In the heat of the summer

The heat that started in early June has settled in. We can expect it to break sometime in October, which is generally when our first cool front hits. While others are experiencing bounty in their gardens, we are trying to nurse our plants through the rash of 100 degree days we continue to have.

Making my garden a little more challenging/out of my control this summer was a trip to Virginia. My family all lives out of town, mostly in the Shenandoah Valley. Due to shoulder surgery and wanting my kids to spend quality time with their grandparents, we were gone for an entire month. I left the garden in the hands of my husband and some friends who were housesitting.

My husband kindly weeded and mulched the garden. The mulching was essential to help retain the precious little water the plants get over the summer months. His other garden project was to tie into our irrigation system for the front yard and bury a pipe to the garden (about a 25 yard or so distance). My husband is a plumber by trade, so installing a faucet right next the garden proved to be no problem. This project was mostly inspired by convenience. He was tired of having to move the hose every time he mowed. This time of year, it isn't much of a problem, because he is not mowing the backyard at all.

However, we did suffer one plant casualty in the weeding and mulching. My husband's time in the garden is generally very limited, so he doesn't know the plants so well. He carefully left my dying nasturiums intact (they don't like our heat) and diligently pulled our struggling butternut squash plants. After being initially saddened by the loss of the squash, I recovered and was able to see the humor in it.

Our heirloom tomatoes are just barely managing to hang on and produce. The tomatoes are not examples of perfection. The stress of the heat makes it difficult for them to fight diseases and pests. I will need to cut bad spots off of these tomatoes, but I'm pleased that they are still producing despite the heat we've been having and the limited water. I have tried hard to stick to our city's mandatory watering schedule which limits watering to 2 days a week.

I will try to nurse my tomato plants through to the cooler weather. I talked to an owner of a nursery at our farmer's market on Saturday and he recommended keeping them alive so they will produce again in the fall. I can't plant heirlooms for the fall growing season because they are indeterminates. I need to stick to the determinates. Hopefully, at least my Good Germans and Cherokee Purples (my favorite of all the heirlooms) will make it!

Tomato damage, from an unlikely quarter

As I looked down on the garden from my second-floor bedroom window the morning of father's day I had a bit of a rude awakening in the form of damage to several tomato plants. We've experienced the damage done by hornworms, aphids, and other critters and creatures, but this was something new.

Sometime in the night or early morning hours the top of a sweetgum tree had come crashing down across our fence and landed on top of several beefsteak tomato plants. I let out a small sigh and thought, Now here's a garden chore I hadn't anticipated.

Here's what they looked like once I had cut up and removed the tree and straightened out the cages:
Fortunately the fence broke the tree's fall enough that the plants underneath were salvageable. The tomato cages also helped absorb some of the impact. Some of the plants did lose a few stalks and some small fruits but a month later they're all making a comeback and doing just fine. We're finally starting to get a few ripe tomatoes.

Weathering the weather

As early summers go, this one has been a doozy. It is blazing hot outside - about 98 degrees according to the thermometer on the chicken coop wall. It has been just about three weeks since our last snowfall in town. That is correct, during the second week of June we had some unusual weather.

June 11th, 2008: Wet, snowy, and soggy flannel sheets on the tomato cages

All around town people were in a frenzy to protect their plantings. I saw bedsheets on tomato cages everywhere I looked, including my own backyard. Thank goodness we did not have a hard frost, but accumulations were visible just barely off the valley floor. Snow collected in cold spots in my yard- you can see it in the photo ringing the tops of the cages, and on the sheet in the bottom left that was protecting zucchini plants. My tomatoes, squash and most other frost-intolerants did just fine with basic precautions, but much of my basil did not survive. A few days after the snow fell, I accepted their death and went to the farmer's market to buy some new starts.

I know the laws of supply and demand could have warned me that getting to the market almost at noon, after an unseasonable snowfall had killed basil starts all over the valley, wouldn't be a wise economic choice. I was still dumbfounded to see six seedlings, barely three inches tall, being sold for four dollars. FOUR DOLLARS! That is 66 cents per basil plant! I bought plants that were twice as big, for half the price, only three weeks ago! Aaaaargggh. I know that the farmers were hit just as hard by the frost as me, but I was still shocked. And I bought them anyway. Because a mature basil plant in August will cost me at least two dollars, which is far more than 66 cents. Besides, I like growing it myself.

July 2nd, 2008: Hot, hazy, and blossoms on the tomato plants

Armed with the world's most valuable basil starts, I replenished the garden. It is now looking extremely good. My squash is finally big enough to transplant, I'm harvesting and eating lettuce and broccoli nearly every day, and my tomato plants are in full bloom. My neat idea to alternate broccoli and lettuce to save space has proven quite effective; the broccoli makes a cool microclimate for the lettuce, which slows its growth and delays the lettuce from bolting, while the broccoli gets a moister soil and no loss of sunlight. I think I'll do that again next year for sure.

Red lettuce, broccoli, red lettuce, broccoli, repeat!

Last but not least, the strawberries have ripened up and we are harvesting more than a dozen every day. So delicious! Good thing I froze ten pounds of rhubarb chunks!

What a difference some rain makes!

It's amazing what a difference rain makes in the garden. Over the last 30 days our rainfall total is 0.88" above normal and you can see it in our plants - everything is thriving. The zucchini seeds we planted have sprouted and already put on their first true leaves; the cukes, peas, and beans are all finding their way up our trellises; and you can see the beginnings of blossoms on our bell peppers and tomatoes. For this gardener there's nothing more satisfying than a nice steady spring rain followed by a day of sun. Plants seem to respond with explosive growth so rapid it makes you think you can see the cells multiplying if you look hard enough.

Of course I'm not naive enough to think this good fortune is going to last as we head into June. Our soaker hoses are down and our rainbarrels are full and at the ready. I still need to buy a pump I saw at Harbor Freight Tools that hopefully will deliver water from our rain barrells to the soaker hoses with enough pressure to push water through the pores in the hoses. Even though the rain barrell in the picture below is about four feet off the ground, gravity alone isn't enough to push the water out of the soaker hoses. However, this set up does work great for watering our blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, asparagus, hops, and strawberries, all of which are down hill from the barrell.

The fruits and veggies aren't the only things benefitting from our spring rains. Our perrennials in this bed seem to really be enjoying themselves as well. Even our chickens are benefitting from the rain. Since the coop is right next to a rain barrell their waterer gets filled from the barrell, which is also convenient for the chicken keepers.

I guess about the only downside to our rainfall is that the weeds are doing very well too, but given the "exceptional" drought we went through last year I'll take the weeds with the rain.

Listen to your climate

Like I said last week, I am a transplant to Austin. I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, a fertile place with four distinct, but not too extreme seasons. When I started gardening here three years ago, I expected the same results here as in Virginia.

My mom and my daughter picking peas in Virginia.

I started with sugar snap peas. I planted earlier than I would have in Virginia, early-mid March. I asked my gardening neighbor and she said I'd planted way too late. I just couldn't believe it, I had helped with peas for years (in Virginia). This timing had to be just right.

Imagine that--my neighbor who had been selling produce from her organic garden for years at the Farmer's Market was right. I got a handful of peas, mostly small, pathetic looking things with half empty shells.

Next was green beans and lima beans. The harvest was dismal for the limas. The green beans probably would have been okay if I would have watered them every day. I didn't, so I picked squishy shelled green beans.

The next year was different. I gave up the traditional crops I longed for and opted for more of what is thriving in my garden now - tomatoes, squash, and peppers in the summer and broccoli, lettuce, and spinach in the winter. I've learned to listen to those who have been gardening in this extreme climate (at least summers are pretty extreme) instead of thinking that I knew what I was doing because I helped in a garden 1,500 miles Northeast of here.

I finally got my tomatoes in at a reasonable time this year, the end of February. I transplanted those, peppers and a basil plant. I am still hesitant about starting tomatoes from seed. This year, I did take a little risk. Yesterday my daughter and planted a bunch of Genovese Basil plants from seed. In places North, I may be worried about cutting the growing season too short by planting seeds now. Here, I am not worried. I transplanted a small basil plant last August and it produced until our first freeze in November or December last year.

I am counting on my former skill with seeds to hold true; I don't know what we'll do with 10 basil plants otherwise. Hostess gifts? We went to Home Depot and bought peat moss seed flats and organic potting soil. My daughter had a great time filling the flat with dirt, poking little holes for the seed, and then very carefully putting a couple of seeds in each hole. We covered them up and she proceeded to flood the poor little seeds.

My daughter carefully filling the flat with potting soil.

I am not sure if they will come up. I thought I'd try though. Transplants are good, but sometimes I need something I've started (and learned) myself instead of something started by someone else. I am aiming for one or two basil plants. It's a learning experience and my daughter thought it was great to help plant something a little differently than we usually do. After her nap today she asked if we could garden again. I need to find some more seeds to start!

Logging Weather Data

Amazon.com has this $75 LaCrosse Weather Station on sale for $25 today only. I'm tempted by it because it's almost what I want, but not quite - it seems odd that it won't tell you the barometric pressure (although I am guessing this is how it forecasts the weather "trend") and I'd really like a device that will log data that can be retrieved for use on your computer - ideally, automatically, although this is a lot to ask on the Mac platform, so I'd settle for a manual download if it would store at least a week's worth of data.

I doubt that establishing my own personal climate normals is really that useful. Another potentially useful feature, that of measuring the temperatures of different areas of your yard (to identify microclimates that warm up earlier in the spring or stay warm later in the fall) is also curtailed by the streamlined features: Although the station can accept data from up to three individual temperature sensors, it automatically combines these for an average reading. It calls this "more accurate," but gardeners know better. Here's a link to the manual (PDF).

Anyone out there work with temperature sensors and computers, or datalogging environmental data in general? Or has anyone found an off-the-shelf product that does at least some of these things? It's a long-term goal of ours to set up a simple system that will give us some around-the-yard data I can really use.

In later posts we'll be tackling a variety of DIY weather reading projects - maybe we can find someone who can help us add the tech side to the list!