The Solstice Garden
Happy Solstice!
There was nothing much to say on this blog from midsummer on because the garden was in such a state of flux and all in all it was one of the least successful years of gardening since this particular garden was established some seventeen years ago.
The climate is changing. The first ten years of gardening this spot the weather was what was to be expected for the temperate rain forest, rains all summer at more or less regular intervals. But progressively for the past seven years the summers have become drier and drier after midsummer. A garden planned for natural rainfall but gets none soon dries up like a potsherd.
About mid August a consultation with the garden made it clear that the amount of garden to be had was equal to the amount of water to be had.
Now the rub is this, about 25 feet beyond the fence shown in the above photo and some 14 feet straight down is a cool creek that runs out of the deep hollows of the forest and has water in it all year long no matter the rainfall. Yet when water is 14 feet at the bottom of a cliff-like bank, for all practical purposes it might as well be on the moon. Through the years here I've had a series of gasoline powered pumps that all worked for a while. Not only are they annoyingly noisy, but they deliver their water all at once which must be used right then or stored in a tank of trough for use later. But mostly internal combustion engines and I hate each other with an honest and soul deep hatred. The damn things self-destruct and I have a row of them I have blown up over the years.
I know what comes to the mind of my fellow Ludites is a ram pump. They are not necessarily what they are cracked up to be. In this particular case by the time the water is needed in the garden, the flow of the creek is too low to effectively operate the pump. At any rate, I'm always surprised at the extent to which the solution to such problems as this must needs end up with us standing to the side and watching things happen (the ram pump pumping water) rather than us materially participating in it. So I came across this very cheap (about $28) pitcher pump. Two cedar posts were set in the very center of the garden and a 1" PVC pipe buried to the edge of the precipice and then run to a pool in the creek. At first it didn't work, then it occurred to me to put a foot valve at the end of the pipe and now with modest effort it delivers six gallons a minute.
Some time was spent going over my notes of the past few dry years. I modified the plantings a bit and took my best shot for a late summer garden. I will be going over most of those techniques in detail as the gardening year progresses but the gist is that by using a modification of the intensive planting patterns and judicially watering and hand tending, the garden yielded tomatoes (from rooted suckers broken off the failed main crop of tomatoes), peppers, cabbages, broccoli, radishes, lettuce, snap beans of various types, kale, carrots and quite a list of other things all in the short season left after mid August.
In this mild winter many things are wintering over. There's still chard, kale, carrots, beets, garlic, onions, and such still being harvested here at solstice.
A bed of garlic has survived 0 degrees F with a few leaves bitten by the frost but the whole stalk still good to harvest as green garlic.
A winter turnip amid the green cover crop.
Now its a new solar year and time to reflect on what will happen in the garden this year even here when it is still long before the time when the garden is 'all hope and no weeds.'
posted by Eleutheros at 7:35 PM
2 Comments:
A garden after mid-August! Wow. I might be able to get some greens to grow that late, but mostly here we just get one chance. I had some success this year with spreading the planting dates, though, instead of the common practice of putting it all in the ground on the May long weekend.
Water was definitely the limiting factor here. The saying here is that we are never more than three weeks away from a drought. The last couple of years have shown that clearly, as August failed to water a good-looking crop. This year was not as bad as expected on the farms, though. I think it was the early spring that allowed crops to establish good roots before the dry spell arrived. I think I should be planning more successional planting, to catch whichever end of the season turns out best.
It seems to be the same all over, water is getting to be the limiting factor for gardeners. And we gardeners are surely the canary in the coal mine. The knowledge of feasible intensive gardening methods is urgent because they use much less water for the food produced.
Here in the last couple of days of the year it is time to seed some early brassicas which take ten weeks to produce transplants grown in cool weather ready to be put out in the garden in mid March. All so much so now of days for the reason you mention, if the weather turns very dry again in early summer, they will already have established themselves by then.
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