Welcome to year four of my climate victory garden! This post is about the impacts of climate change on gardening, and my successes and failures as I learn to garden in a changing world.
Year 3 went pretty okay. It did get blazing hot super fast and none of my tomatoes seemed to want to pollinate. Though I did have luck growing tomatoes in the Fall — a nice adaptation to this hot climate here. Had plenty of other successes and failures, and learned a lot.
Still working on finding plant species that are better suited to the hot and humid climate in Houston. Certain varieties of plants do better with heat and humidity than others, so this is important to figure out to be a successful gardener as the climate changes.
I am pretty far along this year as of the writing of this post, as I imagine some of you out there may also be if you garden. We had an unusually prolonged Spring here in Houston. It was nice out for quite a few months — in other words, not blazing hot, though the thermometer finally leapt upwards.
Climate Change and Gardening
Here is a recap of last year’s discussion about climate change and gardening. This info is more relevant every year! I added a new section about the environmental impacts of local vegetable gardening.
As the climate shifts around the world, what we can and can’t grow, and how soon or late we plant it, is also shifting. Historical data shows that the planting zones in the US have been shifting northward by about 13 miles per decade.
In practice, this means that gardeners will have to change when they plant, and also shift to growing more heat tolerant varieties of flowers and vegetables, yet also be prepared for erratic weather, such as drought or too much rain, and late cold snaps/freezing weather in the early spring and persistent heat waves.
In steamy Houston, Texas we will shift from Zone 9 to a Zone 10 (like south Florida) and would probably do well to plant more Asian varieties of garden plants that are tolerant of the heat and humidity. For example, planting Malabar spinach instead of traditional spinach (After growing it I find that Malabar spinach is disgusting! So don’t grow that. LOL! All part of the process. 😉 ).
Another benefit of heat tolerant plants is that they are often more resistant to pest and disease pressure, which is sure to increase as the world warms around you and your garden.
As cooler zones heat up you should be able to plant things a few weeks earlier than you normally would, like planting tomatoes in late March instead of April or May if you lived in the Midwest. Or maybe plant some crops that you never could before.
Not only are growing zones moving, but we also have to contend with more extreme weather and drought. For example, there was an epic cold snap in Texas year before last that delayed Spring planting, and last year we had weeks of endless rain, which made for a slow start to the growing season. (Rainfall is one of the things that has been increasing in direct response to warming conditions.)
If you live out West, you have to contend with extreme heat and epic drought, which will only get worse. You should probably consider catching all the rainwater you can.
The best way to figure out what will work in your climate is to grow several varieties of the same type of plant. The Millennial Gardener on YouTube did just that to figure out the best tomato for his warm, humid climate.
Beyond your garden, there are huge ramifications for large scale agriculture. Not only are shifts happening south to north, but also east to west. The “100th Meridian” in the US, the longitudinal line that separates the arid West from the wetter Midwest and South, has shifted 140 miles east since 1980, and the US’ famed wheat belt is moving north. More reasons to grow your own food.
Climate impact on commercial agriculture is just another reason to grow your own. There’s never been a better time to start or expand your gardening efforts. This will help smooth out the rough patches in a changing world — pandemics, climate change… whatever may come.
A recent study titled, A Life Cycle Assessment Approach for Vegetables in Large-, Mid-, and Small-Scale Food Systems in the Midwest US, by researchers at the University of Iowa looked at the energy and water use of different scales of agriculture, from large industrial farms (LS), to smaller local farms (MS), to small scale (SS) home gardens. Locally grown and home grown vegetables have by far the lowest inputs of energy, water, pesticides, packaging, and so on.
Overall the local farms and home gardens had the lowest CO2 produced, per kilogram of produce. I image the actual reduction in CO2 is even greater if you were shipping produce from California to New York, or avocados from South America to anywhere in the U.S. Also, if you compost your garden waste your CO2 produced is even less for a home garden.
Gardening at home helps you to be a little bit more self sufficient and in tune with the weather and climate, AND it can also reduce your carbon footprint. Of note, any one person’s “carbon footprint” is irrelevant for stopping climate change. Political action and systemic change on regional, national and global scales are what’s needed. The notion of individuals having their own “carbon footprint” was a concept developed by the oil industry to deflect attention from the industry’s culpability in climate change.
That said, anything an individual can do to reduce their impact is the moral thing to do, especially when considering the billions of people in developing countries who have minimal carbon footprints, yet are the first to experience large scale impacts.
In sum, to prevent the worst of climate change — political action drives societal change, while personal action aligns your values.
Winter Garden
Last year I went big into winter gardening, given the relatively warm winter climate here. I was rewarded with a lot of leafy greens and herbs.
This most recent winter I added tomatoes to my winter garden. I started growing them late summer and by the time they needed their flowers pollinated it was starting to cool off. So they had a few months of sunshine with reasonable temps.
With cool temps at night, I covered my tomatoes with a white poly bag so they could stay warm and keep growing. Finally, our first freeze was coming, so I harvested about 40 green tomatoes. I left them in the kitchen and they all ripened within a week or two. So I enjoyed homegrown tomatoes and made tomato sauce, that I had for a month into our “winter” here.
a fleece cover.
blended into sauce.
I had an amazing crop of kale and chard throughout the winter. Made a lot of soups and stir fry with it, and gave a bunch away.
I also planted my garlic around January, which led to an epic garlic harvest this Spring! One new trick I did was to vernalize my garlic. I put the garlic bulbs in a paper bag, then put it in the fridge for a month (not the freezer).
This makes the garlic think it’s been through a cold winter, so when you plant them they start growing and form bulbs. If you don’t vernalize your garlic and you live in a warm climate, your bulbs will not form properly.
I originally ordered a sampler pack of 4 different garlic types. One did great, one did okay, and the other two sucked. So now I know what varieties I can grow here in Zone 9A.
The elephant garlic grows like crazy here, so I will always have some of that in my garden.
Carrots were also amazing this year. Started them in February and harvested them in April. I grew two varieties, Cosmic Purple and Scarlet Nantes. Both were great, but the Cosmic carrots tended to split if they had too much water. They did taste amazing though.
My Spring Garden
Gardening is a year-round hobby. One of the fun parts is planning next year’s garden during the winter months. This year’s goal was to find some new varieties of plants that will be successful in Zone 9, for example: heat tolerant carrots, some new pepper varieties, and early-season determinate tomatoes.
I had plenty of seed left over from previous seed orders over the past few years (though you can never have enough seeds 🙂 ). This year I ordered more from Baker Creek and Victory Seeds. Victory Seeds has quite a selection of different tomato varieties including determinate and dwarf varieties as well as all of the usual other vegetable and flower seeds usually stocked by most seed companies.
I used seed trays to get a jumpstart on the growing season. In the past, some seeds did really well and others did not. I think I was doing several things wrong and I tried to fix that this year. Still not quite there, but getting better at it.
A big reason to use seed trays and plant early is to get your garden started as soon as possible to escape the inevitable heat of late spring and summer which many plants do not tolerate, especially in a warming world. Some of these heat intolerant plants can also be started in the fall and grown into the winter, such as the leafy greens, some tomatoes.
Because it was such a mild spring, I had my seed trays outside pretty early. I left them out and stacked some bricks around them to hold heat (upper right pic), then covered them in the evening with a large piece of cardboard. A couple of times I brought them inside if the temp was going to be below 50F /10C. They seemed to do well, and I had high germination rates.
Also, a lesson I finally learned, if there is something you like, plant a LOT of it! In the pic above I planted a whole row of New Mexico Hatch chilis and a shorter row of some hot cayenne pepper that’s great for making hot sauce. I also like to take pictures of the seed packets and where I planted the seeds. Just remember to store them in their old folder so you won’t have to flip back through all your pics on your phone to find them!
Above left pic is an early season view of my tall raised bed. The middle pic is a few weeks later showing purple bok choi, Chinese cabbage and a cucumber vine in the back. My dragon fruit plants were killed by the freeze, so I added some thin nylon cord as a crude trellis, then planted spring peas (far right).
The white plastic thing in the pics aboce is my new weather station. It’s a Tempest Pro weather station and it’s amazing! It connects via the internet to my Rachio sprinkler controller. You can also see the readings from other Tempest weather stations near you. Pretty cool.
Pickling my harvest, one of my favorite methods of preservation. Pickled cucumbers on the left, radishes on the right.
I like to plant a bed or two of wildflowers to attract pollinators. And in an effort to eat away at my lawn, I expanded my wildflower beds. I also put a block border around it. I was fretting making the line of blocks curve, when I decided to go geometric. It turned out nice.
Garden Fails
I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression — it wasn’t all sunshine and tomatoes! There were plenty of mishaps and unfortunate events, and the gardening season is only half-way through! Ha!
My biggest disappointment was the deep freeze that killed my beloved lime tree. Last summer, that lime tree cranked out the most tasty limes you can imagine. Way better than any store bought lime I have ever had! Perfect for gin and tonic. I double covered it with two poly bags when the freeze was coming, but to no avail.
Something I learned is that most citrus trees (and many other fruit trees) are grafted on to a more hardy rootstock. In the case of the lime tree it was grafted onto a strong root stock that makes nasty tasting oranges. The freeze killed the grafted part, but the root stock survived. I had to uproot what was left of the tree and discard it. I’m sad now. 🙁 LOL!
A huge caterpillar also stirpped my dill plants bare. Little bugger!
Potatoes are also a relative fail. I paid about $50 for some organic seed potatoes (potatoes, tax, shipping) and harvested about 10 lbs/3 kilos of potatoes out of it. Could have literally bought 10 times more potatoes at the grocery store for the same price!
The expense did not justify the output.
Potatoes just don’t do well in this climate. Sweet Potatoes on the other hand are like a weed, but you have to harvest them before the bugs start eating them. I have planted sweet potatoes in two areas and I no longer need to plant them again. If you leave a tiny bit behind it starts growing like mad next year. So plenty of volunteers.
Another fail were my hot peppers, habaneros, jalapenos, and a few others. They like the heat and due to the long cool spring, they did not respond well.
I hope to go for a second pepper planting to see if I can catch up. Though I did plant a whole row of cayenne and hatch chiles, so I expect those will give me plenty of peppers. I also went to my local big box store and bought a few of what they had left for pepper plants. So fingers crossed.
Also my first attempt at wintering over pepper plants from last year was a dud. Two died in the freeze and the other two are not growing very well, again, probably due to the cool spring, and planting them in the clay-rich ground here.
Last BIG fail. I put lawn clippings in my compost pile last year. Why so bad? I use a “weed and feed” fertilizer every spring on my grass. The “weed” part is an herbicide for broad leafed plants. So I unthinkingly added a touch of herbicide to my compost pile, then spread that compost on some of my beds. That might explain why some of my plants did not look to happy last year. :/
Summer Scorcher
After a long cool Spring season, the Summer arrived with a vengeance. We have had record heat in South Texas, along with many other parts of the country, with multiple weeks of temps near or more than 100F/37.7C.
Needless to say the garden has wilted under the heat, as have I. I’ve paused most of my gardening activities and I’m resigned to pulling weeds and cutting back my spring plants and tossing them in the compost. Getting ready for when the heat abates and I can plant my second big garden of the year. In the meantime, I have some shade cloth that I may try.
Another thing to do… I bought all the stuff for drip irrigation last year, and am finally getting around to setting it up. As my garden gets bigger, drip irrigation will be a must for consistent watering and water savings. I can tie it into my sprinkler system and control it from my Rachio sprinkler controller and app.
I’ll still water the main garden beds and containers by hand for now, but all the ones that are farther away from my hose and on the edges of my yard will benefit. Most plants do way better with consistent watering anyway, and worse with intermittent or inconsistent watering by hand, so my hopes are high that this will be a game changer in this climate.
Each year I have learned a little more that makes me a better gardener. I suspect it is lifelong process, like most worthwhile endeavors.
My big takeaways from this year are:
- there’s always more to learn about gardening
- take advantage of nice weather while you can
- if there is something you like – plant a lot of it!
- conversely, stop planting things that don’t do well, seeking varieties of things you like that can cope with your local environment
- and don’t be afraid to experiment with something new like drip irrigation and shade cloth. (new to me anyhow!)
Thanks for reading and I hope you have a successful season in the garden!
More Resources
Great YouTube Gardening Channels To Binge Watch!
- Epic Gardening – my favorite gardener on YouTube with excellent in-depth information on raised bed gardening, in-ground gardening and various other topics
- Self-Sufficient Me – a wealth of knowledge, focusing on raised bed gardening in a warm climate
- Millenial Gardener – in-depth videos on warm climate gardening
- Charles Dowding – the Grandmaster!
- Hollis & Nancy’s Homestead – excellent long form gardening videos
- Grafting Dragon Fruit – for Dragon Fruit aficionados
High Quality Seed and Plant Companies
- Victory Seeds – fair prices, fast service and some unique offerings
- Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds – a bit of everything, and plenty of it!
- Hoss Tools – quality seeds and fast service, with some focus on southern climates
- Kitizawa Seed Company – just got bought out by another company, so not sure how this will affect the quality of their product/service.A great place for heat tolerant Asian garden veggies and more.
- Stark Brothers – best for trees, shrubs and root crops.
- I have bought high quality items from these shops on Etsy:
More Reading on Climate Change and Gardening
- Pandemic-Climate Victory Garden – Year 3
- Pandemic-Climate Victory Garden – Year 2
- My Pandemic Victory Garden – Year 1
- Rainwater Collecting – previous post on this blog about catching rainwater for emergency and garden use
- Redrawing the Map: How the World’s Climate Zones Are Shifting – an excellent article from Yale Environment 360
