Backyard Bounty

The Complete Guide to Year-Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest

Linda Gilkeson

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781771422307
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

“ Very likely the best book ever written on growing food in the Pacific Northwest, and it sets a whole new standard for garden writing.”— Mark MacDonald, West Coast Seeds
 
Grow more food, with less work, in any yard—now completely revised and expanded!  Are you itching to start your own garden or grow more in the one you have, but feel that gardening is too challenging or time-consuming for your busy schedule?  Now completely updated and expanded,   Backyard Bounty  will demystify gardening, bringing it back to the down-to-earth, environmentally practical activity that anyone can enjoy.  Author and master gardener Linda Gilkeson covers everything you’ll need to grow a successful garden, including:  

• Planning your garden and preparing the soil 
• Organic fertilizers and simplified composting 
• Planting for winter harvests and intensive planting schedules 
• Comprehensive information on pests, diseases, and working with an unstable climate 
• Greenhouses, tunnels and containers 
• Organic pest management. 

 
Packed with a wealth of information specific to the Pacific Northwest, this complete guide emphasizes low-maintenance methods, covers problems related to common pests and climate concerns, includes a monthly garden schedule for year-round planting and harvesting, and features plant profiles for everything from apples to zucchini.  Perfect for novice and experienced gardeners alike,   Backyard Bounty  shows how even the smallest garden can produce a surprising amount of food twelve months of the year.
 
“ Backyard Bounty  is remarkably thorough, from roots to pests to pruning to crowns, and it inspires even the experienced grower. Just like homemade soil for a bedding plant, this book is loaded with the richness we need in order to feed ourselves.”—Lyle Estill, author of  Backyard Biodiesel

This chapter covers basic information to help take the guesswork out of growing vegetables and fruit in the Pacific Northwest coastal climate. It starts with an overview of the climate and weather along the coast and how it is being affected by the changing climate. The final section reviews how plants grow, flower, and fruit.

Gardening in the Coastal Climate

What’s different about gardening on the Pacific Northwest (PNW) coast? The climate here is generally characterized by mild winters and warm summers. Only rarely has it been too hot in the summer to grow vegetables that do well in cool conditions (such as broccoli, lettuce, and peas), yet it is almost always warm enough to allow warm-season crops to be grown reasonably well in most gardens. This is actually a wonderful place to garden because so many vegetables can be harvested fresh out of the garden all winter. Because garden beds can produce food all year, you can grow a surprising amount in a small area—and you don’t have to spend the time that gardeners from less “fortunate” climates do preserving food for the winter. (When those gardeners move to the Pacific Northwest, it can take them a while to adjust to the idea that our planting season lasts for six months and our harvesting season lasts all year.) That isn’t to say there aren’t challenges, however. One is adapting to the increasingly variable weather and higher average temperatures resulting from the changing climate; another is learning how to deal with the new pests and diseases that continue to arrive in the region.

Microclimates on the Coast

Within this generally mild climate, the varied geography of the region—from mountains to seashore—holds many local microclimates. The complexities of West Coast geography mean that the USDA climate zone maps are not much use here. While roughly USDA Zone 8 for much of the lower elevation coast, there are large differences in local microclimates.

These microclimates differ in:

• total rainfall and the timing of rainfall

• amount of local fog, marine clouds, and direct sunshine each year

• average low winter temperatures, frequency of frosts and snowfall

• average warm temperatures in the summer

• amount of shading from trees, buildings, even mountain tops

Effects of Elevation

Elevation affects microclimates, but not always in obvious ways. The higher the elevation, the lower the minimum temperatures are in the winter. But higher elevations also get more snow. With an insulating blanket of snow providing cold protection, overwintering plants often have a better chance of surviving an Arctic outbreak at higher elevations than at sea level. With precipitation falling mostly as rain at lower elevations, the ground is often bare during cold snaps, so plants are less protected.

1.1 What’s for dinner in January? Carrots, kale, komatsuna, Brussels sprouts, parsley, and radicchio.

Higher-elevation gardens (up to 1,000 feet), if they are on open slopes, can sometimes have a longer frost-free growing season than valley gardens because cold air flows down the hillsides and pools in the valleys. On very still nights, even in the winter, the air may be even a few degrees warmer at higher elevations than down in the valley due to temperature inversions. This can be an advantage for higher-elevation tree fruit production because there is less chance that a late frost will kill the blossoms of peaches and other early flowering fruit.

The effect of all this is that two gardens only a short distance apart may have the same average annual temperature but quite different gardening climates. A garden close to the ocean or the Strait of Juan de Fuca will have a cooler summer with more fog than a garden a short distance inland, but the winters won’t be as cold. Gardeners may need a greenhouse to ripen tomatoes in an oceanside garden, but winter crops such as broccoli and salad greens will grow beautifully without one.

On top of variations from geography, weather patterns in the coastal region vary over cycles of a few years to a few decades, due to two cyclical atmospheric patterns affecting the Pacific Ocean:

• El Niño–La Niña events: Occurring on cycles of 2 to 7 years, with each phase lasting for 8 to 18 months, these result from complex oscillations of warmer and cooler water and high and low atmospheric pressure in the south Pacific Ocean. The effect differs depending where you are on the continent, but for the Pacific Northwest coast, the El Niño phase usually brings warmer and drier than average winters; the ensuing La Niña phase usually brings cooler and wetter weather.

• The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO): This is a variable 10- to 30-year pattern of alternating cool and warm cycles in Pacific Ocean water temperatures. It appears we are now in a warm cycle. The PDO is not well understood, and the pattern may or may not continue as the changing climate affects ocean currents. When an El Niño phase occurs while the ocean is in a warm cycle of the PDO, temperatures are even higher than usual, as occurred in the extreme El Niño of 2015–2016.

A feature of winters on the south coast of British Columbia and north coast of Washington State is the occasional Arctic outbreak. These blasts of frigid air break out of higher latitudes, bringing periods of much colder than average temperatures. There may only be one or two such outbreaks in a winter, and they usually only last for a few days at a time, but the abrupt drop in temperatures can be very damaging to plants.

Rainfall patterns also vary widely around the region. Gardens in the rainforest microclimates receive far more rain than gardens in the rain shadow of the Olympics or other coastal mountains only a few miles away. (A rain shadow is the dry zone on the opposite side of a mountain range from the prevailing direction of wind and rain; as storms pass, they dump rain on one side of the mountain, leaving little to fall on the other side.)

Know Your Garden

You can keep simple weather records for your own garden with a small investment in a manual minimum–maximum thermometer and a simple rain gauge (or a straight-sided tin can). Wireless digital weather stations are also available if you want to keep more detailed records (be sure to put the temperature sensor for this well away from your house to ensure an accurate reading for the garden). Your records will become more and more useful as the years go by because they will show you the range of temperatures and rainfall in your own garden. Keeping notes on sowing and harvest dates and other gardening observations will make the records even more valuable. Lee Valley Tools still sells a hardbound ten-year garden journal with spaces for notes on each date, and there are many apps for gardeners that make it easy to keep electronic records. See reviews in garden magazines and websites for the latest products.

Gardening in a Changing Climate

By now, most people are aware of the increasingly variable weather that is the result of a changing global climate. It isn’t your imagination that extreme weather in recent years is making gardening more difficult than it used to be. Information on how to adapt our gardens and methods to meet the challenge of a changing climate is a significant part of the new content I have added to this revised edition of Backyard Bounty.

The coastal regions of British Columbia have warmed by around 2°F (1.1°C) over the last century. Climate projections for the 2050s show that average temperatures will likely increase by 3° to 4°F (1.8° to 2°C), compared to 1961–1990 averages. As of 2017, the 15 warmest years ever recorded had occurred in the previous 16 years, with 2016 setting a new global record for the amount temperatures increased in one year. An important factor contributing to higher average temperatures is higher nighttime temperatures, which have been rising steadily.

Average temperatures don’t tell the whole story, however, because extreme minimum and maximum temperatures can average out to a normal temperature range. While extremes of heat are becoming more frequent, that doesn’t mean that periods of extreme cold are less likely (the prolonged cold of midwinter 2016–2017 was a harsh reminder). A particular concern is that warmer average spring temperatures cause fruit trees to bloom earlier, increasing the risk of damage to the crop from a late frost.

Periods of extreme temperatures are lasting longer because of the weakening polar jet stream, another effect of the warming global climate. With a weaker jet stream, weather systems that should move along across the continent from west to east stall for longer over one region. The result is prolonged periods of extreme heat or Arctic cold or record-breaking rainfall causing severe flooding. As the global atmosphere warms, it holds more energy and more water vapor, which also means an increased potential for stronger windstorms and heavier rainfall. As with temperature, however, the effect is variable. We are seeing shifts in when and where precipitation (mostly rain) occurs, leading to increased flooding in some places and longer droughts in others.

For the PNW coast in the long term, climate modeling shows that we can expect a continuing trend toward warmer average growing seasons, with less rainfall in the summer months. The models show the region can expect about the same amount of precipitation in the winter, but it is likely to fall over a shorter period, in more intense storms. More of it is expected to fall as rain rather than snow at higher elevations. Early drier springs and less snowpack in the mountains means a higher risk of summer water shortages for communities dependent on snowmelt to fill rivers and reservoirs.

While the record-breaking drought and heat of 2015 in the coastal PNW was unprecedented, meteorologists say that it was a preview of what may be an average summer by the middle of the century (and that’s only 30 years away). And if that is what an average summer by mid-century might look like, then the variability in weather patterns means some years are likely to be even hotter or drier (or colder or wetter...) than anything we have so far experienced.

Adding to the stress on water resources from a changing climate is the fact that the growing population in the region is also increasing demand for water. Limiting water for gardens is usually one of the first restrictions imposed by water districts when supplies are low. Where once gardeners could irrigate as much as they liked to keep plants growing, water conservation is now an important—even critical—issue for many.

Plants are able to handle variable weather, but the more we know about how plants are affected by weird weather, the better prepared we will be to protect plants from extremes and to design gardens to adapt to these changes.

The Basics of Plant Growth

You might be tempted to skip this bit, but I urge you to read on because so many crop problems that perplex gardeners have to do with growing conditions (weather, nutrients, irrigation) that affect plant growth, flowering, and fruiting. When plants do weird things—such as bursting into flower when they shouldn’t—we need to understand why, so we can avoid it in future.

Photosynthesis in plants is a truly amazing process. It allows plants to take energy from sunshine, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and water from the soil and make it into sugars. Plants use these sugars as building blocks to make fats, starches, proteins, plant hormones, and other compounds. Through a process called respiration, plant cells burn sugars to get the energy needed for growth and metabolism. If they are making more food than they can use, plants store the surplus sugars and starch in storage organs, such as roots, for later use. Some necessary elements, such as nitrogen, sulfur, calcium, and micronutrients, come from the soil, but surprisingly, most of the weight of the solid material that makes up a plant is actually built out of carbon from the atmosphere, rather than elements from the soil.

Water and nutrients move through a vascular system that reaches to all parts of the plant. Water moving upward from the roots and evaporating from the leaves travels in the xylem vessels. Another set of vessels, called the phloem, carries sap with nutrients and metabolic compounds to other parts. This process, called translocation, moves food internally from a source, such as a photosynthesizing leaf, to a part of the plant that needs it for growth. Surplus food can also be translocated to storage organs, such as roots or fruit. There is one more very interesting place that plants send their sugars and starches: they leak a significant amount of what they make into the soil around their roots. This sounds outlandish, but plants actually benefit a lot by providing food for beneficial soil bacteria and fungi around their roots (more on this interesting relationship in Chapter 3).

Sunlight Is Essential

To make a very complicated story simple: exposure to sunlight is vital. Vegetables and fruits need bright sunlight for as long as possible to produce the building blocks that make leaves, seeds, roots, and fruit. Leafy greens can grow adequately—though slowly—with half a day of direct sun each day, but most plants do much better with eight hours of direct sun in the summer. Gardens in open areas with even longer sun exposure will grow even faster, as they simply have more hours of light to photosynthesize.

The efficiency of photosynthesis ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Our Gardening Climate and How Plants Grow
• 2. Planning a Productive Garden
• 3. Preparing the Soil
• 4. Basic Methods for Growing Vegetables
• 5. Starting Seedlings and Saving Seeds
• 6. Basic Methods for Growing Fruit
• 7. Food Crops in Greenhouses and Containers
• 8. Year-Round Gardening Calendar
• 9. Managing Pests and Problems
• 10. A to Z Vegetables
• 11. A to Z Fruit
• Resources
• Index
• About the Author
• About New Society Publishers