They tell us that our valley is the "banana belt" of Montana. Gardening in this 100-mile-stretch, from Missoula at the north to near Sula at the south (our town of Hamilton, roughly in the middle) is protected by mountains on all sides. They say it is warmer than most other open and Arctic-swept regions of the state. Mountains are everywhere you look in the Bitterroot Valley. (BTW, so are restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and other merchants, many more than this older map suggests.) Nevertheless, until the last couple of days, we've had a very cool month of June 2012. We may be listed in USDA Cold-Hardiness Zone of 5a, same as Illinois and parts of Iowa (for plants surviving lowest winter temps of -15 to -20 degrees). But it just takes one unusual weather event to make a big difference. Banana belt, shmanana belt. We decide to look for some protection. I've brought five tomato plants -- started from seed in St. Louis. They need help on these 38-degree nights. I punt. I did pack three Wall O Water "season extenders" (http://www.wall-o-water.com/). And so, on a sun-warmed south side of our old garage, I plant the five tomatoes and position their cages so that every other one takes one of the plastic tubes designed with walls of empty cylinders. When they are firmly in place, I fill each cylinder with water; sun warms it and keeps plants and soil snug overnight. I hope that a little residual heat helps the two unprotected plants. So far so good! Two of the five plants are fruiting. The others have flowers. They've been babied for weeks, but they seem not to have missed a beat. Wall O Water around a tomato plant, against the old garage's south side. We just took the walls down a few days ago when daytime temps soared into the low 80s and nighttime ones were upper 40s, now 50s. An article in the local Ravalli Republic (also Lee Enterprises-owned, my fellow Post-Dispatchers) talks about the struggles of local small farms, in this and other years. Says Bitterroot Organic's Mike Duda, "If you're serious about growing in western Montana, then you have to have infrastructure. Hoop-houses, greenhouses and cold frames are essential for even serious kitchen gardening if you want to be successful in this kind of a climate." (More at http://ravallirepublic.com/business/local/article_983d7c2a-bb44-11e1-8372-001a4bcf887a.html.) I think the water-walls count. And we plan to further bolster our version of micro-climate. First, we pull knee-high weeds out of a little, slightly raised bed just south of the tomatoes and along the alley (believe me, I joined Alex in doing a lot of this work). Then we buy bags of a local favorite, Boost, from the helpful cows at Huls Dairy (www.hulsdairy.com/products.htm) and spread the aged manure on top of weed-free(?!) soil. An incredibly nice guy we meet named Wes volunteers to rotor-till it in for us (on Father's Day morning, no less). Pulling knee-high weeds out of the plot. And we extend an existing fence to screen the alley and, we hope, protect plants a bit more from cold, west winds. I stain the cedar boards. Alex designs and puts the fence together over a series of days. Oh, and the fence may help keep deer out of this patch. When we saw them browsing our yard last summer, always they came in from the alley. We're so clever, we'll outwit those critters -- haha! (Did I mention that the north side of the yard is wide open?) We begin to plant -- peppers, eggplant, zucchini, crook-neck squash and lettuce even though it may be getting daytime hot for tender greens. We also start a small compost bin from old wire fencing that we find in the garage (this view is looking south, at neighbors' Pat and John's sweet little cottage over the fence). We visit several local garden centers and decide that K & S Greenhouse in nearby Corvallis is our favorite (http://www.ksgreenhouse.com/). It was recommended by our friend Mary Alice Holloway. We love the veggie starts and herbs there, but spectacular containers and hanging baskets of annual flowers steal the show. Blooms-a-plenty at K & S Greenhouse, Corvallis, Mt. We also visit other gardens. Our friend Eric Milner is following the tradition of his parents -- mostly his mother Doris -- with a huge vegetable garden in a clearing on the family hill overlooking the valley. Eric's ambitious, deer-proofed vegetable garden, watered from snow melt in an adjacent ditch, with tomatoes secured in great old wooden cages. And on a Saturday in town, we see a garden of a totally different kind. Volunteers with the Ravalli County Museum at the Old Courthouse have installed a Lewis and Clark native-plant garden in shady spots on either side of the museum entrance. Native shade plants, the likes of which Lewis and Clark saw, even collected. Shade-living natives on the other side of the museum entrance. I sat in on a meeting last year when changes for this and two other sites were being discussed and, having just seen the amazing Lewis and Clark collection inside the museum, I asked if anyone had thought of a native-plant garden outside. Bingo! Museum director Tamar Stanley took that little idea and ran with it, getting natives donated by the local Great Bear Restoration (http://www.great-bear.biz/natives.html). Western snowberry, golden current, blue elderberry, chokecherry, serviceberry and thimbleberry are the shrubby, berry-producing, back-of-the-border plants; Rocky Mountain maple is there, to grow and hide a utility shed; and among a dozen or so other hardy flowers are the little pale-blue blossoms of wild blue flax (Linum lewisii). All was unveiled to the public on a recent Saturday as the nearby farmers' market got underway. Beet greens peek out of Alex's bag, at the Hamilton Farmers' Market (http://hamiltonfarmersmarket.webs.com/) -- now in its 20th year and our new place to shop for freshest vegetables, that is, until our own Montana garden starts producing!