Plague Year:Utah's Fifth Year of Drought

Plague Year :Utah's Fifth Year of Drought
Joan Katherine Shaw

Coreopsis with Butterflies

Coreopsis "Early Sunrise" with Two Butterflies (Larry Cannon)

This summer of 2003 marks the fifth year of drought in Utah. What's more, the drought has been accompanied (or indeed enhanced) by some of the highest temperatures on record and includes one of the longest heat waves here in history. To a gardener born and raised among the green and rainy vistas of the east coast, this seems the final blow.

According to the NOAA/CPC US Drought Monitor (http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html), the border between northern Utah and Idaho -- and DragonGoose Farm is right in the middle of it -- is in "Exceptional Drought," the worst that can be said in drought language. Moreover, little rain is expected over the northern Rockies in the short term, though I suspect we're all free to pray for an above-average snowfall this winter.

Sigh.

Bad enough (I think each morning, awakening to unrelenting sunshine), to be winding up my life in semi-arid Cache Valley, Utah, but drought on top of that? No matter that I've lived in this valley for nearly forty years, I still yearn for the green hills and tall trees and sudden summer showers of my childhood.

Moreover, with Bear Lake at its lowest point in years, we here in Lewiston are threatened with a shut down of our irrigation canal as early as the first week in September, and with it the comforting tick-tick-tick of the irrigation sprinkler heads spreading a welcome largesse of ditch water on our fields and flower beds.

Each day I pull up the Internet's weather sites first thing in the morning, often in the afternoon, and yet again before bed, watching in vain for a break in the drought -- meaning the prediction of a good, soaking rainfall that will continue for perhaps an entire month.

Or two.

Or three.

I've come to hate the goony looking suns grinning on Wunderground.com's five-day forecast, but not much more than the hot yellow discs on Weather.com and the daisy-like yellow circles on AccuWeather. Every increase in the clouds above fills my parched soul with hope. Every forecast of possible thunderstorms -- be it accompanied by only a 20% chance of rain -- has me watching the sky and the Internet radar maps again and again during the day. Reading advice to subscribers of the local newspapers such as, "You live in a desert, get over it!" raises my blood pressure twenty points. I've followed some of the urgings of western-based nurseries to ease some of the beds into xeriscape mode, but much of the plant material offered looks too much like flowers suffering greatly to hold much charm for me.

Rose Nearly Wild before being hit with powdery mildew

The Rose, 'Nearly Wild" before being struck with powdery mildew

Various Plagues
Powdery Mildew
Add to this lack of rain the outbreak of diseases never before known on certain plants here on the farm before this summer. Powdery mildew, for instance. I mean powdery mildew even on the weeds! Melanie and I were taking a puzzled look at a group of the modern 'Nearly Wild' roses, a low-growing variety with lovely pink single blossoms lightening in the centers (shown above) that I'd planted some years before near the sprawling R. Eglantine whose blossoms they resemble. What we were puzzled about was the coating of powdery mildew on at least half their leaves. I've seen mildew occasionally on our Gallicas further west around the carport. Gallicas are prone to this problem. But I had never seen such a thing on disease-resistant varieties like the 'Nearly Wild'.

Then Melanie happened to look sideways and spied a tall plant of the weed, Houndstongue, flourishing near
the formidably prickly branches of our big Eglantine, and it was literally covered with powdery mildew. "Ah!" she cried. "There's the vector!" and she yanked it up by its roots. Since that discovery I've found mildewed Houndstongue all over the place threatening every rose anywhere near it. Also gray with mildew are our sweet forget-me-nots, patches of common violets, and the lower leaves of phlox and delphinium. Even some of the lilac are now showing mildew on their leaves.

Shirlaine and Jodie Cutting back drought-stricken lilac

Shirlaine and Jodie cutting back (among many other things) a drought-stricken lilac

    Iron chlorosis
Iron chlorosis or "yellow-leaf disease" -- caused by a lack of iron in the soil -- has been on the rise as well, with many of our roses and shrubs afflicted, as well as trees in as dissimilar groups as Acer and Populus and even our tough-as-nails Nanking Cherry bushes. My days seem filled with questions -- how can the soil lose iron like that? Is it because a constant diet of ditch water due to lack of that blessed rain from the heavens is making the soil alkaline? Consultations with reference works and our extension agent opened up a bewildering range of possibilities. To mention one chlorotic example, Populus tremuloides, our native Aspen tree, originates in the mountains where (1) it is cooler (yellowing due to extreme heat) and (2) the soil is more acidic (yellowing due to lack of iron). Also, because of the heat and the worry about trees drying out, yellowing could be caused by too much water as well as too little. On top of this, aspen suffers around here from Birch Tree Borer which also turns the leaves yellow. Finally, and I know this to be possible, Black Spot tends to make aspen leaves yellow, too.

Well, that takes care of the aspens, though I still don't know which path I should take to help them.
    Being Bugged
Then there are the insects. Following one of the mildest Cache Valley winters in years, we've been visited in this summer of 2003 with an algae bloom of strawberry root weevil. They've rendered the edges of our rose and lilac leaves into a lacey froth -- and this is everywhere on the grounds -- in the beds, up and down the drives, on the hills. The leaves and blossoms of our green-eyed daisies turn brown along the edges prematurely -- what bug could do this? Or is it lack of water, a surfeit of sun, a disease? The extension and garden outlet people report being beseiged with with questions like these.

The thrips seem to thrive in this weather, too -- regardless of the dry air -- browning off the 'Madame Louis leVeque' buds, so that spraying is a constant occupation and, I'm sad to say, bringing with it little positive effect. I keep wondering where the spittle bugs get all the spit they deposit in crotches all over my Meidiland 'Alba' roses across the drive. Moreover, Aphids have curled the wild plum leaves into clumps, and beetles are shredding the hollyhocks as they've never done before. Then there are the grasshoppers. This year constituting a plague in southern Utah, grasshoppers also rise up in hordes in front of my lawn mower here in Cache Valley and shred Melanie's pot plants in front of the granary. Gnats are everywhere, of course, as well as a new invasion -- a small species of brownish dragonfly has moved into the area. Well, dragonflies are fairly harmless to the plants (I think), and happily for us, lethal to gnats and mosquitoes, but they're yet another new phenomenon in this summer of 2003.

    The Deer as Insect
The hungry deer, too, are ambling up from the river bottom below us, mainly under cover of darkness, but often in broad daylight. A doe and her two spotted fauns meander around 24/7. They especially enjoy our lilies. I've managed to accumulate a few hundred of these lovely plants but have had scant enjoyment of them this summer. Just this morning I went out at dawn to photograph a group of 'Casa Blanca' lilies in the middle of our white garden only to find a four-point buck (the other half of our doe and fauns?) in the midst of them, placidly nibbling away. Bounding off after my outraged roar, he'd left me only a bedraggled half a lily on the very edge.

If I'd had a gun, if I knew how to use it, if it were legal, if I hadn't known I'd have suffered untold anguish at having ended the life of such a beautiful beast -- I would have shot him. Why they don't go out into the field to fill themselves up with alfalfa and let my flowers alone is a question I should ask someone in USU's wildlife department.

Weeds too
Alas, throughout this carnage, bindweed, new growth dandelions, prickly lettuce, burdock, plantain, pigweed, quack grass, bryony, bittersweet nightshade, and all manner of thistles continue to shoulder their way into the beds. These thuggish weeds appear to be no great temptation to our browsing deer, unfortunately. And they appear to thrive in this weather. Bindweed's tangle of roots -- the Mother Ship, so to speak -- spends the droughty summer as far as eight feet under the surface, sucking up whatever moisture is down there, cool as cucumbers. Bryony, of course, has its enormous melon-like root to nourish it, and bittersweet nightshade's runners take over the soil in all directions, with or without the blessed rain to nourish them.

Blue Campanula, struggling to be seen through bindweed and dandelions

In fact, whatever the weather, about mid-July, the garden here at Dragongoose Farm moves into its jungle phase. Good and bad and downright ugly, it all needs to be cut back, dug up, and most of it put on the compost heap. A few of the over population of flowers and bulbs we transplant out into the wildflower border which has in its fourth year now become more of an eclectic mass of castoff perennials. I haven't, so far, put our fecund iris out there, bedraggled as they are from the drought, for fear of having a wildflower border solidly packed with them. And, because I've run out of fellow-gardeners in the valley who would be happy, or at least resigned, to accepting our oversupply, I'm faced now with throwing them away. A painful course for me to take -- to throw flowers away.

The yellow blossoms of coreopsis (shown at the top of the page) make a spectacular display during late june and early july. But, given a big enough swath of them, by late July and early August they can make any flower border look like an unmade bed. They need to be cut back in a hurry so that the surrounding gloriosa daisies and gallardia can be seen through the thickets of drying stems. The drought, needless to point out, has made all this going-to-seed many times worse. In fact, this is the first summer in memory that I've started looking forward to winter on the first of August.

The coreopsis shown at the head of this piece in June are here being cut back by Shirlaine -- and none too soon

Hoping for rain,

Joan

Joan Katherine Shaw

August 2003

Head photo by Larry Cannon
All other photos by Joan Katherine Shaw

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