Be A Better Gardener: Drought in the Northeast

by Thomas Christopher

“Schizophrenic” is the best description of the weather in New England and the rest of the Northeast for the last six months. Conditions have varied regionally, but overall summer started with record heat and in many areas above-average rainfall deposited in deluges.

Then Nature turned off the tap. September was bone dry, and October was drier throughout most of our area. During the latter month, there was almost no measurable precipitation in many areas and the temperatures remained unseasonably high. This abnormal heat promoted evaporation of what little moisture was in the soil, drying up streams, and drastically lowering river flows. One notable result to this aridity was an upsurge in wildfires, with more than 400 flaring up across Massachusetts (where I garden) in October alone.

There’s a temptation to regard the weather flipflop we’ve experienced as a freak, and in the past, it would have been just that. However, climate scientists have been predicting this exact pattern for quite a while. In 2014, for example, a national climate assessment derived from observations and research by fifteen Federal agencies including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense, the Department of the Interior, and the National Science Foundation predicted that as temperatures continue to rise (a trend already apparent in weather records for our region dating back to the founding of the National Weather Service in 1870) our region would experience an increase in average annual precipitation, but that this would come in fewer, more violent events concentrated in winter and the early part of the growing season, and that hotter summers would lead to subsequent droughts.

Gardeners cannot fail to notice changes. Due to increased heat and early summer moisture, early blight and late blight, two fungal diseases, now appear annually in my vegetable garden. I can no longer harvest enough tomatoes to can my 50 pints of sauce unless I spray the vines. A number of the twenty dwarf heirloom cider apple trees I planted four years ago failed to leaf out this spring.  Blackened, scorched-looking twigs and twig ends bent into something like shepherds’ crooks revealed that my orchard was infested with a bacterial disease called fire blight. This used to be common only in regions further south, but the warming of our climate has expanded its range northward. I am deeply opposed to spraying toxins, but this past spring I applied a carefully targeted application of copper spray and an antibiotic to my little orchard.

The emerging threat of forest fires, however, makes taking action essential. On a societal level, we need to continue our move away from fossil fuels. But there is also much that we can do individually.

One avenue of attack is making changes in our personal landscapes. A reduction in the use of synthetic fertilizers could provide a significant benefit. The largest component of such products are typically nitrates which are produced by a process that uses natural gas as both a feedstock and a fuel; to produce one ton of fertilizer nitrates requires the consumption of 33 thousand cubic feet of natural gas. And once spread on the garden or turf, synthetic nitrates begin escaping into the atmosphere as “laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, which is 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

Converting your lawn to less nitrogen-hungry turf grasses such as fine fescues (which are also more drought-resistant than the traditional Kentucky bluegrass and require far less frequent mowing) can be an important personal contribution to this crisis. Homeowners can sow clover into their lawns – clover not only has the ability to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into a natural source of nutrients for the grass, it will also make your lawn more supportive of pollinating insects such as our embattled wild bees.

Find space in your landscape for native, locally indigenous plants. They tend to be more drought-tolerant than most traditional, nursery-bred garden plants, and so will help to keep your surroundings green and less flammable during dry spells. They also do a far better job of feeding the local wildlife.

This challenge of climate change has too often been presented as solely a matter of doing without.  I believe that it can also provide a stimulus for a transition to a healthier and more satisfying relationship with nature, to biologically richer and more beautiful human landscapes, and ultimately a more resilient, less disaster-prone local environment.  The difficulties of the last six months may have been just the wake-up call we all needed.

Be-a-Better-Gardener is a community service of Berkshire Botanical Garden, located in Stockbridge, Mass. Its mission, to provide knowledge of gardening and the environment through a diverse range of classes and programs, informs and inspires thousands of students and visitors each year. Thomas Christopher is a volunteer at Berkshire Botanical Garden and is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including Nature into Art and The Gardens of Wave Hill (Timber Press, 2019). He is the 2021 Garden Club of America's National Medalist for Literature, a distinction reserved to recognize those who have left a profound and lasting impact on issues that are most important to the GCA. Christopher’s companion broadcast to this column, Growing Greener, streams on WESUFM.org, Pacifica Radio and NPR and is available at berkshirebotanical.org/growinggreener.