Here's a photo from our garden, shot earlier today! Merry Christmas to you as well! 😁
But let's start with a short trip back in history! My late grandparents were avid gardeners and for more than 30 years after their retirement they worked a small family garden of about 900 sqm. That garden supplied fresh fruit and vegetables + all the canned goodies (measured in hundreds of jars) for three families. I'll write a separate post about them some day...
Grandpa had a master plan for the garden in calendar format. When should something be done - be it seed starting indoor, direct sowing in the garden, work on fruit trees and vines, transplanting, etc, etc. It was like the farmers' almanac in the USA I leaned about in later years.
What's interesting is that plan contained only concrete dates. It was not a relative to something, like two weeks after last frost. It was "April 15, courgette seeds in the ground under cover".
Take a moment and think about that. Thirty years of working with the same dates.
For 30 years that plan failed on just a couple of occasions and it was not catastrophically, meaning they lost some stuff but there was plenty of other stuff instead. And one of those occasions was a freak storm when I was like 8 years old when we had a half-day snow event on 24th of May and people still talk about that...
My grandparents stopped gardening for health reasons in the 90ies. And maybe that was a good thing... because since those years the weather patterns have become really, really weird.
If grandpa was alive and gardening according to his plan today, we would have 9 out of 10 years almost complete crop failure. I'm not ready to start some flame war on the topic of global warming, however climate have most definitely changed towards weirdness.
Some of the weird directions in the period 2010-2020, listed in no particular order:
- Spring here is a wet season, and usually quite cool to cold. In that period we had 7 drought-level dry springs and 3 massive flooding springs. Not even 1 normal.
- Usual temperatures for February are around 0-5C in daytime and sub-zero nighttime. In the last 9 out of 10 years we've had 15C+ in February for long stretches of time and 20C+ in March with 0 rains for almost all month.
- 6 out of 10 years we've had 3 full months of summer without a drop of rain. Unheard of.
- 4 out of 10 years we've had really cold June and so much rain, it felt like spring.
- Some years we've had tshirt weather in December and only 1 white Christmas, which was the norm before.
- Some years we've had light snow and heavy frost in September and then 30C October.
So in the context of gardening what does all that mean?
Well, for example, our new fruit trees have been flowering for 4 years now and we still haven't been able to try most of the fruit. That definitely sucks. Very warm Feb/Mar starts the development of the trees prematurely and then a cold snap in late April just kills all the blossoms.
We've lost fruit bushes due to their early development and the getting -15C and dying.
We've had so many vegetables planted out getting killed by a freak event. Like that April when it was so hot, we had to WATER THE PEAS (ultimate dishonor!!!) and then on 7th of May we had a frost for just 1 single night of -3C and then it was back to summer temps.
My grandpa would be toast. It's all like a moving target now. We're constantly shifting the planting dates and it's anyone's guess what will fail any given year. The general advice/rule is just wait a bit longer before planting stuff out... however in a cold climate you actually have very short window of doing things or you're looking at no yield.
Another advice is "get a hoophouse", however that's also questionable, as unusually hot summers started destroying crops around here, unless it's a industrial installation with air conditioning, hence inherently defeating the purpose.
So we arrive at 2021. This year the hot spell in early February lasted just a few days and then we had snow for a couple of weeks. Then in March we had another hot spell but now, at the first day of spring, we got a fresh dumping of 25 cm snow. None of the fruit trees have broken dormancy yet so there's a thin sliver of hope that we might finally get to try our apples and pears and apricots and plums and everything!
Sure, that postpones our plans for seed starting, but that's a good thing. There's a time for everything and rushing usually does not help. I'd rather do stuff in the garden when it's the proper time, not when weird weather lures us into thinking it's time.
I'll leave you with that thought that's been bugging me for years. If it really was straight up global warming, just everywhere getting warmer and that's all, that would have been a good thing. That would have meant our last frost date moving from 1th of May into April. But instead the climate change just makes weather patterns erratic and unpredictable.
So we're hedging the bets so to say by planting the widest variety of stuff we can. If I can paraphrase my mate @nateonsteemit words, we're trying to throw as diverse shit as possible to as many wall as we could and hope it sticks :D
