The sun was warm this weekend, but winter is coming. People are putting their gardens to bed. And gardeners hope we do not have another winter like last year.
Sharon McEntee has been gardening in Sutton for 43 years. She built up the original thin soil with compost and loads of topsoil. She prefers a saddle hoe to pesticides. She uses organic methods to grow flowers and vegetables. She worried last winter about how many perennials would die as the cold wind whipped across the bare ground.
McEntee lost about one third of her perennials. One third of her peonies were gone. The lady’s mantle ground cover was nearly dead. The Pulmonaria struggled. They eventually nudged an inch above the ground.
The clumps of day lilies that normally produced over one hundred blossoms managed only three. McEntee lost a 15 year old apple tree, a cherry tree, and two crabapple trees.
The late spring and cold soils affected the vegetables too. Row covers helped the beets, carrots, and lettuce, but everything just seemed slower and smaller. Peas just took forever.
It wasn’t all bad news for McEntee. At least the cold winter and late spring knocked down the slugs in her garden.
The voles were fierce though. McEntee pulled the beets about two weeks early. It was going to be small beets or no beets the way the voles were eating through them.
Craig and Jenny Baer have been gardening in Chickaloon for 44 years. They were putting their garden to bed last weekend. The potatoes were dug. The carrots were pulled. The remaining tomatoes will be tucked into a cardboard box to ripen.
They didn’t lose any fruit trees. However, small green fruit line the lower limbs of an apple tree. The garden came along more slowly than usual. They thought overall it was a normal season except for the late peas.
Garlic bulbs will go in next week. Craig has a system of mulching that may have saved garlic from last winter’s freeze. He covers the garden bed with a layer of mown leaves, then straw and maybe hay, then wet leaves to keep it all from blowing away.
But the winter did not reduce the slugs in Chickaloon. There were lots of slugs and cutworms this year. Local gardeners attribute the abundance of the pests to the rainy summer.
The winter weather did not damage plants at the Baer’s. However, they endured three nights of freezing temperatures in August. Raised beds and two layers of row cover helped the gardens make it through.
McEntee said the August temperatures never got that cold in Sutton. There was no frost by mid-September. Both are unusual. The warmer weather has given her a longer growing season. It gave some of the vegetables time to make up for the slow start.
The impacts of climate change weigh on McEntee. It’s not just the garden. The deeply frozen ground heaved up this spring and caused picture windows to crack. Those windows had been in place for forty years and will be expensive to replace.
McEntee grew up in the hopeful generation. She remembers the first time the Earth was seen as a blue marble floating against the backdrop of black space. She remembers when Earth Day became a holiday.
Now the Earth is reminding us that she needs us just as we need her. The orderly balance of seasons is perhaps unbalanced. The Earth reminds with wildfires that rise nearly a mile into the sky. She reminds us when apple trees die in frozen ground and when a day lily that blooms in June provides its blossom in the fall.
There is a pattern to the end of garden season. The hoses are drained and hung up, the beds are mulched, the compost bins are filled. The days are getting shorter. Our patch of Earth is out of balance as we tilt away from the sun.
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Kendra Zamzow reported this Page Two article and yours truly, Lee Henrikson produced it. If you have an idea for a Page 2 topic, please email us at page2@radiofreepalmer.org.
That’s it for today and the news on Page Two on Wednesday September 16, 2026.
Photo: Gate at Craig and Jenny Baer’s garden in Chickaloon by K. Zamzow