how do you make your garden more resilient?

Nicole said, "On permies, we're about solutions, so this thread is about what we can do in our own gardens to make them more resilient!

This thread has offered a lot of really good suggestions on how to make your garden more resilient.

My suggestion is one of the first basic components of having a great garden.

Build up the soil

The first things that come to mind when I think of this:  Wood chips and mushrooms.

Some suggested threads:

https://permies.com/t/94750/Ten-Principles-Healthy-Fertile-Resilient

https://permies.com/t/56107/story-microbes-accomplish-miracles-culture

Dr. Bryant Redhawk's Soil Series:

https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil

I've pretty much given up on gardening until I am able to change my situation and have a bit more land, even a 1/2 acre... 64SQFT of raised garden bed in Florida is a lot of work for not much in return and I feel the smaller the garden, obviously the less resilient it can be.

There was no redundancy. It is so small that if anything goes wrong, pretty much everything I have is screwed. I spent so much time on it and have nothing to show for. One classic, Florida, 5 day downpour streak with well draining beds and my 8 tomato plants were completely destroyed.

It hurts, but unless I get lucky and win the lottery, I'm not sure I'll garden intensively ever again.

Sorry to hear about your weather woes, Jeff.  It’s hard losing a crop you put a lot of work into. I have had my share of failures in my small space too.  Twice I specially prepared asparagus beds following instructions in gardening book, only to have the plants die over winter, even though they are hardy enough for my zone. This year I got no cherries due to temperature extremes in the spring. My plums might as well just be ornamental. Between vine borers, cucumber beetles, and powdery mildew I can’t harvest a single zucchini so stopped trying.

But…if you try a little something each year you may start to find some crops that do work for you. Or you may find some volunteer/wild plants that like your yard and those make a garden too.  Or you may figure out that you just need to tweak you garden set-up a bit. Resiliency can be discovering through trial and error what will grow for you in your specific space, and taking finding a way to work with that.

It may take several seasons to work this out. You’ll have some failures, but also successes.

I agree with Anne and Eric about healthy soil being fundamental and soil organic matter is the key.

It takes a lot of organic materials to build the soil. According to USDA, 200,000 lbs of organic materials added to the soil surface result in 1% stable soil organic matters in the top 6 inches of one acre ( several pounds per square foot). It is relatively easy for a garden area because people basically concentrate biomass from other area to give the garden a head start. It can be wood chips, straws, compost, leaves etc. The added OM will be consumed by soil microbes but at the same time, plants are putting carbons back in the form of root exudate or debris. This is a dynamic process. So it is equally important to manage the garden throughout the time to keep the balance or even increase the OM content. Through no till and returning organic materials to the field, there will be 0.1% percent gain of soil OM per year, or 1% in 10 years. If a gardener fails to do that, then he will have to keep replenishing year after year or the soil will lose fertility.

I made the mistake of not maintaining the soil OM properly and part of the garden was reverted back to its original poor and compacted state and plants were stunted. Now I learned the lessons and have been practicing multiple ways to build soil in the long term. Stronger and healthier plants simply followed effortlessly.


Edited again.
Here's the USDA info page, more in their links inside

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/ia/newsroom/features/NRCSEPRD1356810/#:~:text=Depending%20on%20your%20original%20organic,%2C%20that's%20a%201%25%20increase.

The USDA calculation is based on the weight of soil and an estimation of 10% of materials finally are converted into soil organic matters. They are looking at large scale operation like spreading bales of straws or shredding corn stalks by a combine. In a small scale back yard garden, one can make the conversion more effective such as tucking compost under wood chip mulch. At first I calculated 200,00 lbs per acre into about 5 lbs per square foot. But later I felt it's not necessary to take that number too literally. Nevertheless, that's still a lot of biomass!

The cane fruit always delivers for me.
I'm eating raspberries and black berries every day, and they propagate themselves.
All I do is tie them up to a central post, chopping and dropping any dead canes and nearby weeds.

My compost has become a seedbank for spagetti squash, butternut squash and cherry tomatoes.
Everywhere I use the compost from the chicken yard, I get volunteers.
I hope to maximize this to the point that food plants are the default "weeds".

My beds are 18"-24" deep and filled with carbonous matter.
This helps my plants survive my neglectful care.
Like a sponge, the organic matter seems to hold water for the plants.
Come fall, a layer of autum leaves protects and feeds the soil.

One pound of soil organic matters can hold 18 to 20 lbs of water. Besides, they improve soil structure so plant roots can go deeper and the plants will be more drought tolerant.

The drought and high temperature this summer put my garden to a test and the varieties that couldn't handle won't be planted next year.

I got rid of my raised beds yesterday. The thing everyone wants, good drainage, less compaction, and water retention seemed to be a negative here in Florida, the beds got too hot and they drained too rapidly. So I switched to ground style gardening with a layer of soil on top. Watering twice a day was becoming the opposite of resilient, although, my tomatoes aren't necessarily supposed to be growing now, I might make a permanent switch to becoming a tomatillo connoisseur since I used to be addicted to salsa verde, lots of different varieties out there.

I will try some lasagna gardening in the meantime. Doesn't seem to matter how much organic matter you provide here in Florida, the sand and heat eat it like nobody's business.

Most things in nature seem to have some sort of "purpose" or place in the bigger picture, like the destruction of hurricanes is countered by various benefits they bring to the natural landscape. Do you feel the higher temperatures and droughts are a product of our own negligence, and being somewhat unnatural, don't necessarily serve an intrinsic purpose, or do you feel that it's natural in its own way and inspiring adaptation in various ways, like increasing permaculture knowledge, focusing on selective plant varieties, etc.?

I'm revisiting this after a year--I see someone asked me about my response to the slug issue. I'd said mulch helped with temperature, moisture and weeds, but could bring slugs--which weren't a problem for me. Someone said, isn't the point of this thread how to respond to unusual problems that aren't usually a problem? Well. I rec all reading about a year recently when usually wet England was so extremely, ridiculously wet that slugs were everywhere, people had trouble growing anything. And slugs  can be issue here in WV for those in the bottomlands, but I live on a ridge where it never floods. And this year would be the test--it's been a very wet year. No slugs in my garden. I also have chickens, free range until this year when unfortunately the predators were so bad we gave up and fenced in a run. But the run is large enough that it still has lots of tall grass and weeds after a  coupler of months, and it incorporates the whole orchard and borders my main garden. But I have a small garden with a drainage problem, mostly solved by making tall raised beds--I haven't had slugs in there either, though some of my tomato cages are falling over, probably because the prongs lose purchase in the wet ground. So I have enough problems--I'd list squirrels stealing all my apples, pears and peaches at the top of unsolved problems, and tomato diseases next. But slugs are not on my problem list.

I'm also in Northern California, like Cumba but further north. We do have an unusual situation here. In winter we get rain that creates a lush forest and shrub ecosystem, with a full complement of critters like deer, mice, and so on. Every spring there are zillions of young ones, born during the period of lushness and plenty. (my home gets more rain than Seattle, but all in 3 to 5 months.) Then no rain at all for at least 6 months. So the animals are more desperate here than elsewhere, even in a normal year. When I planted a 100 sq ft bed of potatoes, I harvested about 3 tubers--the gophers got the rest.

Sometimes the mice, woodrats, etc (which are basically seed eaters) chew on garden plants because they are thirsty, not for food. They will chew into plant stems and even trees to get at the juicy cambium layer beneath the bark. The solution is to put out dishes of water in the garden. The drip trays made for setting under pots are perfect. I put them in all the garden beds, and if the bed has drip irrigation, I set one under an emitter to get refilled automatically. In addition to preventing losses from thirsty rodents, this attracts pest-eating frogs and lizards,  birds, gopher snakes, dragonflies, and myriad other forms of life. It is amazing how much diversity your garden can gain from even a small amount of open water. It is a magnet for life. (I also put a tray of water outside the garden for rattlesnakes, to avoid attracting them into the garden itself. I'm fine with them eating gophers on the hillside, but not with them hiding under the lettuce.)

Deer fencing works. Trapping gophers helps. An outdoor cat helps. Growing root crops in containers helps.  But in dry climates, all the repellent tricks--bad smells, blood and hair, threads or light wires, fuzzy-leaved plants, etc etc are pointless, because the surrounding wild areas are bone dry and shriveled.  For deer, it's not a choice between food here and food there; it's a choice between food here and nothing there.

When there is a lot of animal (or weed) pressure, or very extreme heat, transplants can be much easier, use less water to start, and establish more quickly than direct-sown plants. For one thing, you can pull mulch around transplants right away, instead of having to leave the soil bare and vulnerable while seeds germinate. And many animals that disturb the ground enough to kill newly-germinated spouts--from cutworms and moles below ground to birds and cats above--don't bother transplants. Like most things in the natural world, "It depends." That said, I prefer to sow squash, beans, and other large seeds in place, so they can develop deep roots right away. Smaller seeds are more problematic once the heat starts.

I would like to clarify a couple of words and concepts I see used in this thread and other gardening threads. It is useful to know the terms so you can say what you really mean:
When you plant a seed in the garden where it will be growing permanently, that is called direct-sowing.
Growing from seed means starting a plant from a seed, whether in a pot, flat, tray or directly in the garden.
The opposite of growing from seed is growing from cuttings, bulbs, slips, or roots (vegetative propagation, aka cloning.)
The opposite of direct-sowing is transplanting.

Growing vs buying transplants is a whole other discussion, involving quality. But they are both transplants, and probably both grown from seed.

Jeff, I typically don't try to do much gardening during the summer here in Hawaii, but I did this year, due to upcoming likely food shortages and global collapse...also because it's not like we can get in the car and drive to the next state if we run out of food/water/gas/whatever...so better to have something, if I can.

Anyway, in the summer I can usually rely on only a handful of perennials that survive the heat and humidity (I don't have sandy soil, but many close to the beaches here do...)

Stuff like edible hibiscus, chaya (need to cook), cassava (need to cook), katuk (Sauropus androgynous), cholesterol spinach (more heat tolerant and less fussy than its purple cousin, Okinawan spinach), sweet potato, moringa.  The only tomatoes worth the trouble are small ones--wild currant types do best; lucky if we get larger ones where I am (I'm not at elevation, so no cold nights that tomatoes like), and Malabar spinach.

You ought to be able to put some of those in your ground or raised bed and get a crop, although the perennials do take a bit longer to get established, so something like bok choy, cress, mizuna, and daikon/turnip greens or mustard greens will give you something to eat fast, and they'll take the heat, except the daikon, but you'd be eating the leaves during this hotter time of year...not the root.

Baker Creek has seeds for dwarf moringa; ECHO in Florida has cuttings of the perennial plants, I believe (they won't grow from seed).

And leafy greens especially prefer morning sun, with some shade during the latter half of the day, or they bolt too quickly.

David the Good on youtube has many examples of Florida growing, and there are also videos of tours of ECHO that have good info that should help you.  Persist, and success is possible, I promise!

Jeff Steez wrote:I got rid of my raised beds yesterday. The thing everyone wants, good drainage, less compaction, and water retention seemed to be a negative here in Florida, the beds got too hot and they drained too rapidly. ?

My garden has improved tremendously since we changed to having the paths slightly higher and the beds sunken a bit.  We are on a mild slope, so some of the beds are sunken on the uphill side and have a small berm on the downhill side to retain water,  like small terraces. . We also have leveled the beds as much as we can. One thing that gave us food for thought was that large-scale farmers have found it pays to laser-level their fields, even on the valley floor. Slight differences in height can translate to big differences in yield. You can see if you spray water on bare ground, it doesn't take much to make either a puddle or a high-and-dry spot. Even with drip, and even under the surface, water does run downhill.

The combination of sunken beds, mulch, and good drip irrigation has given us a very productive garden even in this drought. If we did not have access to irrigation water, we would need to grow native herbs instead of vegetables in summer, and concentrate on tree crops (including acorns,) wheat or other winter grains, and winter vegetable gardening, like the cultures around the Mediterranean did historically. They grew their staple protein crops--favas and garbanzos--in winter as well, which is the rainy season for those of us in Mediterranean climates.

The problem for us is that we are in a colder climate zone (7) than most of the Mediterranean, due to our elevation.
At our elevation, we can get frost until June, by which time the daytime temps are in the 90's. So planting summer crops early enough to take advantage of remaining moisture in the soil is usually not very possible.
For mountain peoples in Mediterranean climates, tree crops, wild or hardy greens, and meat animals have been the most dependable sources of resilient food through the centuries.

I think what these last two posts illustrate is that one-size-fits-all garden advice is not always useful. Even in one community, gardens differ--they differ more between geographic regions. I have raised beds in my main garden, one flat space for crops like corn and sorghum, and higher raised beds in a patch that has poor drainage. Since I made the tall beds there I've done better, but it still doesn't seem to work well for root crops. So I grow those in my main garden. I am on a ridge, so my problems with flooding are minimal, but here in West Virginia we get 40 inches of rain a year, pretty well spread through the year, so drought is not a common issue--and I have a pretty good irrigation system for the times when it is.

In the thread How to survive a year without summer

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
I plan for odd-weather by planting odd crops. I can't predict the future, but I can plan for events that are similar to the typical patterns of previous growing seasons. For example: The El Niño/La Niña weather patterns bring certain characteristics with them that I can plan for while planting.

For example, I grow many species of pulses: Some that thrive in cold weather. Some that thrive in hot weather. Some that thrive in rainy weather. Some that like it dry. Some quick maturing. Some long season. Between them all, it doesn't really matter what the weather is like in any particular year. Some species will thrive, even if others struggle. My system is inefficient. But it is incredibly redundant and provides tremendous food security, even though I can't predict ahead of time what foods will be available.

I do the same for all of my crops. I plant cold weather crops, and warm weather crops, and hot weather crops. I plant rain loving crops and drought tolerant crops. I plant greens, and seed-crops, and fruits, and nuts, and vegetables, and root crops, and grains, and pulses, and medicinals, and spices. I add more species every year to my garden, and to the nearby wildlands.

So to answer the question directly, about what I would do in a year without a summer, is that I would plant lots of the cooler weather crops, and not as many of the warmer weather crops.

I think he put that brilliantly. That approach has served me well in regions that most people have found very challenging to grow in. I would add that it involves:

A. Observing and learning how a wider amount of plant life grows
B. Learning how to diversify your plant environment to be more like very resilient natural environments
C. Learning to cook and eat and utilize a growing variety of foods each year

This makes not only your garden and yard more resilient, but also it makes you more resilient.

Mary Cook wrote: here in West Virginia we get 40 inches of rain a year, pretty well spread through the year, so drought is not a common issue--and I have a pretty good irrigation system for the times when it is.

Here's an illustration of the point Mary and several other folks have made about how much circumstances vary: My locality actually averages more rain--about 50"--than hers but we get it during the winter, with none at all in summer. That one fact is more important than climate zone (which is only about winter low temperatures) or even last frost date (which may be similar as well.) Yet on paper we would seem to have similar climates.

Alan Savory's brittleness scale is the relevant measure here. Mary's climate, with 40 inches a year, is a more resilient climate regime, with both moisture and decay spread through the year. My climate, with 40 inches in a drought year and more like 60 in a wetter one, is more fragile, less resilient, because the moisture comes during a short period. Summer is the dormant season for most natives here; they grow during fall and spring. Both growth and decay (natural decomposition or compost, if you will) stop during the summer when humidity may be only 20 to 30%.

But, because we have plenty of warmth and sun, and plenty of moisture during the growing season, the biggest issue is disease, especially fungal diseases.

Both James and Mary make great points above. I grew up in the PNW, which is like James describes. Water comes mostly in winter when you your garden doesn't really "need" 40-60" of rain! So you learn to grow things that can withstand being waterlogged all winter, and then drying out in the summer. It's a challenge.

Then I moved to the desert SW.  This year was the first year in the desert where we had a really great monsoon season. It was incredible, rain all summer.  Many people here received 10-18"  over the past 4 months, which is a LOT for here. (I'm in a spot that averages 12" per year.)

So this was my first growing year experiencing summer rain and the things that happen with that - like the incredible fungal and viral issues that can affect tomatoes!  In Oregon, I could water tomatoes overhead if I had to, no issues.  Here, all my tomatoes except 1 variety (Wild Galapagos cherry, L. cheesmaniae, a different species than most tomatoes grown for food) got a terrible blight and are barely recovering now.  So turned out this was a good year to try out the Wild Galapagos species, which has been producing tasty yellow cherries all through the humid weather.  I am growing 8 other tomato varieties that all succumbed, many of them with a long list of those disease resistance abbreviations after their varietal names... So I finally get it when people in the SE say it can be hard to grow tomatoes.

I also had the unique (to me) experience of broccoli plants rotting.  Rotting brassicas! In summer! How incredible that was to a person from the PNW, where brassicas grow like weeds and many varieties can survive the extreme wet of winter there. (The ones that rotted here were De Cicco, an Italian hot climate heirloom. I had another variety that did not rot. And most of the De Ciccos are recovering.)  Brassicas don't normally rot in the desert SW, though they can be challenging to grow for heat reasons, hence why I am growing De Cicco the heat tolerant heirloom. But it apparently is not tolerant of extreme wetness mixed with heat in this climate/location...

So I think I finally have an inkling of understanding of the challenges growers east of the Rockies have with their summer rains.  Regional climate is radically different and affects our methods and strategies.  

And that brings me to one more resilience lesson I learned this year - try growing a different species than your normally grow of X thing, if it exists.  It may end up the sole producer in a hard year.  Joseph Lofthouse's comment above speaks to that in more depth.

Thanks everyone for sharing! Great thread.

For what it's worth--likely not to Kim, as this year was a fluke. But for those who struggle with tomato diseases, fungal diseases--including in varieties "with a long list of abbreviations for disease resistance after their names." Mostly those don't include early blight and late blight, my main problems, also occasionally septoria blight. After my first year here, I get hit with these every year about the time the first load of tomatoes is ripening in early July. But I've now found, I think, a way to get enough tomatoes to can anyway. Yes I do what sources say--rotate tomato family crops as well as I can, mulch, try to separate the plants, prune the lower leaves off as they grow since these diseases work their way up the plants from the ground. But also--two hybrids, Defiant and Stellar, seem to actually have strong resistance to late blight and decent resistance to early blight. Defiant is early so it produces the first wave of tomatoes for canning, and then Persimmon (a large yellow tasty one that doesn't have good resistance but produces a lot of tomatoes right in the middle of the season) comes on along with Stellar. I also grew some paste tomatoes but haven't found a really disease resistant one.

What a terrific group of posts packed w ideas & successful experiences.
And reading all of these I’ve been inspired to get to work on a food forest. I kinda cleared an area on the edge of our woods but the invasive weeds are brutal. So I’ll work on continuing to clear these, get some areas plantable & start small…maybe raspberries, blackberries & rhubarb.
The area I cleared is in the woods to the left of the tree.

I guess my best strategy is to spread my bets.

I have in ground stuff....more and more just root crops because of what Jeff was saying about Florida.
The sun eats up the organic matter, flooding can be an issue, and non root type crops just struggle no matter what.
I'm deliberately on fast draining land because of flooding issues otherwise.

I grow in containers. Mostly things like tomatoes peppers, edible gourds (regular squashes stand zero chance here) alpine strawberries etc.

the containers are all sitting in water, everything from those inexpensive plastic kiddie pools to hand dug  trenches lined with 10 mil plastic with landscape cloth over the plastic to minimize punctures..
the ones in the trenches have fertilizer added (Steve Solomon's DIY complete organic fertilizer ) to the potting soil and just water in the trenches because it would be quite expensive and time consuming to mix hydro solution for all of them.

The ones in kiddie pools are sitting in hydroponic solution like the Kratky method.

Watering is via overhead sprinklers where needed for the in ground stuff. Not automated but close enough, throw a valve for the particular section and go.

I have a greenhouse that is self watering/fertilizing via a dutch bucket setup with reservoirs and pumps below ground level so the solution can drain back.

I have every kind of low maintenance fruit tree or bush I can find space for. Mulberries, persimmons. eleagnus family like goumis, blueberries, blackberries, etc. etc.

I grow leaf lettuce and seedlings in my living room under lights.
currently planting the gone to seed lettuces from that in the gardens to see if they'll reseed every year.

Some neighbors moved off, abandoning a litter of kittens. My dog found them and insisted we rescue them.
Best decision ever. All rodent problems terminated (there were MAJOR problems) and even the birds stay away from the fruit trees.

They're also extremely entertaining.

So how's all that working?

The in ground stuff is a lot of labor hauling/placing compost but I dearly love a lot of the root crops that result.
Soon I may be too old to do it. I'm in my early 70s now but we'll see how that goes.

I suspect I will end up just doing the pools/trenches and the greenhouse in a few years.
Already experimenting with growing my root crops that way.

All the containers are a lot of work come time to replant them but minimal effort otherwise.
They offer some nice options in that you can move them for bad weather or a better spot to grow.

The kiddie pools and trenches for containers are working better than I dared hope for, just needing to watch the water and nutrient levels in the pools and just the water level in the trenches.

PH of the water has been stable in the mid sixes. I credit that to using a lot of fine pine bark in the soil mix for the containers.

When I first had the greenhouse going I was using perlite as the grow medium and fighting rising PH constantly.

Using straight pine bark instead of the perlite stabilized the PH and it's been no trouble since.
A side benefit was a lot of partially composted pine bark end of the grow season to mix up into potting mix for the regular containers after solarizing it.

Minimizing the effort required to water things has been priceless.

A lot of my efforts now are towards tinkering to find better methods and trying out as many cultivars of things I like to see if they'll survive Florida.

I also try to grow proven cultivars across a few of the different systems, weather permitting, and I grow a backup set of the ones I really like to have.

I'm fortunate in that I'm retired and have had enough time money to set these things up, although a lot of it was improvised inexpensively.

I'm nowhere near self sufficient, but, it's proving to fairly consistently provide something that's high quality food for most of my meals.

Long term goals are finding things that may eventually work together to turn  my little place here into a zero input self sufficient food forest, be that trees, bushes, perennials, or things that will re-seed themselves yearly or bi-annually.

To those who say growing squashes is impossible in your area I might have a suggestion for you as a lot of people say the same thing here in Hawaii. First you gotta dig the hole deep and refill it giving some good organic matter, then you cover with black weed mat making an X above the hole, cover the surrounding area in more weed mat, plant seed directly into ground and use an old water bottle as a mini green house for protection, cover the plant in bug netting simply by draping it over it, on mornings where you have time go out and hand pollinate some of the female flowers and trim back any vines that will be growing past where your bug netting reaches too. Never water overhead on the leaves, always down by the stem. Plant anything that loves Mediterranean climate on other areas of the black weed mat if you want and they will thrive.