Posted on July 15, 2009

And Then Came the Rain …

Not a day after my post on using water to see potential support issues in your garden, we had a freak rain here. By "freak rain", I don’t mean some accidental summer sprinkle. I mean, it went from "a tad chilly outside" to thunder, lightning, and mild flash flooding on the side of my house. It felt sort of like taking a giant leap from July to March in the Willamette Valley. (My poor peppers and tomatoes!)

My mom says a true Oregonian goes out in all kinds of weather. To one-up her on that notion, I say a true gardener will go out to save the garden in any sort of weather. So there I was, in thunder and downpour, standing in a sinking bed of mud, pruning and staking the tomatoes. (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to prune or stake when the leaves are wet, but it was either that or have a bunch of main branches on a few bushes snap off—I did what I had to do!)

This week’s (wet) lessons learned:

You do what you have to do, and sometimes it works out okay.

The tomatoes that were tied and pruned while wet were actually okay … so far. It’s probably not the best idea for an extended cold/wet snap, but it works for those freak storms like this one where the weather warms up significantly the next day. (And, again, you do what you have to do—a light pruning while wet was better than losing the entire branch from the weight.)

Small bamboo sticks don’t hold up to Oregon weather.

Those bamboo stakes I brought from California did not hold up very well in Oregon. You can see where the bamboo stake had snapped with water/weather/weight and is now running horizontally in the middle of this picture (larger version):

Free branches rock.

The cherrywood and curling willow branches I picked up for free off Craigslist, however, do stand up wonderfully. They are much taller, stronger, more flexible, and more resiliant than the little bamboo sticks. They also give the whole thing a new, funky vibe:

Weather is fun.

It is probably wise to count seconds between the thunder and lightning if you are standing outside and gardening in a storm. If they get too close together, run in the house … quickly.

Weather and environment can drastically change your plants.

One of the plants that took a huge topple was a red currant tomato. This particular plant (I have 2 of them) happens to be from a small packet of seeds from the Martha Stewart Collection at K-Mart that I bought about 3 years ago. The packet describes it as

‘Red Currant’ Tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum var. pimpinellifolium
A wild tomato from South America. Tangy, sweet, crisp, and just 1/2" in diameter. Very prolific, grows in long clusters on vigorous vines that are easier to harvest if trellised. Good disease resistance.

The first year, a "normal" weather year in Concord, CA, these seeds produced neat 4-5′ bushes with ample fruit and leaves. The second year, where we had late cold and then blazing heat, they were small little shrubs with a lot of fruit and barely any leaves. This year, after moving to Oregon, this same packet of seeds is producing these beautiful 6-8′ vines that I finally discovered after the storm and had a crazy time tacking up! It’s just amazing to see what an heirloom or wild variety of plant will do in response to changes in the environment, where as a modern variety of tomato (created for a specific commercial purpose) might not be able to adapt to changing weather conditions as well.

Plant spacing is not overrated.

As I’m considering how I would change things for next year, I definitely think I will make the garden bigger overall but put more traveling pathways within the garden. There’s nothing like having to fix these fallen tomatoes, stepping into the garden while balancing precariously around a bunch of sharp support sticks, and having my foot sink about 8" down. The one bit of good news, though, is that the ground has somewhat compacted—when I first added the dirt, the sink level was about 12-18" deep.

I can’t dismiss some of the benefits of the spacing, however. For example, my basil is growing fantastically in the filtered sunlight below the tomatoes, and my fall broccoli is being kept from blazing sun in the same manner. The soil is also drying out slower, the plants are working to support each other as they grow, and the planting density is doing a great job suffocating out most of the weeds.