Inland Northwest Gardening

At 8 a.m. this moring, there was snow in the rain. This is June 10 for crying out loud and I’m at about 2100′ in elevation. My tomatoes have been in the ground for almost three weeks. The beans took three weeks to come up and I haven’t seen the corn or squash. In my 30 years gardening here, I’ve never seen it this cold.

So how do we combat it and still get a garden?

Cover tomaotes, peppers, eggplants, melons, cucumbers, and other warm season crops with a tent of floating row cover and leave it on into the early part of July. Floating row cover is a spun polyester fabric that lets light and water in but helps retain some heat. During the day, the extra heat helps the plants grow. At night the heat retention can save a crop from freezing.

You can make an inexpensive hoop house frame of PVC pipe to hold up the row cover and make a mini-greenhouse. It should be big enough to cover the plants and the tomato cages.

Cut the bottoms out of milk jugs and large juice bottles and place them over the plants. remove the caps during the day and replace them each night.

Unless you are willing to religously remove and recover plants with plastic in the morning and evening, I would not reccomend covering plants with clear plastic. A couple of hours of warm sun in between cold rains can cook the plants.

I have been watching people buy basil since early May not realizing that it needs HEAT and lots of it to grow at all. Our air and soil are just too cold. I usually don’t seed mine until the end of June and usually get a nice crop by mid-August.