Cool nights in the garden



Our greenhouse

Our latitude here is 52 N and our altitude is 2750' above sea level.  We get lots of long, warm days but our nights stay cool.  A typical mid-summer day can start out at 5 C (note the Canadian way that I mix metric and imperial?), go up to 30 C or more, then end up back at 5 C.  This creates wonderful conditions for people and animals who are happy in the daytime heat yet sleep comfortably.  It's also great for cool-weather crops like peas and lettuce, but it makes the heat-loving crops a challenge to grow.


Peas in the garden

Tomatoes, for example, stop growing below 12 C.  In our brief, 90-day frost-free season, we might only get half a dozen nights above that temperature all summer.  Even in our greenhouse (which is unheated), the tomatoes grow so slowly that the fruit hardly starts to ripen before we're heading into the autumn's frosty nights.  I don't try to grow our full supply of tomatoes but just put in a few plants for treats to snack on.

This year, the weather has been so cool that I don't know if any tomatoes at all will ripen!



Knee-high tomatoes in the greenhouse