Good morning fellow gardeners. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute to one of the best parts of the Daily Kos website.
Today's topic is what to do when all hope of gardening is lost.
Actually, it's about planning and preparing for gardening when there's snow on the ground or winter temperatures and weather just refuse to let you do much of anything outside. Sometimes winter does feel rather Dantean as another circle of cold hell opens up and hopes of spring falter beneath yet another snowfall and temperature drop. Since that happens pretty much every year in most parts of the US and Canada, this should be a topic almost everyone can identify with and contribute to.
For example. The lead photo was my situation last weekend up in the Pacific Northwest near Canada. Even the greenhouse was covered in snow. That's mainly because I've been waiting (since October!) for electricians to show up and wire it so I can install an aquaponics system. They finally started wiring it just before this was published. We're in one of the fastest growing counties in the US and demand for electricians and plumbers is off the charts, so getting one that's qualified to do a small but complex job has been challenging. The aquaponics system uses fish waste (urine primarily) to fertilize plants while the plants purify the water which then returns to the fish tanks. Since the water is heated, it will in turn help heat the greenhouse when the sun is down or, as in this case, hiding behind snow clouds.
Once the aquaponics system is up and running, I'll be able to garden year-round, even a half mile from Canada. But, that's just 500 square feet of year-round gardening. And once it's up and running, I promise I'll write it up for our Saturday Morning group. But for now, everything else looks as forlorn as the fruit trees in the foreground of this picture.
So what to do in the winter time when your green thumb can't find a pot to peat in? Well, there's always looking at seed porn!
Yes, the secret winter pastime of avid gardeners whose yards and fields are already running over with plants is dreaming of other plants, other possibilities, and looking at full color pictures and descriptions as tempting and mouth watering as writers can make them. No illicit affair or porn "novel" could possibly be as exciting as considering an encounter with new varieties of vegetables and flowers. So while it's cold outside, I'm inside, staying warm with catalogs and cuddly cats.
Sissy seems to love catalogs almost as much as I do. Everytime one is out on a table, she's on top of it. I think she’s trying to sniff that flower on the cover.
So I read and dream of luscious tomatoes with exotic names like Chocolate Cherry, Black Opal or Geranium Kiss. Carrots with names like Romance, Nectar or Bolero, and for other tastes, Hercules or Atlas. Mustards called Sylvetta, Amara, or for a little heat, Wasabina. Adriana, Red Rosie, or Skyphos lettuces, described as having "beautiful, large, dark red heads."
Or considering a Hungerian Blue poppy to seduce the pollinators. Do you think the bees might like a poppy that "seranades the garden with a show of enchanting purple-blue flowers with translucent petals and silvery foliage. After flowering, pretty seed pods can be harvested for use in baking or can be included in dried floral arrangements."
You want more titillation, eh? And did you notice titillation has TILL in the middle? That's what that word is really all about, all of you guys with dirty minds--yes, real dirt on your minds, you gardeners. You folks who spend most of your time working on fertility and who long for virile plants with strong stems and vigorous growth! Don't tell me gardening isn't the sexiest of occupations. So how about the Watermelon Heaven poppy, described in the Burpee catalog as "mouth-watering color and silky crepe-paper petals make this fast flowering poppy a scrumptious showpiece?"
OK, now that I have your attention. Down to business during winter.
The other thing you can do during non-growing season is congregate with other addicts and share knowledge. So last week my wife and I went to the Country Living Expo held every year in Skagit county, a bit of a drive for us, but you know addicts can get desperate.
So my wife and I, sometimes separately and sometimes together, took classes on such topics as attracting and raising bees, raising waterfowl (we're considering adding ducks to our chicken flock), tips on blueberry pruning and growing, common poultry diseases, controlling rats in yards, attics and barns, invasive insects and small system solar powered water and lights for remote locations.
Every county in the US has some sort of winter expo or workshops on gardening and small farm related subjects. There you'll find workshops like those mentioned, but you'll also find booths with resources, publications, new products and examples (and even seeds). Just look up your county's extension service, conservation district, or state university (where most of the farming programs and degrees are based). They will have info on all the classes, workshops, expos and fairs throughout the year that are open to the public and may be of use to you as a gardener.
And you can't imagine what's available right at your fingertips. The local regional state university, Western Washington University in Bellingham, opened part of its FoodWISE lecture classes to the public this semester, for example. The classes are named after Professor Gigi Berardi's just published book, FoodWISE: A Whole Systems Guide to Sustainable and Delicious Food Choices. Amazon describes her background as "In addition to teaching food and geography classes in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, she currently homesteads 25 acres with her family in the San Juan Islands in Washington, where she milks sheep and makes cheese. She maintains a popular food blog (resilientfarmsnourishingfoods.blogspot.com) and has written numerous articles for both newspapers and scientific journals. She received her BA in biology with high honors from John Muir College, University of California San Diego and degrees (MS, PhD) from Cornell University in Natural Resources and Resources, Policy, and Planning." Amazon link here: Gigi Berardi's FoodWISE
So Thursday morning off we went for more farming related wisdom, quite unlike what I discuss below from the Expo that is more about technical issues in gardening. Professor Berardi shared her lecture with Joel Salatin (live on screen via the internet) on "Our shared world of food and farming." Anyone who knows anything about organic farming or grass farming, as Salatin puts it, knows about PolyFace Farm. http://www.polyfacefarms.com/our-story/ His family started with worn out eroded soil on a old farm that had lost over 8 feet of topsoil in the once highly fertile Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. After 60 years of farming differently, his organic, sustainable farming methods have added back over 14 inches of topsoil (topsoil naturally reproduces at about an inch per century so that's an incredible rate of recovery) and took their embeded organic matter from 1 percent to 8 percent. That, for those in the know, is an incredibly high rate of organic matter in the soil, and it means massive amounts of water can be retained as well as massive amounts of carbon have been locked up in the soil. If every farm in the world had 8 percent organic matter in its fields (the average is under 2 percent) our global warming problems would be dramatically reduced. A discussion on factory farm systems versus animal-centric, biologically focused sustainable farming ensued to well over 200 attendees.
For another example of what's available and something we learned more about at the Country Expo and where we met some of the contributors to it, is WSU's Hortsense, indispensible information for anyone putting fingers into dirt. Hortsense
The invasive insect subject, just to pick one topic, is one every single gardener or farmer needs to know about. At some point, your plants are going to encounter a problem or attack of some kind by some kind of problem. Hortsense or its equivalent in your state is a goldmine of information on how to address it.
You do have to filter the information if you're a natural gardener or organic gardener, because some of the sprays and pesticides just shouldn't be used, in my view. But most states are supportive of organic approaches, and you can find what they recommend on your state's site. It's always helpful to use your state's information, although if your growing area and issues are similar to other states (I also consult Oregon's ag info sites) those can be helpful too. In my case also, being so close to Canada and sharing similar growing issues, I consult the British Columbia resources: What the Canadians are up to
We're currently on watch in our area for Asian Giant Hornets, an invasive species that entered the Vancouver area and has been seen in Blaine and on our farm recently. I thought at first it was a small hummingbird, but then realized it was a gigantic wasp! I took the class because I didn't know what to do then, but because of the workshop I do now. We actually have a color printout of the most dangerous invasive insects posted in the workshop so we can quickly check an unfamiliar specimen. Most states also maintain invasive plant and insect sites with information and who you can contact with questions or if you spot one of the culprits.
Some of these bugs are worse than the guys on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted list. And this is something every gardener can and should do, as invasive pests such as the gypsy moth or starling (damn those Shakespeare lovers who inflicted those on us) have inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to important crops and forests.
So winter is one of the best opportunities to educate yourself, and this blog entry covered just what was out there over one week in my tiny area. So go find out what's going on in your neck of the woods. Don't just dream of new, exotically named plants and flowers. Don't just lose yourself among floridly imagined stamens and pistils during long winter days, idly flipping through "seed porn" catalogs--take advantage of the time to educate yourself about the wealth of knowledge out there in your county and state, paid for by taxpayers, available for free, and which can help you achieve your dreams of luscious tomatoes, peppery mustards, fields of poppy seranades and cascades of flagrant lillies . . .