Cold Climate Gardening

No thanks to me, but we have been enjoying some fabulous lettuce from the garden lately. Except for one week in early June, it hasn’t been especially hot. So it might be the weather, or it might be the varieties, but we’re eating salad every day.

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Having written about arcane gardening topics myself (colchicums, anyone?), I understand the challenge of writing to an audience that is unfamiliar with the jargon and techniques of one’s subject, an audience with no emotional investment in the topic at hand. Giant pumpkins are brobdingnagian in size. Their growth rate is astonishing. But neither fact could hold my attention for long, if I didn’t care about the people involved with these giant fruiting bodies. In Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever, Susan Warren succeeded in making me care about these growers of giant pumpkins.

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An unidentified bee species visits a corn poppyPerhaps, like me, you’ve noticed there haven’t been as many bees flying around this year. If you’re the sort of person who gets nervous around bees, this might even seem like a good thing to you. But perhaps, like me, you notice your apple trees have scarcely any apples on them, and you know that the flowers weren’t damaged by a late frost. This is not a good thing. Multiplied by millions of fruit and almond trees in orchards all over the country, it becomes a very bad thing. They’re calling it Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

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Barbara Damrosch rightly points out that not only is this a good time of year (for us Northerners, at least) to be thinking about what to plant in the vegetable garden next year, but it’s also a good time to think about that garden on a more FUNdamental level:

If your vegetable garden isn’t fun anymore, this is a good time to ask why it’s not . . . . A garden that becomes a burden is easy to avoid, so that by fall it’s a disaster you can’t face at all. Instead of promising yourself to do better next year, see if you can figure out just what makes that spring-planted Eden slide downhill. Use the tranquil dormant period

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In her latest Washington Post column Barbara Damrosch writes

It’s raining seed catalogues and the forecast is for the downpour to continue well into January.

She then starts in on her vegetable wishlist, what she would like to see the “elves” at the “North Pole Experiment Station” tinker with in her favorite vegetables to make them even better. I second the motion for a pepper that’s just a little bit hot. And I never would have dreamed of a root crop that you could store for the winter and then pot up to sprout broccoli on the windowsill, but it sounds like a plan. The new varieties on the front pages of the catalogues are all “improved,” but what should they …

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When growing food, the greatest obstacle a cold climate presents to the gardener is the short growing season. In a classic example of great minds thinking alike, here are two books that address that obstacle with similar approaches. All of the authors live in New England and were influenced by Scott and Helen Nearing and French intensive gardening methods. Both books have a two-pronged approach: use devices to moderate the climate and extend the season, and focus on growing vegetables that can live with cooler temperatures and low light requirements. Published in 1994, Solar Gardening: Growing Vegetables Year-Round the American Intensive Way by Leandre and Gretchen Vogel Poisson is the more technical of the two books, not too surprising given that Leandre is an industrial designer by training. (He designed the Grey Poupon mustard jar.)

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I mean, Johnny’s loves me. I happened to be looking at tomatoes online tonight (which is early for me!), and lo, I discovered Valley Girl! Despite anything anyone says to the contrary, I am going to believe this tomato was developed just for me. (I am a girl, and I am living in a Valley.) Assuming it works as advertised, it sets fruit under both extreme heat and extreme cold, matures early, and is crack tolerant. It’s also supposed to be productive and flavorful. And it’s not a tiny tomato. It’s only everything I’ve ever wanted in a tomato! (Hopefully, it will prove itself worthy of that title next year.)

And, in case anyone is wondering, I have …

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