Smart gardeners emerge from gloom with bumper harvests
Leafy greens thrive in cooler climes but tomatoes barely survive
Savvy gardeners are reaping a bonanza of leafy greens, lettuces and kale, thanks to a cool May and a gloomy start to June.
“You mustn’t forget that we live in a rainforest,” said veteran vegetable gardener Jill Weiss, who tends two plots at the venerable Cottonwood Community Garden in Strathcona. “I don’t put all my eggs in one basket gambling on hot weather or cool weather.”
“There are many ways to compensate for the rain,” she said. “There are lots of things that thrive, almost all of the leafy greens do very well in cooler weather.”
Weiss and her fellow Cottonwood gardener Mark Drutz are awash in the aforementioned greens.
“Things are going quite well and after that spell of warm weather things really took off,” Drutz said. “We’ve got more lettuce and kale than we know what to do with and I’ve harvested asparagus three times already.”
The news hasn’t been all good.
Weiss has had to replant seeds for heat- loving squash that simply failed to germinate due to the damp, or the cold, or both. Perhaps optimistically, she has new squash seeds in the ground now.
Tomatoes that people planted during May’s warm spell are alive, but not thriving, Drutz said. “It’s going to be another rainy week, so you have to decide if you are going to gamble and put out the tomatoes or just wait it out.”
Despite a patch of relatively sunny, dry weather in May, Vancouver is mired in an unseasonably cool and rainy period likely to last at least another week, according to Environment Canada’s senior climatologist David Phillips.
There were 15 dry days in mid- May, which means that it was very wet at the beginning and the end of the month, he said. The average daily high temperature was just half a degree below normal at 16.1 C.
“But every day for the past week there has been rain,” Phillips said. “When you are expecting summer to start and you get June- uary, it’s a bummer at this time of the year.”
People are always very very eager ... but if you look at a gardening book for our area it will say that hot weather plants shouldn’t be put out until sometime in June.
MARK DRUTZ
GARDENER
Environment Canada’s outlook for June predicts normal to below- normal temperatures. The summer outlook suggests a more cheerful run of relatively warm and dry months ahead, Phillips said.
For now, it’s survival of the wettest out there.
Drutz and gardeners across the region are battling slugs that are dining in style on tender lettuces and greens all night and right through the day, when they would usually have to take refuge from the sun.
For Weiss, wet springs are just business as usual.
“People are always very very eager to start their tomatoes, their zucchinis and their corn and all their hot weather plants, but if you look at a gardening book for our area it will say that hot weather plants shouldn’t be put out until sometime in June,” said Weiss, who teaches vegetable gardening workshops. “Putting them out early is a gamble and sometimes you gamble correctly.”
There is still plenty of time left for planting and smart gardeners will wait for summer to arrive in force before risking heat- lovers to the vagaries of a Vancouver June.