Extreme Gardening

by Barbara O'Neal

It’s garden season, and for the first time in six years, I have a real garden of my own.  It’s quite a project.  My beloved, probably weary of hearing me bitch about the idiocy of using scarce water to (barely) keep a backyard full of blue grass alive in a climate where it was never meant to grow, gave me a Christmas gift of a garden plan and the people to put it into operation.   

We started with a very bland rectangle. The most boring suburban backyard (complete with winter-killed grass) you can imagine.  

 

Over the past month, we've come to a series of raised beds.

Which I'm in the process of planting.

Now, a garden project in most places sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea.  Grow some roses, and some corn, a little lettuce and some dahlias. 

In the Rockies, even on the Front Range where I live, gardening is not a sport for the faint of heart.  We live at 7000 feet above sea level.  The air is thin, which means less oxygen (babies born here actually develop larger lungs than other people).  It also means the sun is scorching.  

The weather is also…er…challenging.  It’s almost June and we had a hard freeze last week.  This morning, at eleven am, it’s 46 degrees.  My neighbor, looking over my fence at the newly created raised beds in the backyard said, “You’re putting in a garden? What about all the hail?”

It will hail.  It has already hailed three times on my baby little plants.  I will build hail-protectors out of PVC pipe and window screens to haul out as necessary, because I have lost entire gardens to bad storms more than once. 

But what is a gardener to do?  Give it up because it’s hard? 

I am a gardener, thus I garden.

In England, gardening is a national sport, and for good reason.  I am astonished anew every time we go back to visit CR’s mother.  She has foxgloves large enough

 to sail the seas in.  Roses climbing to heaven, grass thick and starred with buttercups. Everything grows with hedonistic abandon, and naturally, everyone gardens.  CR’s mother is quite a talent, which doesn’t sit well with her neighbor.  That neighbor, (Barbara, too, as it turns out), takes me aside secretly to show off her wisterias and exotics, all called properly by their Latin names.  These two older English ladies are thrilled that I share their passion, and send me home with gloves and potato bags and all manner of beautiful gardening treasures. 

It would be lovely to garden in England.  Or California (oh, for an orange tree! For avocados!).  Or the south where wisteria drips from every surface.

Here I am, however, in the high desert where it will not rain enough and then fling hailstones.  Where the sun will scorch baby plants and give me wrinkles, but eventually coaxes out roses and corn, squash and sage.  Since mailing my book last Monday, the only thing I’ve cared to do is plant and dig and arrange and make notes on my plantings.  (Imagining myself to be Vita Sackville-West, composing my own tiny Sissinghurst.)  My neighbors will pity me, they with all their grass, but in August when the corn is over my head, when I’m bringing them tomatoes hot off the vine, filled with the flavor of sunny days and cool nights, they’ll envy me. When I’m plucking peaches from my tree, and collecting new potatoes in jackets the color of garnets,

they’ll know why I stick with it.  In the spring, my lilacs will explode, and the tulips will dance.  Next year, it will be even better, and the year after that….and the year after that.   

I am a gardener, so I garden.

What is gardening like where you are? Love it? Hate it?

 

Comments

[Doc In CA]

I garden in Sacramento, California. Our biggest garden problem here is plants frying when we have several 100+ degree days.

However, thanks to Global Climate Change, last year we barely even had a summer and this year looks like a repeat.

[Reine]

Hi Barbara,

We have a lot of invasive desert broom here, very difficult to keep from killing off everything in the garden. It is also choking out the native vegitation.

It is pretty hot here in the Sonoran Desert, but we do have orange trees in the back. They do very well here. A neighbor has wonderful lemon and grapefruit trees.

We put desert scape out front and are trying to move slowly to zero scape to conserve water. I refuse to give up my orange trees, though. The fragrance in spring is amazing, and there is nothing quite like a sweet orange straight from the tree. That has become a Christmas ritual for us.

Best wishes on your garden. I do like your plan. Very, very nice.

[Harley]

Barbara, I am so sorry to tell you that I live in Southern California where the oranges and lemons and grapefruit and kumquats in my backyard are so plentiful that the kids throw them at each other for sport and then have to fish them out of the pool ... And plums and roses going crazy, and bougainvillea . . . and I don't deserve any of it, I water them when I remember to water them, and that's about it. Last year my ignorance and neglect killed an avocado tree.

Mea Culpa.

[Margaret Maron]

Love gardening until the thermometer tops 90. That's why we, too, have raised beds and grow heat-tolerant flowers like zinnias and petunias. Too hot for lilacs to do well, but I have 3 or 4 that are over a hundred years old. They limp along and put out a few blooms every spring. Ah, but you should see our gardenia bushes!

[Ramona]

Right now, in Delaware, I'm clipping bunches of peonies and roses to bring indoors. My house smells divine.

And those wonderful purple alliums in your photo from England? Once the blooms drop off, the seed heads make for an interesting arrangement, like an alien life form floral display.

I do a couple of container pots for herbs. That's about it. When I lived in Indiana, Pa, we had a vegetable garden that was fabulous. Best sweet corn I have ever eaten in my life, and I ad-libbed a story every night at bedtime about Petunia the pumkpin. I think I even made up a song.

[Karen in Ohio]

Is there anything more wonderful than to look out your window and see green, growing things? No matter where you live, something can grow; it's just a matter of picking flowers/vegetables/varieties that tolerate your climate.

Barbara, your garden plan looks pretty ambitious! What a good idea, to make hail covers. I wish you great success.

Here in southwestern Ohio, it's almost as much a matter of keeping things from growing, it's so fertile and lush. And with the extra 14" of rain we've had so far this year, I feel very fortunate to have raised beds for my veggies, otherwise they'd be rotting by now. I spend more time weeding than anything else during the growing season.

Here's a tip for conserving water: mulch. My strawberries at the farm (which get bird-pecked; I really need row covers for them) are mulched with shredded tax returns. The paper turns into almost a papier mache when it gets wet, and keeps the moisture in the ground while still being permeable to any rain or watering you do. And it keeps the veggies, etc. out of the dirt.

[peach]

Given the vagaries of Western Pennsylvania weather, we never know what kind of gardening weather we'll be given. This year we haven't seen frost since late April. The average last frost date is mid-May, but like the mid west we've had water pouring from the skies since early March with very few dry periods. We've had to shoehorn our planting into those dry days.

This is in contrast to the past three springs where we've had unusually warm Aprils then unusually cold Mays. Although the NOAA charts say our average last frost date is May 29, in my 50 plus years of experience mid May is our last frost and never a freeze like we had the last two years in mid May. We lost our pear crop last year due to the May freezes. We had lots of little pearlings(made up word), but the sub freezing nights made them all drop from the trees.

Normally we're able to plant cool season crops during the last week and a half of March and then potatoes in late April early May. We usually plant around a dozen early tomatoes, in late April early May, under 5 ft. tall cages made of wire re bar wrapped in heavy mill plastic which is tucked in at the top to create a mini green house. Gallon jugs of water are placed inside the cage next to the plant and they help keep the micro climate inside the cage warm through the night. The plastic doesn't come off until late May. On warm days we open the tops so the plants don't fry.

Peppers and eggplants get planted in soil covered by black plastic since they like hot soil, the same with cukes and melons. They are normally put in the ground in mid May. The same goes for all our seed crops of beets, beans, corn, carrots, etc. Mid June we plant seeds for our fall crops of cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower. We try to plant so that every crop doesn't come at the same time, but all that careful timing has gone by the board this spring.

We still have yet to get our main crop of corn in the ground and we have no beans planted at all plus a few other things. The weather forecast is calling for very hot and dry beginning on Sunday so I imagine once the soil drys out enough our Memorial Day weekend will be spent in the garden.

We have been eating salad every day from the garden for the past month and now the spinach has gotten so prolific I need to start cooking with it instead of just scattering its leaves in salads. The asparagus season is winding down. We're leaving most of it go to fern while occasionally picking enough for a meal. We're hoping to save our strawberry crop from the slugs by sprinkling borax around the bed. They are so bad this year they actually started eating our radishes. Usually only wire worm attacks them.

As you might have guessed we garden on a large scale. With large yards we're able to plant a traditional garden with long rows of vegetables. Most of our crops we plant with the express intent of canning, freezing or storing for winter use. Beginning in late April we eat at least one thing fresh from the garden every day. By early July every part of the meal, with the exception of the protein, comes fresh from our garden. With fall cool season crops we extend the season into November.

[Hank Phillippi Ryan]

Boston! Where it rained for the entire month of May. EVERY DAY. I was so worried it would turn our garden into the hotel for slugs.

But so far...it's gorgeous. In about three days, the peonies will open!

Last night after work I came home and picked two huge bouquets..I deeply love being able to cut flowers from my own garden.

Good luck with yours!

[Nancy Pickard]

Do I love it or hate it?
Yes.
Mostly love it, but our "soil," turns to clay if you so much as turn your back on it. I have a couple of little plots that I work and work every year, and the next year you'd think I had gone to a ceramics factory and bought all their clay and shoveled it into my ground, like mulch. That's the main reason--that, and August--that I don't do bigger gardens.
Your love of gardening just shines from this post, Barbara. So nice.

[Karen in Ohio]

If you have slugs, sprinkle either wood ash from a fireplace or charcoal ash from a grill around your plants. The slugs cannot get near that stuff without grievous bodily harm. Which they so deserve.

[Katherine]

My husband has the interest and talent for gardening, not me. We have tulips in pots on the deck. However, deer ate some of the blooms! Deer usually aren't much of a problem, though. We live in the Pacific NW near the Skagit Valley which produces bulbs to ship all over the world. This year, the fields were late, but beatuful as usual.

[Sheila Connolly]

I would love to do more gardening, but I have so little sun! To increase sun I would have to take down a large and venerable sugar maple (which I actually tapped last year!), and then the house would be hotter and we don't have air conditioning because you can't retrofit a Victorian...excuses, excuses.

My sole achievement on my quarter-acre lot has been to create a mini-orchard in the little sun I do have, right in the front yard. And now I have tiny apples growing, for the first time!

Anybody have suggestions for things that grow without sun?

[Kathy Reschini Sweeney]

I grew up tending to a big yard and lots of plantings. To this day, the thought of dead-heading petunias gives me a headache.

Tom has the green thumb in this house. Left to my own devices, the yard would be a meadow!

[Elaine Viets]

Barbara, I live in a condo, so I'm an indoor gardener mostly. I have a huge ficus tree in the living room and some philodendrons. (do they count? They're nearly impossible to kill, and a bushy dark leaved thingy in the living room. On the balcony I have some basil, which seems to love the wind, salt air and sun.
I'm going to buy a pot of wheat grass for my cat, hopefully this weekend.

[Barbara O'Neal]

Peach, I could lean a lot from you. My corn just this very morning finally poked its head out of the earth... I was so excited! Now I know the ground is warm enough to plant the next round.

Pretty sure all plants count, Elaine. Fresh basil on the balcony definitely counts. Mmmm.

Slugs. Ew. That's something I don't have to contend with. Or snakes, either.

Sheila, no way I'd cut down a sugar maple that you can actually tap! Cool. I also love the mini orchard. Plants that grow in shade: hostas of all kinds, begonias (some of my favorite flowers and beautiful leaves), and impatiens.

[Alan P.]

This is St. Louis, It was 55 this morning and the high on Monday should be 90. The Missouri Botanical Garden will tell anyone who will listen not to plant until Mother's Day because of late frosts. There is 100 degree heat coming.

With that, spice garden, now that it is rabbit and bird proofed, is doing fine. The bamboo, got whacked by the lawncare people. It may still survive. The landlords bare spot is loving our rainy May and my $10 of grass seed.

[Laura (in PA)]

We used to do a vegetable garden. My husband would get all gung ho and buy too many plants, plant them carefully, then, what with both of us working full time and the tendency of Philly-area summers getting lots of hot, humid days, he would lose interest and the weeds would take over. Four years ago, we found a local, organic CSA Farm, and now we just write a check in the late winter, and go once a week to pick up lovely veggies (and some fruits) from mid-May to Thanksgiving. Best decision we ever made.

I've always wanted an "English Garden".

[Doc In CA]

The cool wet weather out here has caused the snails & slugs to get all uppity. I just found out that they ate a cantalope sedling and 4 bush bean seedlinds. Tomorrow, I'll put out the Sluggo and then laugh the Laugh of Triumph as they eat it and die! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[Nancy Martin]

This year, I have a lupine that's bigger than an easy chair! It has 20 blooms on it at the moment--totally spectacular.

But, for some reason, by peonies are puny this year. You can never predict. Which is another wonder about gardening.

[Barbara O'Neal]

Harley, I am sobbing. I sometimes teach at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and there are always trees dropping fruit, sending this rich, citrusy smell into the air.

Hahaha...uppity slugs.

[Deb]

Elaine, ANY kind of gardening counts! I live in a condo, too, and I have done lots of deck gardening in the past. For a couple of summers, I planted basil in the same pot with tomatoes, and both did very well. There were some summers when I had so many tomatoes that I was giving them away. I've also had great luck with impatiens and violas.

Due to some physical limitations I have now, I haven't done much in the past few years. However, all of the recent posts about gardening have encouraged me to start up again, but to be more realistic about what I can do.

So, thanks to all of you gardeners for the inspiration!

[Alison Kent]

We're already eating jalapenos and hot banana peppers, along with basil, oregano and thyme. We've also had three early tomatoes, and have about fifty that are fat and green. By the time you're eating yours, our plants will be dead and gone. Such is gardening in Southeast Texas!

[Barbara O'Neal]

Alison, does it get too hot in the summertime to continue gardening? I never thought of that.

[Alison Kent]

It does, yes. We usually are done with our tomatoes by July 4th. They won't flower once the nightly low is 80 degrees or so. I actually kept one vine alive all year last year, but then it wouldn't produce once it cooled again. Had to give it a try anyway!

[Hydroponic Growing]

Raised bed garden is every gardener's dream and you can implement it by using a raised bed garden, you can put the proper mixture of dirt,compost, and manure to ensure success in your first year.Plus you should mulch your garden to keep weeds to a minimum as well as retain moisture and heat.

Deck gardening sounds really great idea.Share your views.

[Suzanne]

Hi Barbara,
I am thrilled for you with your new garden. I am a fairly new (this is my second year) raised bed vegetable gardener NW of Longmont-cooler, windy. We have just begun to get hot having rec'd. 4+ inches of rain in May. I found old gardening books by Louise Riotte on companion planting fun and helpful. Carrots Love Tomatoes, (she has published a few), very helpful. Love the pictures on the gardens progress! Any tips on growing Dahlias? Best of luck,Suzanne