The quiet season is coming to an end.
During the winter there was a little bird gush to lift my heart. There are no occasional caw caw, chickadee dee of chickadee, big songs of little carolina rens that stay on our Pennsylvania farms throughout the winter, but no great horned owl courtship calls, nor wooden thrush or Baltimore orioles. Still, I was delighted with the music that was left behind.
However, we just heard the first notes of our first returning songbird, and with a red-winged blackbird, the snowdrop began to protrude from the ground.
The other day I forced their flowers to move last fall potted tulips and hyacinths from the unheated side of the barn into the warmth of the garden room. However, the vegetable garden is a puddle of icy mud, and the flowerbeds are still finely covered with leaves, showing little signs of life. The boxwood is covered in burlap and the snow fence is covered around trees and shrubs to prevent deer from being devoured.
The deer, which has changed from the color of milk chocolate to dark, breaks through the makeshift deterrent, eating Ee, Eunee Mauss, Treehouse, and this winter, Holly. The squirrels are running around joining their radar, but the chipmunks are still nowhere to be seen. I think they are in their dens that I think opossums, raccoons and bears are.
I've been waiting for a greenhouse, but now I'm hoping to hibernate in the winter and take a break from sowing, potting and growing. To walk through snowy forests and observe animal tracks, study ice patterns in the pond and make it seasonal. I would like to read in the Fire and Skilled Garden Catalog. Imagine what the garden will look like next year, and hope that next year will be better than last time, as all gardeners do. As Vita Sackville-West wrote in her poem, “The Garden:”
The gardener dreams of his own special alloy
Possibility and impossible.
But what is possible now? Looking back at last year's terrible season, how do you adapt to the changes I witness?
A year ago, the winter was very warm, the shrub barely died, and last spring, a welcome sight dripping with leaves, but not normal. Spring was so hot that I missed out on a nice, cool window for the transplant. Early season, I didn't know when to plant ruthless vegetables, and when to produce soft plants, not 85 degrees.
“After the danger of frost” is a general wisdom, but when is that? My plant's hardiness zone has recently shifted. Because the coldest temperatures in my area are three degrees higher than in 2012. But even that new guidance didn't help me.
Mid May felt like mid-June. It was then arriving on May 29th.
Anyway, I planted poppies in April (they like cool weather), but the seeds were washed away by the flood. There was a drought between June and November. The grass was brown. Dogwood and Tulip Poplar lost their leaves in July. My vegetable garden resembles a cracked riverbed. The soil was very hard and weeding was almost impossible.
The stream was dry so I saw deer walking into the pond and drinking for the first time in 36 years. Small food was available for them, so they distorted to our garage and ate deer-bearing lavender. Walking through the forest, I was impressed by the lack of growth underneath, especially the huge patch of nettle nettle from North American origin, the host plant for Admiral Akagi and the butterfly in Eastern Comma. Chanteles never bear fruit in normal places. I was worried that our spring would dry out.
Pennsylvania saw record wildfires in the fall. Usually, the two lilacs that appear in the spring bloom in October, and in late November I was harvesting something that I had not yet grown.
All of this reminds me of a radio show called “Piano Puzzlers.” My husband and I listen to it on Saturday mornings. Composer Bruce Adolf rewrites songs that are familiar to the classic composer's style. He changes the tempo, harmony, or mode of the tune, and the contestants try to name the song and the composer. Imagine “a bit of a jude” in Brahms style. Somewhere in my brain, the song sounds familiar, but something is off. The music is misplaced. Sometimes I guess correctly. In many cases, it is not.
Climate change gardening is the same. Confusing and there are many speculations.
What should a home gardener do?
“The only predictable thing is that it becomes unpredictable,” said Sonja Skelly, director of education at Cornell Botanical Gardens in Ithaca, New York, “it was crazy too.”
Last spring was hot in Ithaca, so vegetable gardeners began planting two weeks before the frost-free date on May 31st. Extreme temperature fluctuations were then created, but the plants that just started were better as they were established. Things planted on the target day were stunted and were in poor growth period. “A good lesson,” Dr. Skelly said. The line covering that allows gardeners to get and grow plants later in the season “is really important in a climate like ours,” she said.
Covered crops such as millet, sorghum and black-eyed peas have been successful in botanical gardens. They improve moisture retention, reduce weeds, reduce erosion, and limit negative microorganisms in the soil. The birds love them, Dr. Skelly said.
She recommended planting together what the Haudeno Sauny people call three sisters, corn, beans and squash. The system produces better yields per hectare than any monoculture crop system, she said.
Drip irrigation is another solution, Dr. Skelly said. “It adds moisture where it is needed at the roots,” she said. The water is slowly released and remains laid down, and does not escape as with manual watering or using sprinklers.
“Observe, take notes, ask questions, ask for answers,” advised Dr. Skelly. “What are your neighbors watching?” I've been working on this issue for a while, learning through going to local botanical gardens, public gardens and nature centres. “Try to keep the information cycle running and talk to friends, family and neighbors as a way to help you understand it. That's very important,” she said.
Dr. Skelly believes it is important for home gardeners to truly understand their plants. “Climate change may be a way to get to know our gardens much better,” she said. “We have to do it.”
For a long time I relied on experts who taught me how to garden responsibly. Do not harm the environment. I have learned to plant a variety of plants, including pollinator natives, and celebrate native weeds like Freeben. I'm practicing planting companions. I don't spray pesticides or pesticides, and instead use compost, I make my own from comfrey and stinging nettles instead. I wish I could buy plants from something other than plastic.
But the more we contemplate gardening in an age of climate change, the more we believe our home gardeners must find many solutions for themselves. Much of gardening is trial and error, and unstable weather patterns mean that we must experiment more to do our own research. Essentially, we must become citizen scientists in our own vegetable patches and flowerbeds.
Cornell Botanic Garden has a garden for climate demonstrations, but in fact we all do. None of us had experienced this. And in the end, we're all together. You will navigate a strange new world of digging the soil and growing things.
The collection of Daryln Brewer Hoffstot's essay, “A Farm Life: Observations from Fields and Forests,” was published by Stackpole Books.
