From my garden to yours

In the Beatles song “Rain”, John Lennon sings laconically about the existential meaning of weather in our lives: essentially nothing. As gardeners, we know that the resulting atmospherics can effect the world around us, but does the weather truly control our lives? If our beans and peppers are going to freeze, then “que sera, sera”. With records breaking all over the map for the hottest, driest, wettest, longest, coldest conditions buffeting our gardens, what’s a poor boy to do?

My garden plan always involves a calendar, seed growth schedules, a sense of history and a bit of hope. The Christmas Freeze of 1989 was preceded and followed by the mildest Florida winter in memory. The work-around for those three days of sub-20-degree temperature was not feasible, let alone predictable. In hindsight, with a house full of holiday family and babies, there was not much I would or could have done differently. But I was back at the Winter Park Farmer’s Market the next week.

We don’t know how many more times this winter’s conditions will be unfavorable for warm season crops. To continue protecting beans, basil, peppers and tomatoes could be considered an exercise in insanity. The best plan would have been to start the crops soon enough to reap a harvest by now. Then press the reset button on the space invested in those now unseasonable plantings. The tough part was, there is only so much growing season between the end of the summer and the start of winter.

Out come the bedspreads, blankets, floating row covers and mulch. I see the most damage occurring on the second day of a cold front when the wind tapers off and the frost settles down, penetrating all our crop covers and good intentions. Avoid direct thermal conduction of the cold when plastic or wet covers contact the plants. Multiple layers of covers of dissimilar composition trap heat in combination with air pockets (the whole is greater than the sum of the parts).

Micro jet irrigation frost protection is best left to professional growers. In addition to the water use, constant monitoring and maintenance of the system is beyond the scope of residential growers. The water must be left running until the freeze subsides and resulting protective ice layers melt. Alternatives like smudge pots burning bunker oil and bonfires of old tires have thankfully been relegated to the history books. The final review will show that most consequences of our efforts were preordained before the first seeds were planted.