The Heart of Winter or My Favourite Time of the Year as a Gardener
Tuesday, January 17th 2012 @ 12:33 AM
As a gardener, my favourite part of the gardening year is the heart of winter. It is at this time that I am holed up on the couch with seed catalogues planning out the next year’s garden. While pouring over them, I am envisioning my garden in absolute perfection, providing a bounteous harvest, without images of weeds, or infestations of aphids.
I am fortunate that where we live, we can continue to both harvest from the garden through the winter, and work on it through the winter. We tend to use this time to amend the soil in our beds. We have worked out a great composting system for our garden waste. All of our weeds and clippings get thrown into the chicken run. This provides the hens with new stuff to scratch through, bits to eat, and provides protection from the muddy ground. They in turn help work it in with their manure and straw, creating amazingly rich compost. We then use this mixture to amend the vegetable beds over the winter.
Another aspect of the planning is to go back over what you grew where in your garden, and how successful you were with it. The key to making this really work is to maintain a log of what you planted, when you planted it, and what your yield was. This allows you to figure out what works best in what part of our yard garden. This also feeds into crop rotation which is a key to successful long term gardening. By cycling different plants through the same bed you avoid depleting the nutrients in the soil and provide pest control by interrupting the pest cycle.
There are a lot of things I consider while reading through the seed catalogues and planning out next year’s crops. While it is essential to filter by what will grow in your zone, the bigger factor for me is plant productivity. A few years ago we planted corn. The six plants provided us with about a dozen ears, but took up the space that could have produced 60+ lbs of tomatoes. While I like corn, it is not an efficient crop for us to grow. I also use this same consideration when comparing heirloom varieties to modern hybrids. While I will grow a few heirlooms for diversity and to support their preservation, the majority of my garden is geared to producing the most vegetables possible to feed my family.
I also try to pace my purchase of gardening tools and supplies across the whole year. I’ve learned the lesson that it is better to buy one expensive tool, than to have to replace it three or four times because the cheaper option has broken on me. You can sometimes score off-season deals on tools and supplies, because the stores want to clear them out before restocking for the spring.
The winter is also a good time to catch up on garden-related reading. There were all sorts of books I wanted to take out from the library last spring and summer, but there were long hold lists on all of them. Now in the heart of winter I’ve managed to find all of the books I wanted sitting on the shelves. I’ve just finished reading Ruth Stout’s Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy & the Indolent.
So, even though the temperature has dropped so that there is ice in the hen’s water fountain and the occasional flurry falls, I am very actively gardening, and still drawing great joy and inspiration from it.
