Friday Favorite: Fresh Snow
One of my favorite things is a fresh coating of snow. It makes everything lighter and brighter, especially when the sun shines! Earlier this week, we got a few inches of snow.
Sadly, we’re supposed to get 2″ of rain today, so it will all melt away, leaving behind an icky brown mess and there will be no white Christmas.
Do you live in an area with snow?
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Still Harvesting
On Monday I harvested that last of the vegetables from the garden, it was a mess of lettuce that I had under a plastic low-tunnel with an additional layer of remay on top of the lettuce itself.
The ground inside the low tunnel isn’t frozen at all, in fact it’s still soft. We’ve had a lot of nights in the teens and a few nights that were only 3 degrees, which means this lettuce did a great job surviving such cold temperatures.
I ended up with quite a harvest, at least a week of salad for dinner. Some varieties did better than others, I didn’t specifically plant cold tolerant varieties for this experiment, I just used seed I had on hand. The variety that performed the best was ‘Alkindus’ from Johnny’s Seeds. Next winter I’ll most likely try to find a cold tolerant variety or grow mostly the one variety that did really well in my garden.
Are you attempting any winter gardening?
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Digging up Dahlia Tubers
I wasn’t going to plant any dahlias this year, in the past I’ve always grown the dinner plate dahlias from inexpensive tubers I purchased at the local discount store. They never held up well to the windy conditions in the back garden and the earwigs chewed them to pieces. This past summer, there was a vendor at the farmers market selling tubers to small dahlias, beautiful ones. I purchased three tubers and planted them in the garden. Since they were so small, they didn’t bloom much (that and I planted them late).
When I dug them up this fall I have really nice tubers that should produce lush plants with lots of flowers next summer. I typically overwinter mine packed in cedar shavings in the basement. It is a bit of a pain to dig them up, overwinter them, and plant them once again, but they are well worth it.
Do you grow dahlias? What’s your favorite variety?
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Still Harvesting
On Sunday I headed out and harvesting some spinach, kale, and leeks from the garden. There’s still more out there, but the deer have found the garden and thus the harvests are dwindling rapidly. Nevertheless, I’m happy to still be harvesting vegetables from the garden.
After this harvest, there are only a few things left, mostly lettuce under cover. While I often have grand plans of growing more things for harvest in winter, the reality is that I grow some, and harvest through December, but I can’t seem to get seeds started and transplanted in time for winter harvests. I also have found that I often don’t have space in the garden when things need to go in during July/August. Any little bit will do, and I’m happy that at least some of the vegetables on our table are freshly harvested from the garden.
What are you harvesting right now?
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Finally Back
Sorry for the lack of posts last week. I was actually sick, something I picked up on our way back from Israel. I had big plans of going through all my photos and sharing the beautiful thing we saw, but instead I spent the week on the couch trying to rest up to make sure I got better quickly for the busy holiday season. I was feeling better this weekend, which meant I was able to get out and get a few things finished in the garden, namely wrapping plants to keep them protected from the nibbling deer.
I find using upturned pots over smaller plants works very well. This is an especially effective method of helping plants that are on the edge of their hardiness zone as well. I cover several roses and my acanthus each winter. I also wrap plants in burlap. This year I used various plant supports I had throughout the garden. I put them over small blueberries, roses, and other plants that the deer find especially delicious. Then I wrapped them with burlap and fastened them with twine. This method works quite well and it looks fairly nice as well.
What methods have you developed to protect plants from deer?
