Going Native: Adapting to My New Climate

Learning to live with what nature gives you

This is a year I learned to love what is.

Our growing season is winding down here in Minnesota, and although this one is longer than I’d expected, the light is fading and plant growth is slowing — as is life, mercifully, after a frenzied summer.

Obviously, this is far different from garden life in my former home of California. Far different.

There, I lived in a land of endless plenty. Something came ripe, either in my garden or at the farmer’s market, maybe 48 of the 52 weeks each year. This easy access to ripe produce lulls you. California is the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Not so here in the snowy north.

For a while, I tried to carry on as I did before. Tending my seeds saved from years of growing in California. It’ll be OK, I thought.

As the days tick by, I am faced with the reality that my favorite plant varieties, happy in Sacramento, simply aren’t suited to the relative chill of St. Paul. Many, like my squash from Sonora and beans from Chihuahua, will run out of time before frost kills them.

I already pulled my squash. They had not set at all by Labor Day. Most most winter squash need at least 50 days from the time they set to maturity, and you can’t count on 50 frost-free days after Labor Day here. So out they went.

My Chihuahuan beans I left in because even though I knew I’d never get those pretty dry beans, I could still eat them as green beans. Better than nothing, eh?

Safe to say it’s been an adjustment.

Now that it’s all over but the shoveling, I am turning my eyes to the north and west for inspiration, instead of my beloved lands 1500 miles to the south.

Out there, in the Dakotas, live several groups of indigenous people who were and are great farmers: the Mandan, Arikara and Hidatsa. And even the more-local groups, like the Dakota and Ojibwe, have saved seed for crops for generations.

Find your native seeds and you’ll be a better gardener.

So I’ve started my search for next year. I’ve already found sources for beans among the Hidatsa, a sunflower with big, edible seeds from the Arikara, and several kinds of corn and squash. There’s even a Lakota tomato.

I’ll experiment with these in 2025 and start tinkering in the years to come. I’ll need to make a few decisions, however, because both beans and squash will cross if you grow multiple vareties close to each other; when this happens, the saved seed won’t grow true the following year.

So right now I am leaning on starting with a Hidatsa shield bean, a pretty white bean with a tan, mottled “shield” pattern on one side. Still thinking about the squash, as there are many options. A blue Hubbard volunteered in my yard this year, but I am not at all sure I want to grow 30-pound squashes on the regular…

My yard is too small for corn, but I have a friend with acreage outside the Twin Cities I might be able to convince to grow some native corn varieties. I really want to make my own chacales — roasted, dried, cracked corn.

I learned about chacales in Mexico, but turns out the local indigenous people did basically the same thing to preserve their corn. And a cool preservation technique I know as bichicoris is also done up here, too. With this, you peel a ripe winter squash and then use a knife to carefully cut the squash into a spiral, which you then dry. That way you have squash all winter. I was stunned to see bichicoris strung up in a restored Mandan village I once visited near Bismarck, North Dakota.

The bottom line here is to grow varieties best suited to your climate. That means fast growing, cold-tolerant plants here. I did learn that smaller hot chiles, like a chile pequin, will grow well in a pot in Minnesota; the plant’s next test will be to survive inside during our long winter.

There’s only so much you can hold onto when you make such a radical life shift, and that holds true in the garden, too. Time to embrace the north, the Great Plains, the new reality. It is a reality that can be every bit as fruitful as my past incarnation, maybe even moreso because the harsh seasons hone the senses, making me more attentive, open — grateful — to what they give me.

It’s that gratitude that feels new. When I pull out a jar of homemade jelly, crack some hazelnuts, slice open a squash or simmer some beans, I’ll know this came from hard work done in those long days before the snow. Somehow that feels better than plucking a fig off a tree in sunny California.