🍅August brings with it summer abundance, and the old holidays of Lughnasa and Lammas celebrating the first fruits of the harvest season. In my house, that’s tomatoes, chiles, eggplant, basil, cukes, and a few zucchini, plus some new everbearing strawberries doing their thing.
August has also brought merciful relief from the choking hazardous smoke of relatively nearby wildfires, trading it for high smoke from far away. It gives the sunlight an amber glow, but stays out of our lungs. We’ve had our days of extreme heat this year, too, like far too many people the world over, amid the record-setting deluges and days on days of drought.
So this is the moment: how will we adapt our gardens to climate change, for future Augusts of too-many tomatoes and such?
My strategy so far has been to plant everything I can in self-watering containers, whether individual pots or 8′ long raised beds, and mulch everything with a ton of straw. This helps, but we ended up putting in drip irrigation to keep things going while we traveled during a hot July 4th, and we put up shade structures over the peppers and eggplants for the 90 F+ days. Tomatoes love heat, but they, like all of us, got too much of it in July. I’ve got a year now to figure out how to go bigger with a shade structure or windbreak or both for next summer, especially amid warnings about the emerging El Niño.
With cyclospora and oil shocks hitting the supermarket shelves, there’s never been a better time to learn how to grow some of your own food. Even if it’s just a few containers of lettuce (diarrhea-free!) or herbs, it’s empowering to know how to do it, and empowerment is the antidote to climate (or political or economic) doom. Growing even a little food also puts you in touch with the season and those long ago holidays of the first fruits. An essential part of summers past, and summers to come, no matter how fierce they are.
Got a tip for how you’re adapting your own garden to extreme weather? Let me know!
Related:
​Hey Cistern​, my notes about cisterns for garden use (not drinking water). We installed such a cistern at my house a few months ago, and it’s working like a charm.
​Climate Proof Garden​ – More about those self-watering raised beds. The title oversells it a bit, but it’s something to aspire to! #GardenGoals