Back in August I visited two families in central Oregon that grow incredible vegetable gardens. Jim and Ardyce Swift, in Terrebonne, extend their season with two greenhouses for winter vegetables. They showed me snapshots of tomatoes and strawberries ready to pick in the middle of winter. Of course, their propane bill for the greenhouse is more than for their house. Lance and Jennifer Barker grow most of the vegetables they eat in their Bear Valley garden at 5000 ft. elevation about 20 miles south of John Day. Officially, they have no frost-free months. Lance is the primary gardener and over the years he’s learned which varieties work and numerous techniques for extending the season.

When I got home I was motivated to put some effort into growing fall and winter vegetables in our own garden. Bellingham has a pretty easy climate for fall crops, but it’s important to get them in the ground soon enough. Fall gardening doesn’t mean planting in the fall, but harvesting then. Planting seeds in mid-summer means the soil is nice and warm so they germinate quickly as long as you keep the soil moist. That means daily watering since we don’t get rain in the summer. I had to break my deep-seated prejudice against watering every day, but I’d seen what it could do in lots of east-side gardens this year.

On August 12 I spaded, cultivated, and worked a couple of wheelbarrows full of organic matter into three of our vegetable beds. Then I planted ‘Garden Babies Butterhead’ Lettuce, ‘Bright Lights’ Rainbow Chard, ‘Romeo’ Round Baby Carrots (all from Renee’s Garden) in one bed. In another bed I planted ‘Tyee Hybrid’ Spinach and ‘Early Dividend Hybrid’ Broccoli (both from Territorial Seed Company). Along the garden fence I planted ‘Cascadia’ Snap Peas (Territorial) and ‘Heirloom Cutting Mix’ Lettuce (Renee’s).

It’s been a month, and we’re just about ready to start eating spinach, chard, and lettuce thinnings. Here’s part of the spinach patch:

A week later, on August 19 I prepared and planted another bed and worked a fall crop into holes in a summer bed. I put in patchs of ‘Winterbor Hybrid’ Kale, ‘Bull’s Blood’ Beets, ‘Altaglobe’ Radishes, and ‘Melissa Hybrid’ Cabbage (all from Territorial). They’re all going strong, too.

The organic matter I worked into the beds included partly-composted leaves and garden debris. My compost piles almost never get hot enough to kill all the weed seeds, so I’ve had to pull lots of little weeds from around my vegetables. It really doesn’t take long to pull them and gently cultivate the soil with my fingers when the weeds are tiny. The work provides a nice break from sitting in the office working on captioning photos. I also had to put down slug bait since new little vegetable plants are a slug delicacy.

Now that the plants are coming along, I’ve got new photo subjects as well. It’s rather nice to be able to grow my own subjects, and then when they’re big enough pick and eat them. Shooting in my garden forces me to look closely for the weeds and get them out of the way. I also select for the nicest-looking plants. They may taste the same with a few bug holes, but they don’t look as good. I get down close to ground level to photograph the new plants since I think they look better from the side than from straight down. Recently, I’ve been using my Canon 90mm TS-E tilt-shift lens to control the plane of focus, sometimes with an extension tube to get closer.

It’s September and we’re smack in the middle of our short tomato season. I’ll admit it, we’re tomato snobs. If a tomato doesn’t come out of our garden we don’t eat it. So for too many months of the year we go without fresh tomatoes. Then when they’re in season we pig out on them. When we have too many to eat fresh we freeze, can, or dry them to enjoy through the winter months. As frost threatens we’ll pick everything off the vines and either let them ripen on the counter or eat fried green tomatoes. Some years we can still be eating fresh garden tomatoes at Thanksgiving.

Bellingham can be a slightly challenging place to grow tomatoes because we don’t get a lot of summer heat. Our garden is situated in the triangle between two streets so the microclimate is slightly warmer than some other vegetable gardens in town. We grow our tomatoes from seed, starting them inside in the spring and then transplanting them out in May. We use wall-o-waters around them to get them going. This year we were a little slow getting them in the ground so we didn’t have any ripe tomatoes until after the first of August. We like to have them by the last week of July.

In any case, we’re now eating tomatoes as fast as we can to keep up with the bounty of our eight or ten plants. We grow ‘Sungold’ (pictured) and ‘Sweet Million’ cherry tomatoes along with ‘Siletz’, a good slicer, and ‘Oregon Spring’ which is tasty and a little firmer than ‘Siletz.’ We get all our seed from Territorial Seed.

The ‘Sungold’ cherry tomatoes are definitely one of our favorites. They’re very sweet, flavorful, and just the right size to pop the whole thing in your mouth at one time.

One of the advantages of the garden as photo studio is choosing which plants to grow, and being able to shoot conveniently whenever the conditions are just right. Sometimes I have to ask Natalie to hold off picking the produce until I’ve finished photography. These particular tomatoes were photographed about a week ago and are long gone. But there are more on the vines ready to be picked and enjoyed.

It’s been a busy summer with many long days out photographing gardens. Now that mid-August is here, I have a little time to catch up on captioning and updating web galleries. I’m running about a month behind in captioning, so just finished preparing the galleries from my July trip to Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. I uploaded over a thousand new images to Inland Northwest Gardening last night and they’re now ready for viewing. I photographed in 22 different gardens between July 6 and 15.

This nice waterfall and pond are in Mary Carson’s Coeur d’Alene garden.

I’m working on shooting for a new book about gardening east of the Cascade mountains. Since I live on the west side, it means long road trips and concentrated photography to maximize the return on my time and travel expenses. I try to photograph at least a couple of gardens a day, one in the early morning and one in the evening. That’s the fun and creative part of this business.

When I return home then I have to edit and caption the take, which can require almost as much time as the original photography. At this point in 2007 I’ve already created considerably more new images than I did in all of 2006 or 2005, years when I was not shooting a book or doing a lot of travelling.

Many of these new garden images are online on the Inland Northwest Gardening website. The site will continue to grow as I keep shooting and captioning.

One of the challenges of any kind of outdoor photography is dealing with the weather. I’m in the midst of a week-long photography session in the Spokane, Washington area at the moment and nearly froze my fingers off this morning while working in a garden under seriously overcast skies.

This week’s overcast is in strong contrast to the weather I had earlier in May while photographing gardens in the Canadian Okanagan. That week I had one day of partly-cloudy skies (meaning the clouds skittered by, giving alternately sunny and bright overcast conditions) and three days of pure blue sky and bright sunshine.

Ideal weather for garden photography is a bright, high overcast, with enough sun coming through the clouds for soft shadows, but not so much that the contrast between lit and shaded areas is extreme. Unfortunately, it’s not often that I’m blessed with these ideal conditions. I tend to work early in the morning and late in the afternoon for garden landscapes. Mid-day is a good time to take a break and refresh — unless it’s a cloudy day which often means starting later and working during what should be high noon if the sun were out. It’s difficult to predict, and I’ve learned not to completely believe the weatherman.

Sometimes I just have to make do with what I find. Today, that meant waiting around in the morning for the sky to brighten up enough to be worth going out. I had time to read both the Sunday and Monday newspapers while waiting. Then I took an early lunch break when it started raining on me. The light was definitely soft, but with the combinations of plants in the gardens where I was working I was able to make some nice images. It wasn’t quite the light I would have ordered, but it worked.

Late this afternoon I started shooting in a park-like private garden with an incredible collection of Hostas and some nice small conifers. The sun broke through the clouds briefly and I thought I was going to have about three hours of nice light. However, the storm clouds soon rolled back in, the sky darkened, and rain threatened. I packed up and returned to my lodging to wait for another day. Soon after I left the sky opened and a thunderstorm dropped hail, winds picked up to 30 mph, and the temperature plummeted 10 degrees in 30 minutes at the public radio station I was listening to while driving across town.