Cool Planet

by Adam Markham,
CEO, Clean Air-Cool Planet

It was brilliant last week to see Michelle Obama taking Michael Pollan’s advice to “rip out your lawn” and to begin a vegetable garden. Our family has ripped up a lot of lawn in the last fifteen years and it’s been a wonderful way to introduce our daughter to nature. She learned early on that food you grow yourself tastes transcendently better than anything you can ever buy in the shops. She’ll eat berries, tomatoes and peas straight from the bush and with the other neighborhood kids she can strip a row of lemon sorrel and a strawberry patch faster than a blue jay can crack an acorn. Once on the way to an agricultural show at the local Grange she ate my entire exhibit of prize runner beans – raw, before they got a chance to be prizewinners.

Gardens instill a lifelong love of the smells, sights and sounds of the outdoors – not to mention a healthy appetite for fresh produce. And there’s nothing like gardening to keep you in touch with the seasons. When we lived in Northern Virginia the summers were perfect for plump sun-warmed tomatoes and a dazzling display of zinnias, but the heat and humidity confounded our attempts to coax a show from some of the more sensitive perennials. Four years in New Hampshire taught me what a proper New England winter will do to lovingly nurtured rosemary and lavender plants. Kill them. No messing. Completely dead. Now, in our fifth southern Connecticut growing season we’re struggling to work out whether we are in gardening zone 6 as USDA says we are, or whether in fact global warming has shifted our old Virginia climate up to meet us and we’re now in zone 7 again.

Truth is, it’s not so easy to pin the climate down these days. It’s been a splendidly snowy winter in New England and January and February were surely cold enough for any fan of Robert Frost’s Winter Eden, but there’s no getting away from the fact that New England winters are losing their bite. University of New Hampshire scientists Elizabeth Burakowski and Cameron Wake have done the number-crunching to show that over the last 40 years winters have gotten warmer by an average of nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit. What’s more, the long-term trend is toward less snowfall and a lot less snow on the ground.

Global warming is changing the nature of our seasons and those of us with gardens can already see changes, harvesting our tomatoes later in the autumn and finding the occasional rose in bloom in December. But warmer winters are much less effective at killing garden pests and when you are an organic gardener like me, you want the weather to give you a big, Malthusian helping hand in keeping down the slugs and grubs.

Aside from warmer winters, I’m expecting drier and hotter summers, and that means more mulching the flower beds to conserve precious water and keep the soil cool and moist. The heat will send my spinach, arugula and lettuce to seed in a flash and it’ll encourage the mildew that plagues my phlox. No doubt too it will put paid to my ambition to have a fresh jar of gorgeously scented sweet pea blooms on the kitchen table every day from June to September, because if there’s one thing these beauties can’t stand it’s parched and overheated soil.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the vagaries of the seasons and the unpredictability of the weather. That’s a big part of what makes gardening fun. Climate change won’t stop me growing vegetables for the table – although there may be more okra and olives in future. But what global warming will do, unless we put the brakes on fast and hard, is change the New England climate so rapidly, dramatically and irreversibly that when my daughter teaches her children to garden, the seasons and weather conditions will be unrecognizable from when she was growing up. We’re taking a natural cycle, we’re playing with the atmospheric drivers without fully understanding the consequences and it looks as if we’re going to leave the next generation to clean up the mess.

This entry was posted on March 24, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Gardening/horticulture. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: climate change, garden, global warming, seasons, snow, University of New Hampshire, vegetable garden, winter