Hot Time in the Ol' Garden... or, "How to Be Besties With Your Veggies"

“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

Masanobu Fukuoka –“The One-Straw Revolution”

Permaculturalists are nonconformists by nature, so it should hardly be surprising that none of them do things the same way as each other.  Oh, there are some commonalities – lots of use of cardboard, heavy emphasis on seemingly random distributions of various plant species, integration of wetlands and orchards with herb and vegetable plots, heavy reliance on native plants and, of course, plenty of animals around who not only fertilize everything, but also get to eat their fair share.

But in general?  No two permaculture gardens are going to look more than vaguely similar.

Only one of many, many different "Permaculture" or "Forest Garden" schematics

We were thinking about that singular fact recently when we were asked a question about tomatoes by an online chum of the straight-and-narrow twentieth century square-garden-plot-enhanced-by-Miracle-Gro school of thought.  Seems he had moved from Colorado to Central Texas a few years ago, and wondered how to keep his tomatoes producing for as long as possible; when he lived in Denver, he got tomatoes all summer long; last year, living as he does now in San Antonio, they petered out in early June, when the heat simply became too much.

“When it gets over 90°, they just stop producing.”

A common misconception, the truth of which is invisible to anyone who does not practice some form of “forest gardening” or “edge gardening” or “permaculture” – depending on which one of us hippie freak gardeners you are talking to, and what we happen to be calling it on any given day.

The problem is not the daytime high being so ridiculously hot.  No, the problem is the nighttime low not being low enough.

“Well, great,” you may be thinking, “but I can’t do anything about that, either.”

Oh, ye of little faith.  There’s plenty you can do about it.  Fruit set for large swaths of the United States, of course, involves the opposite problem (if it’s too cold at night, fruit will either not set, or else if already set, will not ripen), but that, too, is solved by placing your beloved tomatoes in a broader context, making them part of a wider and more diverse little ecosystem.

Without all the jibber-jabber… give ‘em plenty of shade (put them near a row of shrubs, or a trellis covered with beans, or any of a number of vining squash, or passion fruit, or some such), mulch them heavily with leaves, or straw, or wood shavings, get indeterminate varieties and instead of putting them in cages, let them trail along the ground.  And for y’all Yankees who might be reading our humble blog, the same works in reverse – the things that aid in the prevention of a heat sink in the southern garden also insulate against the loss of heat in the northern garden.

All of these suggestions fly in the face of conventional wisdom, of course.  Practically everyone has a story about their grandmother or great-uncle, or some such, who grew State Fair grand prize winning giant tomatoes in cages, with so-and-so’s miracle fertilizer, and made sure to pinch the suckers from the base of the plant on a daily basis, and did the whole “shake-pollination” thing where they tap the blossoms with their thumbnails.

It’s probably true.  You can produce humongous individual fruit, and humongous bushels of bland-tasting produce from a genetically modified hybrid tomato plant, provided you are willing to suck your soil dry of all other life, and are willing to hang up your garden hat by the middle of June, when the plants will have all gotten crispy in the blistering Texas sun.

We’ve never run out of tomatoes when they are “in season” in spite of not doing all those things common wisdom deems necessary.  We have never had problems with pollination, because we take care of the local wild bee populations, and as a result they take care of us.  Weeds and the like do not bother us because they are a sign of healthy soil, and when harvested in moderation make for excellent salads for us and forage for the chickens.

And those suckers so fastidiously removed by other tomato fanatics?  Yeah, removing them will increase the fruit yield on the plant, but at the expense of the plant’s overall health.  If you don’t mind it dying in June, then by all means, prune away.

We would like to suggest a different course, however.

Rather than thinking of tomatoes as either “Spring tomatoes” or “Fall tomatoes” why not just call them “tomatoes”?  In their natural habitat (something slightly misleading, since they have been bred into ridiculously contorted varieties no longer resembling the wild ground cherries of ages long gone by) they are a perennial fruit.  And in some greenhouses, tomato trees (really just trellised indeterminate vines) live for not just multiple seasons, but actually for multiple years.

Epcot's famous tomato tree

Even if you don’t have a greenhouse, you can still protect the plants from the ravages of the extremes of the year.  We would suggest that step one in such a cause would be to change philosophies regarding your relationship to the plants and to the soil in which those plants grow – a couple of helpful concepts from other cultures (taken in a slightly different context from their usual associations) will illustrate what we mean.

First, the Japanese idea of “Wabi Sabi” – this word is all the rage among interior designers and antique dealers.  Wabi Sabi is the appreciation of imperfection; typically it refers to liking the weather-beaten look of a “lived on” sofa, or the gritty texture of centuries old silverware that has been polished a few too many times, or the beauty of the lines around an old woman’s eyes, showing clearly that she has spent many, many decades smiling and laughing and loving.

In the garden, Wabi Sabi means not clearing away “last year’s crop” – those dead plants?  They are next year’s mulch, and the following year’s soil.  Nothing ugly about them at all, they are a beautiful part of the cycle.  And once your new year’s tomatoes are growing, all the “weeds” in the bed are not ugly, either, nor are they a detriment to your plants’ health.  They are trap crops (attracting beneficial insects, and distracting detrimental ones), living mulch, keeping moisture in the soil and – most important – regulating temperature.  “Better Homes and Gardens” may think your tomato bed looks imperfect; we say, “So?”

The other borrowed concept we’d like to address is the Swedish concept of “Lagom” – loosely translated into American English, this means “plenty good” and we need more of it.  You can never have too much moderation.

Basically, lagom in the garden means not worrying so much about getting the biggest tomato, or the largest yield, and instead having big enough tomatoes, and harvesting enough for your purposes.  A healthy relationship with your environment means not just doing as little harm as possible to the environment on a macro scale, but also treating each part of it with respect on a micro scale.

Our daughter is an avid animal rights activist, and eschews the eating of meat on moral grounds, and she asked us a question recently that we have heard asked in a sarcastic manner before by cynical devotees of the exploitation culture:  “What are the ethics of eating plants?”  Understand, she was not asking whether it is right to chomp on a carrot or not – no, she was asking what are our responsibilities in our relationship to carrots and such?

Understanding that we are actually in a relationship with everything around us, including our garden vegetables, is an excellent first step towards making those relationships right.  Lagom teaches that if we are truly grateful to our plant friends, we will only ask what we need, and will only take what we need.  No more.

As such, any gardening philosophy geared towards getting more than we need may as well be geared towards learning how to grow 7-11 Big Gulp fountain drinks, and McDonald’s Supersized fries.

On the other hand… taking just enough means we get to take for a longer period of time.  We fully anticipate having ripe tomatoes in July and August, in spite of daytime highs in the 100°-plus range, and nighttime lows in the 78°-plus range, because the plants will not be stressed, they will be shaded by velvet bean vines, and cooled by a host of so-called weeds, earthworms, mulches of old vines and oak leaves, and plenty of their own leaves as they trail along the ground, preventing the soil from soaking up all that daytime heat.  They are our friends; we will support them, but we would never presume to tell them their own business – they know how to be tomatoes far better than we do.

However you go about getting friendlier with your garden, we hope you have fun with it.

Happy farming!

It's not so much the heat... Oh, wait, yes it is...

Want some perspective on global warming?  Look at overnight low temperatures, not daytime high temperatures.  The record “warmest low” (that is, the low temperatures which were the highest on a given day) for the month of July have almost all come from recent years.  In fact, 15 of the 31 “highest minimums” have come in just the last two years.  15 of 31 high min records were set in 2009 or 2010 for the month of July.

On the other side of that coin, the “low minimum”, or “record low” for each day in July has not been set since 1994.  For any of the 31 days in July.  In fact, only five of the 31 daily record lows have been set since 1990.  25 of the 31 were set before 1968.  21 of the 31 record lows were set prior to 1936.  It simply doesn’t cool down at night here any more – it’s hot during the day, but that has always been true.  What is new is that it is also hot at night..

Climate change is real.  Just ask a gardener.  Seriously, the fact that there is still anyone at all debating whether global temperatures are actually rising or not astounds us.  For anecdotal proof, ask anyone who has grown tomatoes for any length of time whether or not the fruiting season is shorter now than it was a couple of decades ago.

The answer, of course, is almost definitely “Yes, the fruiting season is shorter now than it was when I was younger.”

Why would that be, do you think?  The answer is fairly simple.  Tomatoes are dependent upon relatively cool nighttime temperatures for pollination.  In some parts of the country, this still happens well into the summer, but in most of Texas and the Deep South, there is no longer any evening relief between mid-May and late September.  Essentially, July tomatoes are now a rarity in many parts of the country, unless they are grown indoors.  Those fruits set before the nighttime temperatures soar into the upper 70s and lower 80s are all the tomatoes you are going to get.

Jennifer Freeman of the American Meteorological Society wrote an excellent piece entitled “The New Climate Normals: Gardeners Expect Warmer Nights” in NOAA’s ClimateWatch magazine, in which all the gory details of evening temperature data are summarized fairly succinctly.  Some places may be experiencing relatively cooler July high temperatures, but on average the country is warmer everywhere, mostly due to nighttime temperatures having soared.

The implications of these findings are fairly serious for society generally, but if we just restrict our thinking to what goes on in the garden, there is still more than enough to give one pause to reflect.  The bad news is that the growing season for some crops – like tomatoes – is quite simply disappearing, at least for the Spring garden.  We will probably reach a point at which we can only get Spring tomatoes for a month, maybe a month and a half each year.  In the Fall, on the other hand, we will probably be able to get good tomatoes for a three or four month stretch in a good year, because the date of first frost will probably get pushed back further and further.

There are other implications, though, for a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, which will require experimentation.  Gardening “experts” will increasingly be sought after, and their advice will be increasingly worthless, too, as changing temperature patterns make some old truisms about gardening in various places no longer true. 

Squash, for example, is an old standby in most of Texas – “The one thing you can count on in July is getting plenty of squash.”  Well, maybe… if you plant the right variety.  It never used to matter before, but it certainly does now.  Some varieties have pollen with low toleration for nighttime heat stress, you see.  Butternut squash, for example, has big, vibrant, thriving foliage and blooms during a Texas heat wave… but unless the nighttime temperature dips into the lower 70s, those big beautiful flowers are better as filling for quesadillas than as potential new butternut squash fruit.  Varieties with smaller flowers and higher-temperature pollen tolerances still produce prodigiously, but experimentation will be required to discover which varieties these are, since this is not one of the factors most seed companies advertise – it simply wasn’t a concern before, so nobody has thought seriously about it yet.

Other plants, though, thrive in the warmer weather, including the warmer nighttime temperatures.  Some of these plants are old favorites, and are welcome everywhere – cantaloupe and watermelon, for example.  We have some thriving volunteer cantaloupe – we weren’t sure at first what these plants were, and even after they started fruiting, we couldn’t be certain until the husk took on the characteristic woody muskmelon texture.  We also have some Sugar Baby watermelons which have not only produced prodigious vines, but have also produced more fruit than we ever imagined would come out of a 5’x10’ plot.

Then there are the plants which are not so welcome for most gardeners.  We have many times described our fondness for weeds – chicken feed, actually, is what we call them – and we will doubtless have ample opportunity to do so again.  Most varieties of invasive plant do better in high carbon-dioxide environments than do domesticated crop varieties of plant. 

We are strongly considering harvesting the chenopodia variety you see here nestled amongst our Hopi Red Dye amaranth.  The Native Americans grew chenopodium berlandieri and chenopodium album intentionally as an excellent grain source and potherb, much as we grow amaranth and quinoa.  In fact, these native pigweeds are closely related to chenopodium quinoa, and while they are not as colorful, nor as prodigious in their production of grain, they do have the advantage of growing in summertime in Texas.

Likewise, the common dandelion is an excellent salad green and forage food for chickens and other domesticated livestock.  And while its growing season is shifting also due to its particular temperature sensitivities, it has the tremendous advantage of not relying on human hands to determine when the right time for planting comes along.  We can rest easy when planning our garden, knowing that we simply harvest the dandelions when they are ready – if ever there were an easier “crop” to care for, we don’t know when it might have been.  Climate change has done nothing to make this any more difficult.

We have mentioned before our philosophy when picking fruit crops to incorporate in our garden, and it is worth mentioning again in the context of warmer nighttime temperatures.  We picked pomegranates as the most prominent fruit tree in our garden due to their ability to withstand extreme heat and cold.  The fact that this plant grows in every temperature and moisture extreme from Istanbul to Kabul makes it an excellent fruit tree for the changing climate of southeastern Texas.  Likewise, the variety of blackberries we chose to plant – Brison – was developed to be more heat-tolerant than the many Arkansas cultivars of blackberry.  Recent trials in Arizona have borne out the wisdom of this choice – the Arkansas varieties burnt to a crisp in low desert farming, but Brison berries were producing five pounds of fruit per plant by the third season.

Peaches were a problematic choice for us – the best peaches in the world, with all due apologies to Georgia, where they are rightly proud of their peaches, come from the Texas Hill Country.  We live in a region too warm on average and historically too wet to produce the high quality sweet peaches we remember eating when we were younger and lived in the western half of the state.

However, there are a few varieties with relatively low chilling requirements – Earligrand peaches only require 100 hours of temperatures below 45° in order to set fruit.  As the “new normal” begins to include less and less rainfall, the sweetening influence of water stress will hopefully improve the quality of our Earligrand crop, though we still doubt the quality will ever match that found in the high chilling requirement peaches found in Fredericksburg and Luckenbach.

Rio Grande is another lower chilling requirement peach variety – 400 hours of temperatures below 45°.  This represents something of a compromise for us, because while this sounds like not a lot of time – even calculating at just being 45° or less for only 12 hours a day, this is only about a month (33 days) of “low” temperatures – but it is nevertheless a difficult target, only likely to get more difficult as the years go by and the greenhouse gasses mount up.  To put this in context, while 90° temperatures in January are not exactly common even here, they also don’t surprise us when they do happen.

So, some years we expect our Rio Grande peaches will not set fruit.  On the other hand, when they do, they should be sweeter than the Earligrand.  Another advantage lay in the fact that Rio Grande are “mid-season” producers, meaning that in a typical year, we will likely have blackberries in May and June, with Earligrand peaches in June and July, and Rio Grande peaches in July and August.  If we stagger our plantings of watermelon and cantaloupe, we should be able to have fresh fruit clear through from the last week of April up through when the pomegranates peter out in December or January.  If we ever figure out how to produce a strawberry crop, we will be set almost year-round.

First, though, we have to just survive the heat...  A nice cold glass of water, followed by a snack of peaches sounds good right about now.

Happy farming!

A Rock and a Hard Place...

We're stuck in waiting mode.  As we've mentioned before, the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring is a difficult thing to gauge in Texas.  There are so many plants which should not go in the ground until "the danger of frost is past".  The problem, of course, is that some years, the final frost is at the end of January, and other years, it isn't until sometime in April.  Average final frost is the first week of March here in College Station, but we take that with a grain of salt.

We do have some indicators that it might be okay to plant our tomatoes and peppers this week; the Weather.com forecast for the next ten days shows us not getting below 40° anytime soon.  There is a lot to be said for this forecast's likelihood to be accurate, and it dovetails pretty nicely with the historical records around these parts -- a little chillier than usual, but not by a whole lot.

Of course, it did snow just a week or so ago, so there may be some justifiable concern that perhaps... just maybe... it is too optimistically sunshiney and warm.  Maybe?

The climate pages over at NOAA.gov tell a somewhat different story, even if not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Basically, for the next month, we will be "blue for 'Brrrr!!!'" cooler than usual.  That does not necessarily mean that we will have any freezing temperatures... but one never knows.  The latest forecast for El Niño shows that the actual ENSO (El Niño Souther Oscillation) event will be subsiding within the next 30-45 days... but that the effects of the event will linger past the actual "end" date.

So.  We are not going to plant peppers and tomatoes this weekend.  We are going to weed, turn over garden plots, and have guests over to sip wine, munch on cheese and crackers, and talk about religion and politics.  You've got to fertilize your garden at every available opportunity, you know, and nothing can do that better than heated discussion of religion and politics.

Until the weather breaks...

Happy farming!