The Modern Victory Garden

Winter will not be boring this year.   The weather has already dished out some serious snow, a frigid cold spell, and prolonged soaking rain events that keep me looking out the window to make sure an ark with pairs of animals is not floating by!   All this and it is only the first week of December.   Forecasts for Sunday and Monday are calling for more serious amounts of rain – potentially measuring in multiples of inches within a period of 24 hours.                                        

Our 2010/2011 winter as shaping up is a function of the La Nina affect, which for the Pacific Northwest is the wetter, colder weather phenomenon that is the flip side of the more common and warmer El Nino pattern.   La Nina occurs when the surface waters near the equator are cooler than normal in the eastern Pacific Ocean and El Nino occurs when those same equatorial surface waters are warmer than normal.   The last La Nina winter we had was the winter of 2007/2008 which resulted in some serious flooding events in our region including the flooding of I-5 around the Chehalis area the first week of December 2007.   The Pacific Northwest had a large storm hit that week.   Just to give you some perspective on it, areas of the Oregon coast experienced wind speeds close to 130 miles per hour (that is hurricane strength folks!) and the City of Bremerton (which is where my work is located and a short drive from our home and garden) received nearly 10 inches of rain in a 24 hour period of time.   Hopefully this La Nina year will be kinder to all of us, but it has all the characteristics of being just as “interesting”.       

The heavy rains have  made the garden beds and walkways waterlogged.   I am glad I have the grow tunnels up protecting the main bed of over wintering spinach, carrots, and green onions, because these relentless cold rains are just as devastating to plants ultimately as hard freezes and snow can be.   However, the irony of it is that the beds do dry out after a period of time and require watering.   I think my spinach bed is close to that point.    I have the opportunity this weekend to pull back the plastic cover for a few hours and let the rain irrigate the bed for me before covering it back up.   However, messing around with a large expanse of plastic sheeting in heavy rain is not a fun task and chances are I will just wait and do a manual sprinkling on it with a hose and wand attachment on a nicer weather day in the future.            

Between errands and appointments on Saturday and heavy rains on Sunday, the garden is not likely to see much of me over this coming weekend.   You can be sure though as I work inside the house on various projects, that I will be checking out the window often to make sure that big boat with pairs of animals does not go floating by unnoticed!                   

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener