in other words
february19
9
God is My Co-Pruner (Garden Time in Vernonia): Crappy Climate
2015
By Tom Coughlin
The Longest Night is behind us.
For now. The thrushes have pecked all
the medlar’s golden orbs back to bare
branches. A lot of Honesty is hanging
in tatters, and the Chinese lanterns have
rotted down to their skeinskin cages, a
bright orange marble enclosed in each.
Lichen glows on the branches, but over-
all, the yard’s looking a little dismal. It’s
all increasing photons from here to June,
though. So we can hope. Let’s hear it for
the Returning Sun, for Invictus Sol.
Like a lot of fresh-faced, first
time gardeners, early on we tried grow-
ing the charismatic megaflora we all
dream of eating from our own patch out
back---tomatoes, corn and cantaloupes,
for instance. Took a long time to admit
defeat in large part because it was years
before I calmly sat down and timed the
number of hours that shone on the beds
we hoped to grow in. Not a cheerful tally.
Even worse was I realized the sun sank
in the sky as the Summer progressed.
That’s a somewhat shameful
thing to admit for someone purportedly
interested in green-thumbery. After all,
isn’t that what it means for the Year to
turn Fall? Astrophysics is one thing in
the mind, but it’s another to see a shad-
ow creeping its way weekly up a bed of
something you’ve already been coddling
for months. You’re counting on those
warm rays to ripen your efforts, but in-
stead the sun slips slowly below the tree
line, leaving your once leafy lovelies
to limp along chlorotically until you’re
lucky to get even a stunted version of
the picture in the seed catalog before it
sprouts shiny black hairs and turns to
mush.
Of all the obstacles we’d face
and I was too stupid to discern the im-
portance of, shade was probably the most
basic and the least surmountable. Even
so, we’ve managed a modest pleasure
garden, not nearly enough to line our
larder with, but enough to give us many
meals and many evenings of snacking
out in the yard. In part we’ve done this
by lowering our expectations and in part
by raising our soil’s fertility.
To the naturally Green-
Thumbed, this will seem painfully ob-
vious, but you need to fertilize. I once
believed basic soil was good enough,
that the less you messed with Nature,
the better plants would flourish. I’m not
sure what I was thinking, because, as it
turns out, Nature messes with our soil by
pouring forty-four inches of rain a year
through it, in the process leaching away
a lot of what would make our soils nutri-
ent dense. It’s difficult to make compost
strong enough to compensate for that
rainfall and low light and so we need to
add fertilizer to our soil when we pre-
pare our beds and when we side-dress
our plants throughout the growing sea-
son. At least we do here if we want much
to happen.
The other thing has been to pick
plants that can handle the low light, high
rain profile. It helps to imagine what
could grow in an even crappier climate
than our own. We’ve certainly given up
on corn and cantaloupes and have turned
instead to the types of plants one might
find in an Irish cottage garden.
A particularly light-starved Irish
cottage garden.
So much depends on the size
and siting of your yard. Long time read-
ers of this column will recall I grew up
in the Mediterranean climate of southern
California. After moving to Hillsboro
decades ago, my dad pretty quickly gave
up on gardening because the Willamette
Valley was too cold to grow the kinds of
plants he was used to. He took up other
rainproof hobbies, like ham radio. I hate
to think what he would’ve done if we
had moved to Vernonia, instead. Prob-
ably scrape the place clean and put in a
go-cart track.
Last summer, wonderful as it
was, there was more than one morning I
talked to a friend in Dundee who, were it
not for Weather Underground, probably
wouldn’t have believed how much chill-
ier a day can start out here. “How can it
be thirty degrees colder there?” (Italics
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his). I don’t really understand the factors
that make that possible, but I’ve come to
accept the result. My dad thought he had
it bad living down there in the Banana
Belt and, compared to SoCal, he did.
Compared to Vernonia, though, he had
it easy. Being as wise as I’ve become, I
encourage myself sometimes by imagin-
ing some schlub in Siberia tending his
tundra bed, dreaming of a steaming mug
of lichen soup. A mind game blessing.
Though I’ve pretty much sworn
them off, I bought two tomato plants last
year, mostly to support our local garden-
ing group. Japanese Black Trifele is a
really attractive, mid-sized tomato we’d
grown with some success before. I fig-
ured it’d at least be pretty. Isis Candy
is a variety I’d been interested in for
some time, but hadn’t been able to lay
my hands on. Although there’s probably
no cultivar the NSA more closely has its
eye on, the catalog copy hooked me---a
rich, sweet, fruity cherry tomato with a
cat’s eye starburst on the blossom end.
Again, at least it’d be pretty. Turns out
we got plenty of tasty fruit, though they
were grown in our sunniest spots dur-
ing an unusually sunny summer, in soil
liberally amended with Down To Earth’s
wonderful Bio-Fish 7-7-2 fertilizer. But
that’s what it takes.
The effort was so successful, in
fact, that The Institute of the Exploding
Mole is currently developing a line of
Organic Vernonian Shade Grown To-
matoes. Look for them at a market stand
near you this fall.
