat were damaged beyond saving.

For the plants left uncovered by anything but hope, outcomes also were mixed. Some outer leaves of the collards and red kale were bleached by the cold, but those bleached leaves are not wilted, and the newer, inner leaves look fine. The curly kale and the carrots appear to be completely undamaged. The spinach looks fine, the parsley and cilantro have some limp-looking leaves among the healthier ones, but all the leaves on all the radishes and beets have turned mushy.

I pulled up the dead plants, but beyond that I haven't done any real work in the garden today, because we have taken this three-day weekend to rearrange the garage.  All of my physical work has been given over to shifting shelves, boxes, tools, the rabbits and their enclosures, bins of toys and household stuff, and more, to make a working space for Joe to build a boat.

We have been in this house for a long time, and the garage had been full of the accumulated stuff of life in the suburbs while raising two boys, so thinning out and rearranging has been a big job. Finishing the job will take more than one long weekend, really, but while Joe is working out which of his final two choices of boat to build, we are busy making room for the project.

Otherwise, my big task for the weekend has been to order some seed potatoes. Last year I was unable to find any Irish Cobbler potatoes for planting, so this year I made sure to order them early.

It's Magical Outside

The title words for this post are the words I woke up to this morning. It was insanely early in the morning, but Joe was right. Snow was everywhere, covering the ice that had coated everything yesterday. Magical. We don't get to see the landscape so transformed very often here in Kennesaw.

After Joe took our old coonhound out for a brief slide around in the yard (her back legs aren't very stable these days), we took our younger dog for a long, pre-dawn walk. Snowflakes were still falling, and no one else was out.

We've spent a couple of days at home since Georgia declared a state of emergency over the winter weather, and I've been contemplating the coming spring for much of that time. I've plotted the crop rotations for the year, put in my last seed order, and hovered over a flat of seeds so recently planted that only the lettuces are visible above ground. The tomatoes should appear in a few days, but the peppers and eggplants could be much slower.

I've also done a bit of small-farm research for a new farmer who came to the office on Tuesday, and I've been reading more about community gardens, permaculture, and agro-ecology. If it sounds like I've had a great couple of days, well, it's all true!

In the news, there was talk of widespread power outages, so we have kept the woodstove going. Yesterday we had a pot of crowder peas (harvested and shelled out late last summer) on that stove most of the day; today we have vegetable soup on the woodstove, and I've made bread. Power at our house has stayed on, but a transformer "blew" up the street, leaving some of our neighbors without electricity for a while. Luckily, repairs already seem to have been completed.

For me, it's been a pleasant  couple of days, complete with garden thinking-and-reading, phone calls from concerned relatives (in Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana), text updates from local friends, cozy moments with my pet bunnies, magical moments with Joe, and comfort-foods hot off the woodstove. I hope that other gardeners have also found ways to enjoy the break from their usual routine!

When the Garden Gets Slammed By a Very Hard Freeze

I have a friend who says that gamblers should skip going to Vegas and just plant a garden, instead --  letting those weather dice roll and taking odds on what will yield well, what will do poorly, and what will be a total fail.

In the past bunch of winters, broccoli, cabbages, and nearly all the cool-season greens have produced right through until spring. Gardeners in North Georgia are accustomed to the success of those crops, so, back in October, we all would have said the likelihood of those crops surviving the winter was fairly high. This year, the usual winter crops pretty much ended a few weeks ago when the temperature dropped down near 5 degrees F.

It seemed like it might be useful to have a list of the hardiest crops, for future reference when planning the fall/winter garden, so what follows is such a list:

multiplying onions
shallots
garlic
carrots
winter radishes
green onions
cilantro
spinach
Brussels Sprouts (report from another local gardener)

I'm guessing that parsnips would be ok, too, but I didn't plant any this year.

The perennial herbs also seem to be struggling with the cold. Most years in winter I can find enough fresh oregano down under the browned stems to use for cooking, but today I could find only a few, tiny leaves. The sage has some good leaves, and I found some usable thyme under the tangle of old stems of that plant, but the rosemary looks pretty rough.

Also, since so many of the weeds that I depend upon for bunny food were bitten back by the hard freeze, I've been growing wheat greens indoors to feed to my pet bunnies. Without these greens, my bunny-food bill would be much higher!

We've been growing sprouts in the kitchen for ourselves, too, to add some fresh, home-grown greens to our meals. With the loss of many of the outdoor crops, we are lucky to have options for continued "gardening" indoors.

If other gardeners can let me know of additional crops that have done well in the cold, we can add them to the list, to help in planning next winter's garden. Hope you all are keeping warm!

Rain and More Rain

If you are gardening in the South and have yet to bring in a perfect, red tomato, take heart! I have heard from more than one gardener who said that the past couple of days of sunshine helped the green tomatoes on their plants make it to the blushing stage, and they are hoping to harvest one or more actual, ripe tomatoes soon.

Of course, yesterday morning the thermometer on my front porch was showing a temperature of 59 degrees F, and this morning it is raining, yet again. The unusual weather, both cool and wet, that has been ongoing for months, delayed planting in the spring and has caused a lot of trouble in our summer gardens.

As bad as things are for the gardeners, though, they are much worse for the farmers whose livelihoods depend on the success of their crops. Our grocery store shelves depend on them, too!

An article in the New York Times, "With Too Much Rain in the South, Too Little Produce on the Shelves," points out that much of the Southern U.S. has received WAY more rain than usual. Georgia is up by about 34%, and other states aren't far behind.

The vegetables that aren't doing well in gardens are also not doing well on farms. Fruits either explode in the rain or ripen with a bland flavor. Fields are a muddy mess that can't be accessed with the usual heavy equipment. Fertilizers and pesticides can't be deployed because they are spread by some of that heavy equipment. When those are successfully applied to the fields, it rains again.

One of my friends subscribes to a CSA -- she gets a box of vegetables each week from her local farmers, a husband and wife team up in Rockmart, GA, who have been hit hard by the weather. They had to replant some crops more than once in spring (seeds washed away in heavy rains), and the wet weather has brought enough other problems (disease, ripening issues) that they have really struggled to provide vegetables to their share subscribers. My friend says that the farm had to let go more than half of its subscribers, and the website carries a note that the farm won't be offering a fall CSA due to the excessive rain. It seems unlikely that the farmers will be making anything like "a living" this year from the little farm.

Meanwhile, Eastern Australia probably has just had its hottest July ever, and people in Shanghai are dying of heatstroke from "unprecedented summer heat."  Closer to home, "Anchorage has set a record for the most consecutive days over 70 degrees during this unusually warm summer."

People around here like to say, "if you don't like the weather, just wait a minute..." but the weather doesn't seem to be turning on a dime these days. According to Jeff Crouch, a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. who was quoted in the top-linked New York Times article, “Whenever we get in a pattern like this, we kind of stay in the status quo,” he said. “When we’re hot and dry, we stay hot and dry. When we’re wet, we stay wet.” 

I'm just about resigned to more of the same - rain and more rain. Let's hope my garden is up to it, too!