The silent season is drawing to a close.
All winter, there was little birdsong to lift my heart. The occasional caw of a crow, the chickadee-dee-dee of a chickadee, the big song of the little Carolina wren that now stays on our Pennsylvania farm all winter. But no courtship call of great horned owls, no wood thrush or Baltimore oriole. Still, I rejoiced in the music that remained.
I just heard the first notes of our first returning songbird, though, a red-winged blackbird, and the snowdrops have begun to poke out of the ground.
The other day, I moved last fall’s potted tulips and hyacinth from the unheated side of the barn to the warmth of the garden room to force their blooms. But the vegetable garden is an icy mud puddle and the flower beds, still mulched with shredded leaves, show little signs of life. Boxwood is covered in burlap and snow fence is draped around trees and shrubs to prevent deer from devouring them.
Those deer, which have changed from the color of milk chocolate to dark, break through our makeshift deterrents anyway and eat the yew, euonymus, arborvitae, and this winter, even the holly. Squirrels race around adding to their larders, but the chipmunks are nowhere to be seen yet. They’re in their dens I suppose, as are the opossum, raccoons and the bears, too.
Once I longed for a greenhouse, but now I, too, wish to hibernate in winter, to take time off from sowing, potting and nurturing. To walk in snowy woods and observe animal tracks, study ice patterns on the pond, to be one with the season. I want to read by the fire and peruse garden catalogs, imagining what next year’s garden will be like, expecting, as all gardeners do, that next year will be better than the last. As Vita Sackville-West wrote in her poem “The Garden:”
The gardener dreams his special own alloy
Of possible and the impossible.
But what is possible anymore? As I reflect on last year’s abysmal season, I wonder how I will adapt to the changes I witness.
A year ago, winter was so warm that shrubs hardly died back and, last spring, dripped with foliage, a welcome sight but not normal. Spring was so hot I missed that lovely, cool, window for transplanting. I didn’t know when to plant early season, cold-hardy vegetables, certainly not in 85 degrees, or when to set out tender plants.
“After danger of frost,” is common wisdom, but when is that now? My Plant Hardiness Zone shifted recently because the average coldest temperature in my area is now three degrees higher than it was in 2012. But even that new guidance didn’t help me.
Mid-May felt like mid-June. Then, we had hail on May 29.
I planted poppies in April anyway (they like cool weather) but the seeds were washed away by floods, which can now stretch here from April through October. Between June and November, we had a drought. The grass was brown. Dogwood and tulip poplar lost their leaves in July. My vegetable garden resembled a cracked riverbed, the soil so hard that weeding was nearly impossible.
Streams ran dry, so for the first time in 36 years I saw deer wade into the pond to drink. Little food was available for them, so they sauntered up to our garage and ate the deer-resistant lavender. On my walks in the forest, I was struck by that lack of undergrowth, particularly a huge patch of Canadian Wood Nettle, a North America native that is a host plant for Red Admiral and Eastern Comma butterflies. Chanterelles never fruited in their usual spots. I worried that our spring would run dry.
Pennsylvania saw record wildfires in fall. Two lilacs, which normally appear in spring, bloomed in October, and in late November I was still harvesting what little I did manage to grow.
All this reminds me of a radio program called “Piano Puzzler” that my husband and I listen to on Saturday mornings. The composer Bruce Adolphe rewrites a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer. He changes the tune’s tempo, harmony or mode and contestants try to name the tune and composer. Imagine “Hey Jude” in the style of Brahms. Somewhere in my brain the tune sounds familiar, yet something is off, the music is disorienting. Occasionally, I guess correctly. Often, not.
Gardening in climate change is the same: confusing, with a lot of guessing.
What’s a home gardener to do?
“The only predictable thing is that it is going to be unpredictable.” said Sonja Skelly, director of education at Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, N.Y. “It’s been crazy up here, too.”
Last spring was hot in Ithaca as well, so the vegetable gardener started planting two weeks before the May 31 frost-free date. Then came extreme temperature fluctuations, but the plants set out earlier did better because they got established. Those planted on the target date were stunted and had a poor growing season. “A good lesson,” Dr. Skelly said. Row covers, which allow gardeners to get plants in earlier and grow them later in the season, are “going to be really important in climates like ours,” she said.
Cover crops like millet, sorghum, and black-eyed peas have been successful at the botanic gardens. They improve water retention, decrease weeds, reduce erosion and limit negative microorganisms in soil. The birds love them, Dr. Skelly said.
She recommended planting together what the Haudenosaunee people call the three sisters: corn, beans and squash. This system produces a better per-hectare yield than any monoculture cropping system, she said.
Drip irrigation is another solution, Dr. Skelly said. “It adds moisture where it’s needed, at the roots,” she said. Water is released slowly, stays put, and doesn’t run off like hand watering or using sprinklers.
“Observe, take notes, ask questions, seek out answers,” Dr. Skelly advised. “What are the neighbors seeing?” Learn by going to local botanic gardens, public gardens and nature centers, which have been working on this problem for a while now. “Keep the cycle of information flowing, talking with friends and family and neighbors as a way to help us figure it out. That’s so important,” she said.
Dr. Skelly believes it’s crucial for home gardeners to really understand their plants. “Maybe climate change will be the way to know our gardens far better,” she said. “We have to.”
I’ve long depended on experts to teach me how to garden responsibly. To help, not harm, the environment. I plant a diverse range of plants, including natives for pollinators, and have learned to celebrate native weeds like fleabane. I practice companion planting. I don’t spray pesticides or insecticides and, instead of synthetic fertilizers, use compost or make my own out of comfrey or stinging nettle. I wish I could buy plants in something other than plastic.
But the more I ponder gardening in the time of climate change, the more I believe we home gardeners are going to have to figure out many solutions for ourselves. So much of gardening is trial and error and erratic weather patterns mean we’ll have to experiment even more, to do our own studies. In essence, we must become citizen-scientists of our own vegetable patches and flower beds.
Cornell Botanic Gardens has a climate change demonstration garden, but, really, we all do. None of us has been through this before. And in the end, we’re all in this together, navigating a strange new world of digging in soil and growing things, each trying as we might to contribute to a new way of gardening in a changing world.
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot’s collection of essays, “A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests,” was published by Stackpole Books.