When the Garden Gets Slammed By a Very Hard Freeze

I have a friend who says that gamblers should skip going to Vegas and just plant a garden, instead --  letting those weather dice roll and taking odds on what will yield well, what will do poorly, and what will be a total fail.

In the past bunch of winters, broccoli, cabbages, and nearly all the cool-season greens have produced right through until spring. Gardeners in North Georgia are accustomed to the success of those crops, so, back in October, we all would have said the likelihood of those crops surviving the winter was fairly high. This year, the usual winter crops pretty much ended a few weeks ago when the temperature dropped down near 5 degrees F.

It seemed like it might be useful to have a list of the hardiest crops, for future reference when planning the fall/winter garden, so what follows is such a list:

multiplying onions
shallots
garlic
carrots
winter radishes
green onions
cilantro
spinach
Brussels Sprouts (report from another local gardener)

I'm guessing that parsnips would be ok, too, but I didn't plant any this year.

The perennial herbs also seem to be struggling with the cold. Most years in winter I can find enough fresh oregano down under the browned stems to use for cooking, but today I could find only a few, tiny leaves. The sage has some good leaves, and I found some usable thyme under the tangle of old stems of that plant, but the rosemary looks pretty rough.

Also, since so many of the weeds that I depend upon for bunny food were bitten back by the hard freeze, I've been growing wheat greens indoors to feed to my pet bunnies. Without these greens, my bunny-food bill would be much higher!

We've been growing sprouts in the kitchen for ourselves, too, to add some fresh, home-grown greens to our meals. With the loss of many of the outdoor crops, we are lucky to have options for continued "gardening" indoors.

If other gardeners can let me know of additional crops that have done well in the cold, we can add them to the list, to help in planning next winter's garden. Hope you all are keeping warm!

Garden Plans and Events

After my very eventful December, it has taken some time for the pattern of my days to seem familiar again. I realized this afternoon, though, while hoeing out a few weeds and spreading more mulch in the onion/shallot/garlic bed, that everything feels just about normal. Parts of the garden even LOOK normal, in spite of the drop to 5 degrees Fahrenheit a week or so back.

The onions, garlic, and shallots mostly are vibrantly green, firm and growing. Nearly every other crop above ground has gone to mush  - even the chickweed that I feed to my bunnies! Underground crops, the carrots and winter radishes, seem to have survived the unusual cold pretty well. Only some individual plants that poked up out of the ground were affected.

At the little farm where we volunteer, the winter greens all look very damaged, except for the spinach. That bit of information is probably worth remembering, for future winter gardens.

Tomorrow I'll be working more in the yard. My compost pile is stacked pretty high with nearly-finished compost that I plan to move onto one of my garden beds, rather than risk letting the nutrients wash out across the back yard. I'd rather have them soaking into my garden! I hope to spend some time planning what to grow where, too.

My last, most favorite seed catalog finally arrived, which means I can place a seed order for my garden whenever I've completed the plan. I'll also be ordering seeds for a Seed Starting class that I'll be giving in February. Those seeds will all be UGA-recommended varieties, some of which are heirloom. I'm planning to order from a source that sells untreated seeds, so that organic gardeners won't have to worry about accidentally introducing unknown fungicides or systemic pesticides into their gardens.

The first class I am planning for this year, though, is a Planning for Seed Saving class. It's scheduled for the 28th at the Extension office, and I'll have some seeds to share at that class, too, in honor of National Seed Swap Day, which falls each year on the last Saturday in January (this year it's on the 25th).

I always enjoy meeting more gardeners, so I am really looking forward to both of these classes!

Endings and Beginnings

Never before have I experienced a changing-of-the-year that so emphatically has an embodied ending and beginning. As the old year closed, I gained a daughter-in-law, a beautiful start for the year! While we were in Texas for the wedding, though, my mother-in-law (a.k.a. "Grandma") had some serious health problems, and she has passed away. Her life on earth and the relationships she nurtured - in the form we know - with friends and family are at an end. The events and emotions involved are all complex and varied.

Endings can be extremely difficult. Luckily for me, the endings I usually deal with in the garden  -- the changing of seasons, the maturity and decline of a round of crops -- these all are much easier to accept. They come without fail; the loss is familiar, and looking toward the beginning of a new season brings a sense of excitement.

Right now in the yard, we are anticipating the onset of very cold weather. I barely remember the last time we experienced a drop below 8 degrees Fahrenheit -- schools were closed (because families here in Georgia don't invest in cold-weather gear that is needed only once in a decade), and I wasn't worried about the garden because I hadn't begun growing so many cool-weather crops in the fall.

I will be interested to see how the carrots fare in this unusual cold. The broccoli and cabbages that I didn't harvest before last week already have been turned to mush by a hard freeze. Someone asked me just a few weeks ago why some gardeners in the area were so set on putting protective coverings over their crops when our winters are generally fairly mild -- I think what's coming is why.

Part of the appeal of gardening is that there is always something new to look forward to, even when "what's new" is a bout of freakishly cold weather! For many gardeners, seed and plant catalogs are piling up, plans are being made to try new varieties or to try a new technique or method, and the anticipation of growing favorite varieties alongside the new ones builds an eagerness to begin as the next growing season approaches. I hope that the coming year brings the joy of new beginnings and happiness in productive gardening to us all!

My beautiful family. I'm a lucky mom!

Dahlias for the Bees

One of my friends grew a lot of dahlias this past year. When she dug them up to store for the winter, the ones she liked the least - all the cactus-flowered yellow ones - had produced more tubers than she was willing to keep.

However, those had nice, open centers that had made the flowers a favorite with bees, which meant she would be able to find a good home for the tubers without too much trouble. Lots of people want to help bees!

She tucked the tubers from those yellow-flowered plants into paper bags with peat moss, then put those in the car to deal with later. A month went by before she was able to pass them along. By the time the tubers made it to the office, some of them had developed problems. Luckily, a local dahlia expert -- my friend Maddie -- was in the office at exactly the right time. Of course, she was supposed to be working on her Senior DPA portfolio for 4-H!

It didn't take long for Maddie to sort through the tubers, trim away excess bits, and toss the bad ones.

Each bag held several plants'-worth of tubers, buried in the peat moss.

Some of the dahlia tubers were very obviously too far gone to keep.

She showed us the slimy innards of a tuber that had felt only a little bit soft from the outside.

This little dahlia tuber already has a nice big eye; it's a keeper!

One of the great things about my workplace is the number of plant-experts who stop by. We get to learn from all of them!

Tracking the Harvest: October and November, 2013

The big surprise is that, in spite of the monsoon-like quality of much of the year and the ravenous appetites of the local chipmunks, my yard has managed to provide more than 400 pounds of food in 2013 to this point. Harvests in the next few months will be pretty lean, but that's why we put away surpluses of crops like tomatoes, peppers, and beans when we have them in summer.

I've also been enjoying the butternut squash, which, like the sweet potatoes, keep just fine on their own without any work in "putting up" the harvest. They just sit around in baskets until I'm ready to use them. A lot of the butternut squash has been baked until squishy, then whirled in the blender (without seeds and skins) with some almond milk, black pepper, and sauteed onion and garlic -- quick and easy butternut soup! It just requires the forethought to have put the squash into the oven.

Weights below for the past two months are in kilograms:

October
Tomatoes, ripe 2.4
radishes 1.3
okra 1
Peppers 6.15

November
Persimmons, Asian 0.65
Radish, winter 2.15
Peppers 0.55
Carrots 0.4
Bok Choy 0.75
Potatoes 0.5


October 10.85 kg = 23 pounds, 14 ounces
November 5 kg = 11 pounds

Running total January through November = 181.95 kg = 401 pounds, 1 ounces

What Gardeners Think About in Winter

Just to start, two more seed catalogs arrived at my house this week: Vermont Bean and Totally Tomatoes. This means that the planning part of the gardening year is here. I will hazard a guess that I am not the only gardener who already has begun thinking forward to the next round of planting.

This means thinking about which varieties to grow for each vegetable, about how much space to give to each crop, about the best-yet-cheapest ways to add organic matter to the soil, about the crop rotation sequence, about planning for seed saving, about seed starting and whether the fluorescent fixture needs a new bulb. Really, there is just no end to the garden thinking that goes on in winter.

There also, here in the South, are vegetables still in the yard to harvest and eat. In my yard, I have carrots, winter radishes, broccoli, and cabbage that are at a good stage for eating, and there are vegetables that didn't make it to maturity before the cold set in for me to watch and keep weeded, so they can return to growing as the soil begins to warm again in March. This all takes some thinking, too.

And if, like me, you have a parallel life as a spouse, a parent and a person who has a full-time job, all that thinking has to fit in the spaces between the rest of it. In my own life, the "spaces between" have shrunk down to just cracks for the moment -- next week, my youngest son graduates from college, and in three weeks my oldest son is getting married (THREE WEEKS!!!)--- but that doesn't seem to stop my brain from turning toward the garden.

Good Food and Thankfulness

This week, my mind is more focused on "eating good food" than on "growing good food." Of course, it's hard to have the first without the second! All the gardeners fully understand that backward-sounding order, but plenty of other people forget that behind most good food there is thought, and work, and care.

I have been very fortunate in being able to grow good food in my yard. The food is fresh, and our meals are varied. All those vegetables probably contribute a lot of vitamins and minerals to our daily intake. The garden sparks conversations with my neighbors, building my local community. I am thankful for my garden, the good food it provides, and for the physical strength to manage it. Not everyone has the time or a sunny enough or large enough spot to grow their own food.

Not that long ago, much of the western part of the county was an agricultural area. The Old Guys still talk about how Cobb County and sweet potatoes used to be like Vidalia is, now, with onions -- viewed as the prime source of the sweetest and best produce. The fields were plowed using mules, and farming involved a lot of physical labor.

The sweet potatoes that grow in my yard (four varieties this year!) are also some work, and this year the chipmunks ate what I consider to be more than their share, but when we eat the sweet potatoes I was able to harvest, I know how they were grown (organic methods). I know that one variety is part of a line that stretches back more than 100 years in this county. I know that it is easy enough to grow this staple crop that other people can do it, too.

If enough other people give it a try, our whole community can benefit.

What Survived the Dip into the mid-20s

We had a couple of especially cold (for November) nights last week, and the garden showed it. The leaves of the pepper plants all wilted, the remaining summer annual flowers (marigolds, salvias, cleome) turned to mush, and even the last of the spring-type radishes fared poorly.

In the good news category, the winter radishes are still standing, as are the carrots. The cabbages and broccoli look good, even though they looked very sad on the coldest mornings. All the leaves fell off the Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmon, but the big orange fruits are still there, even a couple that have been half-eaten by my aerialist chipmunks.

The very small lettuces and assorted greens that have all struggled to get beyond the "delicious to chipmunks and wild rabbits" stage, also are still vibrantly green. In my dreams, they reach mature size before we get much colder weather.

A couple of stray potato plants had come up from tubers that were missed in the early summer harvest, and the tops of those collapsed in the cold. The good news is that we dug up another pound or so of red potatoes from underneath those wilted tops.

Essentially, last week brought an end to the remaining the summer crops that had been barely hanging on.

At the County Extension Office, we are still getting calls from people who want to know what vegetables they can plant now (gardeners rarely give up, and they aren't deterred by a little frost!). There is still time to put in some garlic and onions, but that's about it. However, this is a good time to start thinking about some winter-sown vegetables.

UGA Cooperative Extension's Vegetable Planting Chart (planting dates for middle Georgia need to be adjusted for Cobb County by 10-14 days) shows traditional planting dates for the most commonly planted garden crops. Alabama Cooperative Extension's Planting Guide for Home Gardening in Alabama offers dates that are similar to those in UGA's publication.

Other than the onion group, neither of these publications lists any crop that can be planted (with the hope of successful harvest) this late in Cobb County. Even the most cold-hardy vegetables are fairly tender when they are very young, and,  at this point, the odds are pretty small of any vegetable growing to a tougher stage before another killing frost occurs.

However, Colorado State's Extension publication Winter Gardening: Planting Vegetables in Early Winter for an Early Spring Crop tells about planting seeds in the ground in late winter, much sooner after the New Year  than many people might usually consider planting. In this publication, author Curtis Swift offers, along with some basic instructions, this list of cool season vegetables that can be winter-sown:

• lettuce
• peas
• spinach
• broccoli
• Brussel sprouts
• carrots
• radish
• cauliflower

A website called (not too surprisingly) Wintersown offers a step-by-step guide to an outdoor container-option for sowing seeds in winter.

For the many gardeners who like to keep things moving in the garden, winter-sown crops might provide a nice outlet for that pent-up planting energy.

Baker Creek's Whole Seed Catalog for 2014: IT'S HERE!

Yesterday when I got home from work, I found this really great surprise in my mailbox:

First Seed Catalog of the Year!

It may seem early, but the timing is actually excellent. I've started putting together a presentation on planning the garden for seed saving, to be given in January, and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds' big catalog full of open-pollinated varieties (no hybrids included!) is going to be helpful.

The catalog includes a basic guide to seed saving -- on pages 352-3 -- which I may be able to reference in my talk, but so far I've mostly used Suzanne Ashworth's Seed to Seed in putting together a chart of some important features and seed-saving guidelines of common garden crops. It probably helps that I save seeds from my own garden for some crops.

Anyone going organic and trying to exclude GM foods from the garden is also going to find useful information in The Whole Seed Catalog. For example, on page 61, in the corn section, there's a somewhat astonishing note:

"Each year we have a harder time getting seeds that test GMO-free. It is getting to the point where most heirloom corn varieties test positive for GMO's; even growers in remote areas are having problems with Monsanto's GMO corn."

And on page 11:

"Our company used to carry up to two dozen varieties of heirloom corn, until we began testing for GMO contamination in 2006. Now, we are barely able to offer half that number, since the remainder have tested positive. That's half these fine old historic varieties -- gone, until or unless we can find clean seed for them!"

It doesn't help that corn is wind pollinated. That pollen can probably travel for miles on a strong enough breeze.

There's an old joke about leaving a tip that ends "plant your corn early." That closing line may need to shift to a more serious version: "order your corn early," for people who want guaranteed GMO-free seeds for their corn patch.

Meanwhile, I will keep working on handouts for my talk, enjoying the great catalog, and planning my garden to allow for saving a few more kinds of seeds.

Where the Pollinators and Predators Hang Out

The picture below isn't from my yard. Joe and I walked around our local park last Saturday, and there were butterflies, bees, wasps, and other great insects on all the flowering weeds.

Not my yard, but great to see a Monarch butterfly near home

It made me wonder how much my own garden's success depends on the city's not mowing edge-to-edge in my local parks.

When food gardens have a problem with low productivity, it sometimes can be traced to a scarcity of pollinators. A lot of newer neighborhoods are border-to-border monoculture lawns. These yards are pretty low on habitat that would support useful populations of pollinators and other beneficial insects.

Most gardeners understand that this is a problem, and they follow guidelines like those in  UGA's publication Beyond Butterflies: Gardening for Native Pollinators to plant small-flowered herbs and other pollen-and nectar-rich flowers that attract pollinators and useful predators, but if the insects don't have a good place to reproduce and to survive the winter, there might never be an abundance of these useful critters.

My garden crops typically don't have a problem with lack of pollination, and there seem to be plenty of great predatory insects, too, but, like all those other gardeners, I do what I can to attract a diverse community of insects and other small creatures to my own yard. Also, I am lucky in that my yard backs up to a small patch of woods and that it has a creek -- with associated native vegetation -- running along one side. I am sure that all helps.

According to a recent article posted at Southern Region IPM News, The Right Habitat and Food Source Key for Beneficial Insects, that describes findings of entomologists at North Carolina State University, the parasitic wasp Telemonus podisi (it kills stink bug embryos) overwinters more often in leaf litter than in cracks of tree bark:

“The number of parasitic wasps, for example, was four times greater in leaf litter than those overwintering in tree bark,” said Lahiri. “This data, combined with lab studies, suggest the importance of woodland field borders with leaf litter from hardwood trees as a refuge area during winter for the parasitoids.”

I do have some woodland edge, but -- even combined with the right garden flowers -- the wild spaces in my one yard may not be enough to support all the beneficial insects that help out in my garden.

Wouldn't it be something if the unmowed and uncleared edges of city and county parks were the best refuges for our beneficial insect populations?

About Those Falling Leaves

It's really autumn now. Days are shorter and cooler, and leaves on the trees are changing from green to various shades of yellow, orange, red, and brown. In my neighborhood, leaf blowers and rakes have already been pressed into service to remove the first round of dropped leaves.

I am pretty sure that most gardeners can figure out, without any trouble or help from me, that all those falling  leaves blanketing their lawns would make great mulch and/or compost, but awhile back (ten years?) I wrote a poem about those leaves. I do not have any delusions about being a good enough poet that great hoards of people would want to read what I have written, but I'm going to post it here anyway.

Last year, a week after my house was smashed by an oak tree, my father died. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, so his passing was not a huge surprise. However, I remember his telling me once that he really liked this particular poem. That may have something to do with the return of the poem to my mind this year, even though he died in summer.


Predestination

They fall -- yellow stars
and tulips of sweetgum and poplar,
the red and orange of maple,
dogwood's burgundy.
My neighbor looks out
across the bright mosaic
of her yard and goes
to fetch the rake.
She shifts the luminous host
into plastic, scowls
as rags of color twirl
away, across her tidy lawn.
At night, I remove
the black bags from the curb,
take them to my yard,
set autumn free.

A Walk Around the Yard

Right now, the garden says that we have not yet had a hard frost, but that it's been too cool for most of the warm-weather plants. A few Zinnias and my friend Electa's Heirloom Pink Salvia are still blooming. The salvia re-seed all over the place, which mostly is fine because they attract lots of little pollinators.

This year's carrot and radish bed.

The carrots and winter radishes (to the right of the carrots) won't be too fussed about cold weather when it finally gets here, but both crops (and the rogue bok choy that somehow ended up in the same bed) have flourished in the warmth we've had so far.

I had hoped that last year's carrot success wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it looks as though the hope was not in vain. The carrot tops all look good, and the one carrot I pulled a few days ago (just to check on how things were going underground) was big enough that I think homegrown carrots will be part of our Thanksgiving dinner.

Winter radishes are getting big, a few at a time, and we have already been enjoying them as before-dinner snacks, sliced thin and lightly salted. They are our "healthy alternative" to the kinds of fried salty chips that come in bags at the store.

Ichi ki ke jiro persimmons

Broccoli patch

The broccoli is coming along, too. If I look straight down the center of each plant, I can see tiny heads beginning to form. At this point, it's too soon to guess when they will be ready to bring in for dinner, but it may be before the end of the month.

Ichi ki ke jiro persimmons will start coming in soon, too. In theory, they are edible while still as hard as apples (like now), but we learned last year that the flavor improves if they have more time on the tree to get a little bit soft.

Marigolds

Marigolds are still in bloom, and I've been bringing in some of the old, dried flowers to save the seed. This is one of the French marigolds that is supposed to be good for reducing nematode populations in the soil, when planted in a solid block to grow for several weeks (at least). I never grow them that way because the nematode problem hasn't been severe enough to warrant giving up a planting bed for so long in summer, but I like to be ready, just in case.

Still some peppers, in November

When we had our big "freeze forecast" scare more than a week ago, I harvested all of the larger peppers. There were still some smaller peppers out on the plants, and the tinies are beginning to get bigger. If we have another week or so of sunny afternoons in the high 60s-to-low-70s (degrees Fahrenheit), I may be able to fill the dehydrator one last time.

The garden is saying, essentially, that all is as it should be.