A few of you might remember that a mere 20 days ago, we were battling frost. We had to take emergency action to protect our vulnerable squash from getting toasted by this garden nightmare.
We demonstrated some severely impacted squash plants, they were pretty rough around the edges, even by our standards. Back then, we told you all it was going to be OK. We wanted to show you what just 20 days of better conditions and a lot of TLC has brought.
As you can see, our plants have recovered amazingly well and are well on their way to producing squash. (We even have our first baby zuch!) Today, you can see the benefits of that early planting as our plants are well past transplant shock stages and are bulking up significantly, packing on the flowers. You can’t even tell they were nipped by frost and looking like they got hit by a freight train just three weeks ago.
This rapid transition from one extreme to another might “seem” weird, at least to an outsider that isn’t well experienced in subarctic growing. We would say that “usually” things aren’t this crazy, but we’d also say that this kind of thing is not an abnormal experience, either. We have summer, bookended by a very brief spring and fall on either end. Things move fast in the north, our three months of summer comes and goes like a blink of an eye. (And as we write this, a third of it is gone!)
If this is your first year growing at high latitude, welcome to the weirdness. We are here to warn you in advance, fall will basically be the exact same thing, just in reverse. We usually go screeching into winter and snowfall, just moments after shutting down our gardens. If we’re lucky. Sometimes we’re cleaning up in freezing temperatures and that sucks a lot.
This is one of the reasons why we do this whole Frosty Garden thing. We’ve grown at more favorable latitudes and things weren’t like this. We often say that you have very little room for error when growing at high northern latitudes. And that’s why it’s important for us to show you our trials and tribulations, but also the recovery.
If you’re not fully prepared for these major shifts, and the speed at which the northern garden evolves, you can find yourself behind the ball quickly. For many plants, a third of the way into the growing season, we’re definitely looking for maturity like this. This is especially true for plants that require our full season to grow, like squash, as immaturity at this stage can mean no harvest. A lot of the time, it’s best to take those risks, being too risk averse can definitely impact your harvest.
If you’re still in a bit in shock from “the shift” and are asking yourself, WTF? The way we look at it is that means, “Well, That’s Fine” and just keep rolling with it. This is northern gardening, in a nutshell. We have to hope for the best and still try to be prepared for everything!
