This is the last Saturday Morning Garden blog of that most forgettable year of 2020. I express my deepest gratitude to every blogger, commentator, and contributor of photos to this group over the Annus Horribilis of 2020. This blog has been an oasis of beauty, hope, inspiration, learning and recipes (delicious ones!) during a year of strain, isolation, frustration, anger and disappointment for nearly all of us.
But the tide is turning. The days are getting longer and brighter. Winter has been dark and cold.
Life will return and Spring will arrive. That is our hope, anchor, and rock upon which we stand against all the storms of this year.
As gardeners we believe planning, hard work, learning about soils and plants and life, and some luck with weather will pay off in beauty and good stuff to eat. And so we refocus and renew ourselves in hope for this coming year, this new year of cultivating and sowing and weeding and harvesting and enjoying the bounty nature bestows.
In our neck of the woods (the far Pacific NW, right up on the Canadian border and about 5 miles from the Pacific) the year began with learning about a local threat to our bees. I had seen a huge hornet late in October 2019 and had no idea what it could be. Instinctively, I wanted to find out if I could. All I had was a quick observation, no photo, and thus was left with little to effectively go on to research it. So I went to one of the classes held in January 2020 for our local farming and gardening community. There I learned that Murder Hornets massacre honey bees and have wiped out whole hives overnight. These invasives were known to have landed in Vancouver Canada and were feared to have crossed the border. The photo posted on the overhead looked exactly like the hornet I had seen!
That turned out to be a very useful learning experience. There were no honey bees around my winter heather in February or March 2020 and that began to worry me. Honey bees didn’t return to the north end of our property until late in the year, far too late to fertilize our fruit trees. And so on 10 Apricot trees, we got a grand total of 55 apricots in 2020. While every one was delicious, they were far too few.
In late November this year, the local and state ag folks finally tracked down a massive hideout of Murder Hornets about 2,000 feet from our east property line. Inside a tree there they extracted over 500 immature queens and hundreds of male hornets. The very brave state folks had to secure special suits, far tougher than the usual beekeepers garb, in order to avoid painful, even fatal stings from these alien hoodlums. Hopefully, that removes a very real threat to not just our gardens but also to our lives.
As a consequence, some of the local small farms have established hives and we are looking into adding a few hives ourselves in future. One of my Christmas gifts was Beekeeping for Dummies (highly recommended, by the way).
That wasn’t the only threat to our farm we faced in 2020. A supposedly rare torrential downpour flooded dozens of homes in our county, many for the first time ever. Our downspouts, run into the french drains around the footers of our home by code, were overcome by the rainfall and thus our basement where we store our garden produce flooded out. That knocked nearly a week out of farmwork as I cut several downspouts and routed new drains 100 feet to the ponds.
But it turned out doing the work made a real difference. We just had another “rare” torrential downpour last week that finally turned into snow. The drains worked like they should and this time, we kept a dry basement.
There were other frustrations and losses during the year. The first batch of fish for the aquaponics system died due to lack of calcium and potassium in the water and over fluctuation of pH levels. By the time I figured out what the problems were and how to fix them, every one of the tilapia had died. And our plans to take our produce for sale at the nearest Farmer’s Market evaporated with COVID as the board cancelled the market for the year. We tried selling from the farm, but with our remote location and with only one booth, that did not pay off at all.
So this year I joined the board of that Farmer’s Market and we’re going to try again, in hopes that by the time we start in June this year we will almost have a handle on COVID and be able to function in some safety, still following distancing and masking rules. We ended up doing some wholesale and working with a nearby farm on a major crossroad to sell produce this year and to set up a roadside produce shed for sales in the coming year. And we contributed several hundred pounds of fresh produce to our local food bank, which really needed it this year especially. Thank goodness we didn’t have to dump our produce or kill off animals just to survive like a number of farms had to do when they couldn’t harvest, sell or transport their goods due to COVID.
Not everything was a frustration or loss. We harvested our first hardy kiwi this year, after a four year wait for the vines to mature. They were delicious!
We got a bumper crop of plums and blueberries and our first table grapes, and a bumper crop of potatoes and onions.
Looking forward, we’ll be the only farm at the Farmer’s Market with blueberries for sale this year. We’re expanding the produce garden space, adding a small lean-to hoop house along the south facing sidewalk behind our workshop, adding about 40 more fruit trees, and getting our rainwater capture system in place after reworking our house water filtration system to lower pH and remove some of the minerals that contributed to the fish dying. We’ve figured out the greenhouse issues and addressed most of them.
We had 6 electrical outages this year, any one of which would have likely killed off the fish if they had survived. So we have to secure a more reliable power supply, hopefully battery backup instead of a gas generator. The extension of federal solar credits for two additional years secured by Democrats in the latest legislation will help a lot. Hopefully if GA comes through with two Democratic Senators, next year will be even better for those of us trying to address climate change.
We’ve attended one really good online conference this winter and have at least one more lined up to attend, and a stack of books on various issues (one on pruning, another on okra and a third on the farm bill which will be up for revision in 2023). I’m hoping to work with our local Democratic House rep to increase organic research funds this time. And I’m planning to put some okra plants (Heavy Hitters) in the hoop house. The online conferences are great for saving money and time, so I hope they continue in future, alongside the in person events rather than instead of them.
So with renewed hopes and focus we’re going to take on 2021. We have a spot already worked up for sowing wildflowers (hopefully we’ll have a photo to show you later this year). These are wildflowers from 2020.
We are enjoying winter beauty where we can find it. This is mist turned to frost on our car hood. It was covered with delicate featherlike patterns.
And this is a photo of the recent snowfall on blackberry and tree branches in the forest just north of our house, on the property next to us. It’s a color photo, believe it or not, but it’s probably one of the nearest grayscale color photos I’ve ever managed to take.
So what are your plans for gardening in 2021? Have you figured out how to address gardening failures or issues from this year? And what books on growing stuff are you reading during the winter?
I know Downheah Mississippi is working on revising his growing of tomatoes and peppers in buckets. We’re looking into using some black, 20- and 30-gallon capacity fiber grow bags to put okra and tomatoes into inside the small lean-to hoop house, in order to concentrate heat into the soil and hold heat overnight. We stay down in the 50s overnight even in summer most of the time. We have tomatoes started in the greenhouse and they are already starting to flower, despite the snow on the ground and ice forming on the ponds. Hopefully, by March we’ll be having fresh tomatoes.
What are you planning for and hoping to add to your garden this year?