Winter Gardening – December

Mondays are our second weekend day, so B and I have some alone time while the kid is at school. It was a rare sunny day, so we decided to putter around in the garden. I got this idea to make a flower bed next to the steps going up to the hair salon entrance.

There was a large bramble bush under the patio that was reaching through the wire mesh into our vegetable garden (to the right), so that was pulled out by the root and thrown on the compost pile.

We laid cardboard down on the grass where we planned to build the new lasagna garden, and wet it really well. The cardboard will kill any grass or weeds that we don’t want in our flower bed.

We inherit my FIL’s maple tree leaves every fall, so next was 4 bags of mulch, and we wet those really well too, mostly to give them some weight so they wouldn’t be flying all over the property.

The large flower pot was one I had on our patio when we lived in a small 800 square food condo in the city, and other than the lavender plant you see, it is full of mint. We decided to incorporate it into the flower bed.

We found some stripped logs in the brush, and selected a couple that work well as a natural border.

Next we split and dug up a number of daisy flower clumps, and arranged those in a u-shape so their height will be run along the edge of the flower bed and won’t shade the three different varieties of heather plants that we transplanted  front and centre.

To plant in a lasagna garden, just pull back a layer of the mulch and set the plants in, then tuck them in tight with the mulch you pulled back. If you are planting seeds, sprinkle a fine layer of dirt on top of the mulch, toss your seeds on top, and cover with another fine layer of dirt.

When the mint in the pot comes up in the spring we will transplant it to our kitchen garden bed. We will replace the mint area in the pot with more lavender. You can never have enough lavender.

We are currently out of whipper snipper cord, but once we have a chance to get a refill, the grass in front of the new flower bed will be neatly trimmed.

The kitchen garden is a bit shady and is not fenced, so we can’t put anything in there that deer like to eat. My big idea is to make it one big bed of mint in as many different varieties as I can beg or borrow from my gardening friends. Imagine the wonderful mint tea I will be drinking next winter!

As you can see the kitchen garden is roughly a heart-shape, and is close to our main house door. About 1/3rd of the garden has cardboard and leaf mulch already, and once we get some more leaves from the FIL, we will finish lasagna gardening the rest of the mint bed. Adding kitchen scraps, alpaca manure (from our next door neighbors, hopefully), and ash from our woodburning stove will help enrish the garden beds over the winter.

Over the spring and summer I will be asking every gardener I meet for snips of their mint plants. I hope to completely fill the bed with as many different varieties as I can find until the entire garden fills in with mint. It will be divine!

Fall Gardening and plans for next year

We seem to do all of our gardening late, but so far that has worked out, so we’re going with it.

Yesterday we pulled all the tomato, squash and pumpkin plants out and piled them in a new bed we’re layering a lasagna garden bed for peas and sunflowers next year. There’s a large patch of rocky ground in our herb garden where nothing grows, so we thought we’d layer mulch all winter, and then put in peas in the spring. it is against the south front of the house, so we’ll hang some old chicken wire, that’s just laying waste behind the shed, so they have something to climb.

We re-formed the lasagna beds as they had spread a lot over the growing season, and I’m hoping to find some nice bark mulch for the paths around the beds. My dad has some old deck boards and has offered to re-purpose them by building boxes around our lasagna garden beds, so hopefully next year we’ll have less spread and be able to get in and around the bed easily.

I noticed a tray I planted with beet seeds last May has suddenly decided to sprout, so we put them out in one of the lasagna beds, in hopes we’ll have some winter beets. Yum!

My stepmom grew tons of garlic last year and is giving me about 20 or 30 cloves to plant right now so they come up early spring. My plan is to plant them all the way around the perimeter of the entire garden area, and then plant marigolds along the inner paths. Both are great for natural pest control. Last year I planted chives and basil amongst my tomato plants too, and had no issues with pests at all.

This is the time of year we start gathering mulch for building up the lasagna garden beds. Kitchen scraps, the plants we pulled up and trimmed back, ash from our woodburning stove (it’s already getting lots of use!), and leaves. B’s dad has lots of maple trees and bags them up for us each year. The idea is that you layer the beds all winter long, and by spring you have a yummy juicy garden ready for planting.

Last year I just did seedling starts, and it was a breeze to pull back the mulch layers, and place the starts where we want. We were really impressed for a few reasons:

1. Prepping the beds was a breeze. No tilling, no digging. We just collected mulch, threw it on the beds. Done.
2. Planting was almost too easy. You literally just put some gloves on, pull back some layers, stick your plant in, tuck it in, and you’re done. I’ve been reading more on planting in lasagna beds, and basically you just sprinkle a little dirt on the top, lay your seeds down, sprinkle some more dirt. Done.
3. No weeding. Seriously, we didn’t have a single weed. We did have a couple avocado starts from the kitchen scrap seeds we threw on the pile, but that was just an added bonus.
4. Very little watering. During the highest heat of the summer we were only watering a couple times a week. Water conservation is SO important here because we operate on a well, and ground water on Gabriola Island is always an issue.

I’m planning to plant the following next year:

• Tomatoes – I used bamboo stakes last year, and they were a dismal failure. I’ll be trying cages this year.
• Potatoes – we threw some in on as a second thought, and ended up with about 5 lbs of the best potatoes I’ve ever tasted. We’ll definitely be planting more this year.
• Cucumbers – the one veggie my son loves. We only did two plants this year, so I’d like to double that.
• Pumpkins – we harvested one 59 lb pumpkin from the two starts we put in. It was fun to watch it grow, and we’d love to do it again.
• Eggplants – I didn’t plant any this year, but really enjoyed them from a neighboring organic garden.
• Sweet Peas and green beans – we got our garden in too late this year for peas, so I’d like to try them next year.
• Sunflowers – I did some starts but neglected to plant them before the heat wave got them. I’ll try again next year.
• Spaghetti squash – I planted acorn squash last year and discovered I don’t like them. I was a given a couple spaghetti squash from my stepmom’s garden and they were AMAZING! I definitely need some in my garden next year.
• Carrots – my son is a huge fan, but I’m allergic to them, so I didn’t bother this year. I think he’d enjoy picking them though, so I’ll consider putting a row in this year. I’ve heard they are challenging to grow in this climate, so we’ll see.
• Garlic – we started our garden in the spring, so missed the fall planting time. Like I said we’ll be planting about 20.
• Onion – I’d love to have my own sweet onion and red onion, but don’t know anything about planting onions, so might take a pass. We’ll see how much I can learn in the next little while.
• Herbs – I have a number of perennial herbs that come up every year: sage, parsley, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and chives. I added dill and cilantro this year. I moved four pots of basil inside and am hoping they will last through the winter.

Gourdy the 59 lb Organic Pumpkin – Carve your Own

Gourdy started out as a little organic seedling, planted in our lasagna garden at the end of May. We harvested him a week before Halloween, and he’s found a comfy resting place on our patio. His last days will be spent in the Gabriola tunnel, a long corridor of trees that line a long straight stretch of road. His inner candle will shine bright until he returns to the earth as mulch.

Steps to carving a pumpkin:

1. Pick your pumpkin. We picked ours out of our garden, but picking a pumpkin from the market is fine too.
2. Clean your pumpkin. The side that was on the ground got quite muddy, so we gave Gourdy a bath before starting.
3. Set up your carving station. Supplies: a compostable plastic bag, a large bowl, a solid metal spoon, a serrated knife, a stencil drawing, tape, a marker, and pumpkin carving tools.
4. Position and tape your stencil to the pumpkin. Draw the carving pattern on your pumpkin with a marker. Remove the stencil.
5. Cut the top off your pumpkin with the serrated knife. My husband made an irregular cut mark on one side so we could easily tell how it fit back on.
6. Scoop the seeds and pulp into the bowl. Set aside if you plan on roasting the seeds.
7. Carve the face.
8. Insert and light a fire safe light in the pumpkin.
9. Set outside and enjoy.
10. When Halloween is over, break up the pumpkin and layer on your garden beds to let it break down over the winter as garden mulch.

I'm a bad, bad, bad garden mama.

I allowed over 20 tomatoes to rot on the stem. Seriously. I kept telling myself every day to go check for ripe ones, but then nightfall would – fall – and again I hadn’t gotten around to it. For over a week!

Today when I brought my son home from school I told him we HAD TO go visit the garden and pick tomatoes. I got over 20 ripe tomatoes, two small cukes (my last), and a large almost ripe butternut squash that started splitting…

I’m so ashamed that I let SO MANY tomatoes go to waste though. I’m a bad, bad, bad garden mama.

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