The Chilkat Valley has seen months of out-of-sorts weather: with heavy rainfall and unseasonable cold, before a recent dry spell. With the tail end of the growing season approaching, gardeners say the unpredictability has brought changes to the harvest.
The odd weather began in earnest towards the end of April and into May, which together dumped record levels of rain onto the region. April saw almost two-and-a-half times average precipitation, and May three-and-a-half times the average. Then, early summer temperatures remained consistently below usual highs.
It’s easy to say the growing season has been different; it’s harder to say whether the change has been good or bad.
On the one hand, the extreme rainfall had some clear negative impacts, like at Henderson Farm on Allen Road, where spring rain swamped the high tunnel.
“This was all basically a big mud pit — the ground was so saturated that a lot of our crops basically drowned,” farm lead gardener Chrissie Mayumi said.
The farm lost early season crops like lettuce and arugula, and replanting was delayed as the soil drained.
In less extreme circumstances, gardeners say many crops have been notably slow to come up this year. At the Klukwan Community Garden, many usually reliable crops, like peas and beans, are only just flowering, garden coordinator Sandrine Thompson said.
“It’s really different this year,” Thompson said. “Peas, bush beans, green beans — normally we’d be harvesting buckets of those at this point.”
As for whether that was because of the unusual weather, one interesting data point was last month, when the cold rainy streak broke. Thompson said many of the outdoor crops that had been slow going began to show signs of life once they got warmth and sun.
Gardener Sabine Churchill of Gomi’s Garden also has seen slower harvests, like her apple trees, which she said are fruiting less than normal. But still, she’s not worried.
She thinks a mild winter and the massive spring rain were good for the growth of woody plants – trees and shrubs.
“The apple trees look fantastic, they have no stress,” Churchill said. “They just don’t have very many apples this year.”
“The hemlocks all have these droopy tips (which show new growth),” Churchill added. “It’s outrageous; they had them already in the springtime, which means they grew in the winter, and now the ones in my yard look like a weeping variety.”
In Churchill’s garden, the benefits of the cool, overcast, wet weather have extended to bulbs like tulips, daffodils and crocuses.
“They bloomed forever this spring,” Churchill said. “The more they’re exposed to sunshine, the shorter they bloom. I had tulips still blooming into the end of June, a couple even at the beginning of July, which I’ve never seen before.”
So have the unseasonal conditions been good or bad for gardeners?
The answer is likely both. And, it’s hard to say. Different plants respond to the cold and the moisture differently. And on top of that, even two of the same types of plant can respond differently to conditions, based on the whole host of factors.
Take, for instance, the effect of weather and climate on berry harvests, which researchers have been studying around the state. The Sitka Sound Science Center is running a study, and research coordinator Zofia Danielson said it’ll likely take a decade, or decades, for clear trends to emerge. But so far, results suggest it could be hard to settle on one definitive answer about how berry health responds to climate variations or climate change.
“One takeaway so far is that, for the relationship between [plant] health and weather patterns, each berry patch looks really different, and I imagine from community to community it looks different,” Danielson said.
That message is echoed by research from another group, the University of Alaska Fairbanks-affiliated Alaska Berry Futures project. Their research lays out the whole host of factors affected by temperature and precipitation. For instance, warm, wet conditions might help berry plant growth. It also could help fungal growth, which would in turn rot fruit faster. Warm winters, too, could help plant growth; but reduced snow cover could take away valuable early season protection around the plants.
Churchill said recognition of that baked-in uncertainty is part of her approach to growing.
“I try to embrace the fluctuation. That’s the beauty of nature, that we cannot predict it, and we hope to work with it and not against it,” she said. “Let’s embrace it and go with it, it’s kind of fun.”