Climate
Change.
Twenty
years ago, when we first moved into our little house, I scraped and painted the
entire exterior one summer. In doing so, I learned all about the micro-climates
in the yard. The south facing wall was hot—to be avoided during peak sun hours—but
could be used to grow heat loving crops. I moved my tomato barrels to that
space and never looked back. They throve. Every few years, I changed out the soil so
that it was not diseased. I always had to water the plants more than when they
were in the back yard, which is sometimes shaded, but they bounced back in the
evening.
This
year, I decided to move crops around. I put the tomatoes in two raised beds in
the back yard, where they are huge, lush, and covered with fruits. I planted my
corn and scarlet runner beans in the front beds and the winter squashes in the
barrels, dreaming of reading on the couch to the sound of rustling corn leaves.
It has been a failure. It looks like a
scene from The Grapes of Wrath, even
with daily watering.
What is
different? Where we once had a few days a summer where the temperatures rose to
the nineties in that space of the yard, we now have several days in a row where
the temperature is over 100 degrees against the wall. The vines do not shade
the wall; they cannot grow in the heat. The corn, which is a drier, grassy
plant, is fried. These very hot days are
no longer an aberration that will shift quickly; they are normal.
We talk
about mitigation of climate change regularly, things we can do to reduce the
amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The usual—drive and fly less,
eat less meat, insulate your attic, etc. We rarely talk about adaptation to the
changes that have already occurred. I need to adapt to the changing climate in
my yard. My mitigation—growing vines to cool the wall—has failed. I must adapt
if I wish to use that space for growing crops. My plan for next year is garlic,
some winter wheat, and early lettuces and mustards. It will be mulched, but not planted, in late
July and August. What else will we need to do to mitigate the impacts of
increasingly hot, dry summers here in Oregon?
