Bloggers' Luck?

In my everyday life, I don't win things. Contests, sweepstakes, drawings. I never win them. In this I am following in the footsteps of this blog's namesake, Arabella -- the original Arabella, my grandmother -- who claimed to have only won one thing in her entire, long life. At the tender age of 5 or so, she correctly guessed how many jelly beans (or other Victorian era items -- did they have jelly beans in 1896?) were in a big glass jar at the county fair, and won a wonderful music box. It is still in the family -- my sister currently has it, but we have discussed trading off at some point. A fine thing to win, if you are going to win one thing.

Since I began reading blogs, though, specifically garden blogs, I have won 3 (three!) separate items, in different blog giveaways. A year or two ago, when I first discovered my favorite garden blog, Garden Rant, I won a pair of gardening gloves.

Last December, I won a most excellent book, which I quite need -- having nothing but dry shade in my yard. (Except of course for the dry sun.)

Now comes word that I have won a copy of the most excellent, latest, hot-off-the-presses edition of the Sunset Western Garden Book from yet another fine blog (Gossip in the Garden). This book is The Bible for gardeners in The West, and I have personally owned every edition since the 1967 version.

I discovered the (probably) 1959

version as a newlywed in 1971, as I was rifling my mother's bookshelves during a summer visit. I was spending the summer at a US Forest Service guard station (as devoted new wifey to my firefighter/sweetheart) 30 miles from a paved road and after only a few weeks I was desperate for reading material. I borrowed it on an impulse, despite never having had the slightest urge to garden up to that point in my life.

Once I got home to our little plywood home in the woods (fire guard station) I opened it and was instantly captivated. I still don't know why, but possibly it was a newly-awakened nesting urge, due to my recent entrance into the married state. All I know is that, once I got my nose into that book, I became aflame with the desire to dig.

Come September, I left my sweetheart in the mountains to finish up fire season, and returned alone to our crummy rental duplex next to the McKinleyville exit off Highway 101 (northern California coast, 'in the redwoods;), and started creating my first garden. I dug a small flower bed in front of the house and planted daffodils and crocus -- which did well.

I spaded a huge area in the side 'yard' -- really just a weedy, grassy area used by former tenants to bury their garbage. And I do mean garbage. This being the pre-recycling era, I was digging up not just rusted cans and broken bottles, but potato chip packages, old toothbrushes, clothing --- ewww. I persevered, though, and proudly showed my sweetheart my neatly planted rows of leeks, carrots, lettuce, onions and more when he returned a few weeks later.

Alas, most of the seeds did not come up -- I had planted them far too deeply, and the carrots, strangely successful, were eaten over a period of several days by gophers (as I watched in astonishment from the window). No matter. I was hooked. And I am still planting carrots and co. in my garden, with better success and fewer pests. My sweetheart is still a bit shocked that I garden -- he doesn't get the 'fun' of it. But he gladly eats my successes, and realized the time I spend in the garden is time I don't spend getting into all kinds of other trouble.

OK, what other garden blog contests can I enter?

Resolutions

February 1. Time to make those new year's resolutions. What? I'm a month late? Not so. I will admit that everything in my life has been late, the last couple of months, starting with winter.

Winter? What winter? has been the topic of conversation around town since hopes of an early ski season died a-borning, right after Thanksgiving. After a promising skiff of snow in mid-November, we had no precipitation of any kind until the last few days of December, when it ...... rained .03" on the 28th. Pitiful. At least it saved December 2011 from being the driest December on record.

In December 1976, the infamous 'drought year', there was no measurable precipitation at all. That was the year we hiked into Chambers Lakes (7000 feet elevation, in the saddle between the peaks of South Sister and Middle Sister in the central Cascades on my sweetheart's birthday, December 21. Bare ground at 7000 feet in midwinter is unheard of in this latitude. The ground wasn't even frozen. I dug a couple of tiny wild huckleberry bushes for my garden. Shhh, don't tell anyone.

Finally, two weeks ago, on January 16 -- we got a real winter snow dump. Good thing too, as I was getting tired of watering my garden -- dealing with frozen hoses only adds injury to insult (we can talk about the evil agenda of hoses another time). The storm seemed to have caught everyone unawares. Schools were closed. The college was closed. Even Mt. Bachelor, our local ski area, closed. 72" of snow in 72 hours was just too much for even their snow removal equipment.

The chickens, as usual were unimpressed. I thought their new play yard looked quite festive in the snow.

The new girls were suitably shocked.

but a few tasty treats soon lured them all out for breakfast al fresco.

Alas, the new solar panels are not really operational after snowfall.

Now here it is, Feb 1 and it still feels like early November. But for us gardeners, it's time for new year's resolutions. Personally, I don't much bother with the usual January 1 kind of resolutions. 'New Year's Day' is a fairly meaningless thing in the real (natural world). A change of one digit in the year but nothing tangible to hang one's hat on. No wonder most 'New Year's Resolutions' go flop within a week or two.

I prefer to hang my resolutions onto something more tangible, or at least visible in my garden. Feb 1 is very close to that magical day (Feb 4 this year) when we hit 10 hours of daylength -- the point halfway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, traditionally considered the first day of spring. This is the time when plants resume active growth. Hardy greens like kale, mache and claytonia, which can sit dormant all winter in sheltered places around the yard, or huddled up in the cold frame, begin first spring growth about now. Depending on weather and temperature, we can start eating the earliest greens from the cold frame sometime in late February, and few weeks later from the open garden.

Admittedly, this (non)winter has been weird even with plant growth. Some of my earliest shade-loving perennials -- pulmonaria and hardy ferns -- sprouted and began showing new leaves in late December. On Christmas Eve I threw some old kale seed into the cold frame, and within a couple of weeks that was sprouting too.

Who knows what 'spring' will bring. Last year we had cold, snowy, frosty weather until nearly the end of June. Tomato plants that went in in mid-month sat there shivering for weeks as the longest days of the year passed by. Then, suddenly, as if waking from a dream, the weather seemed to straighten up, shake its head, and stand up, casting off the cold like an old coat, and begin blasting out heat and intense midsummer sunlight on every bedraggled seedling in the yard. I had sunburn on my tomatoes -- a first for me.

But that's a worry for the future. For now, I will take a good look at last year's garden journal notes, draw up my first seed orders, and get started on those resolutions. For now?

* Keep better records
* Plant fewer tomatoes
* Figure out a better irrigation system
* Fertilize more
* Skip the sweet potatoes. Really.
* Learn to espalier

* Order seeds NOW

Hint: these are my standard resolutions for every year. Wish me luck.

Oh, and one more:

* Blog often

thanks for reading!

Instant Gratification, Small Recompense

It's still doing this most mornings:

Just a skiff of snow, the overnight temperatures right around freezing, or a few degrees below. As soon as the sun comes up, the snow melts and the spring day proceeds as usual: sunshine ..... clouds and a breeze ..... more sun ..... corn snow..... sun with corn snow ...... rain ...... dark clouds and gusty wind ....... sun ........ snowflakes ........ and so on. This is March -- the cruelest month (except for April, also cruel, and even sometimes May, and quite often June too) in Bend's spring season.

I don't know why anyone is surprised. It's the same very year. I guess it's just that by now, we are all pretty sick of grey and brown and nothing green for months and months and months. Deciduous trees don't leaf out until late April. Spring break, usually the 3rd week in March, is particularly evil. Traditionally -- and trust me, I've kept track -- it has the worst weather in the whole month. Why? Because innocent children all over the county (and their not-so-innocent but ever-so-deserving teachers and parents) have the week off for 'vacation'. So the weather gods, with whom I am normally on quite friendly terms, give a gleeful little giggle and send rain, snow, wind, hail, and many other kinds of wet, cold dreck to pummel Bendites.

Many head for warmer regions -- Hawaii is popular this time of year. My sweetheart heads to Majorca to ride his bike amid blooming almond orchards along the Mediterranean coast. However, for those of us who once again have plans to Get The Garden Going During Spring Break Week, we stay home, with hope -- foolish foolish hope -- in our hearts. And either break out the waterproof jackets and mud boots or dress in multiple layers of wool, including hats and gloves, and spend our days going inside when the rain/snow starts, then back outside when it stops -- over and over throughout the days.

I did get my raspberries pruned. And that is probably the only time I will feel smug until sometime in the fall. After March, I am always behind. I realize every gardener is always behind, because there are just too many things to do in the spring than there is spring to do it in. But still I feel guilty and rushed.

It wears on a person. It really does. BUT!!!!

My personal salvation often comes from the annual seed catalog-a-thon which takes place anywhere from mid-February (good Ned) to early April (bad Ned).

When I started gardening in 1971, I somehow hooked right into the seed catalog gardening lifestyle. Local nurseries had only minimal options and besides, I loved mail order. It seemed so .... pro ..... so 'in the know' -- something that I, as a newbie gardener, was desperate to achieve. The first catalogs arrived right after Christmas, and I spent months happily circling things, making lists, pruning them, adding things back on, and finally, writing checks, stuffing my precious orders into the mail and waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

Most of the places I ordered from were on the east coast, and it took a minimum of 2 weeks to get anything. Some companies were even slower.

In 30 -- no, 40 years (!!!) of gardening, all that has changed. Local nurseries have much better options for seeds of your average vegetables and flowers. But even now, if I want tomatoes that really will bear fruit in our short growing season, I rely on my faithful catalogs to get the seed. What has really changed is the whole catalog thing.

First one, then another, then a few more, seed companies began creating websites. At first, there were holdouts. Even some of the companies that had websites didn't offer online ordering. You could browse, you could admire, but you still had to fill out that printed order form and join the ranks of the waiters. But I am here to tell you, online ordering is the best thing to happen to mail order nuts addicts like me.

ONLINE ORDERING! Oh heavens. Forget 2 weeks. Most places now have an envelope full of seeds in the mail by the day after I order. Instant gratification -- especially good for people like me, who tend to procrastinate. Even if I don't order until the day after the Spring Equinox, I still have my tomato seeds in time to plant them in my greenhouse before the end of March. Sweet!

So while the weather does its thing, I sit at my desk during the worst stormy moments, and fondle my new seed packets. Better than gold doubloons in a pirate's chest.

Imbolc

Most people I know, gardeners included, tend to think of March 20/21 -- the Vernal Equinox -- as the 'first day of spring', just as June 20/21 is thought of as the first day of summer, and so on. We gardeners, at least, should know better. Especially for those of us who live in a climate where 'spring' is of necessity a rather elastic term for the several months of .... varied .... weather leading up to summer, a keener eye set to subtler signals than a mere calendar date are needed to track the seasonal changes.

When I started gardening, I certainly thought in these more traditional terms. I read books and made my plans and charts based on what I gleaned from their pages, not having had any personal experience of gardening as a child, other than eating what my mother grew in the back yard. The urge to start gardening hit me quite suddenly and unexpectedly, just a couple of months after getting married. I was going through some of my parents' old books that summer and found my mother's copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book, probably the 1933 edition. Like lightning, I was struck with the nesting urge and proceeded to draw up the first of the possibly hundreds of garden plans/seed lists/planting schedules that have filled my garden journals in the nearly 40 years since.

For the record, said 'nesting urge' resulted in no human children, but I have had plant babies in abundance. Here's a photo I sent to my grandmother (Arabella, this blog's namesake) entitled 'your first great-granchild and me' in January 1974.



I was as proud as any parent of my darlings, which I always thought of as my children. Many early photos of me in the garden show me in similar embrace -- with tomato seedlings, fondling my first ear of corn, hugging a sprig of apple blossoms. My poor sweetheart soon became resigned to being dragged out in freezing cold or rain to gaze upon a field of freshly dug soil, then pulled along, foot by foot, to admire 'this will be carrots ...... over here will be onions ...... this is where the tomatoes will go next month ....'

As the years have passed, if I have shown no signs of waning enthusiasm for gardening, I have at least stopped pestering him like this. Well, not often. Now I take my wee digital camera out, point, shoot and pester YOU, dear readers, with such shots! Hahaha



The photo shows a wee, wee spinach seedling, just popping up in the garlic bed a couple of days ago. On a whim I had thrown some spinach seed in an empty space at the end of the bed, after planting the garlic and shallots last fall. Being either lazy or wise, I have learned that the easiest way to gauge planting dates for early vegs like spinach, peas and hardy greens, is to pay attention to when overwintered volunteers germinate on their own, and then plant more ASAP. Here's the result:


If this first sowing freezes or rots, it doesn't matter. It's certainly not taking the place of anything else, at this time of year. I never seem to plant spinach early enough, so maybe this year I will be lucky.

The point is, for me, and in my garden and climate, the old tradition of honoring the four other seasonal markers -- the so-called Cross-Quarter days, or Celtic Fire Festivals -- makes more sense as a garden planning device than the more obvious and well-noted Equinoxes and Solstices. Imbolc, the first festival of the ancient year, was celebrated at the point halfway between Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox, on February 4 or 5. I have heard this described in other traditions as the time when 'the back of Old Man Winter is broken.' Modern American pop culture has trivialized this as 'Groundhog Day' but ignoring this silly, shallow media non-event, I am reminded to stop my winter dreaming and get on with serious garden planning for the new season just ahead.

Sure, we will have months (and months and months -- sigh) more of cold weather. But starting in late January/early February, we and the plants notice lengthening days. In the greenhouse, I begin fertilizing the wintered-over flower pots -- geraniums and other stalwarts -- and begin to take an interest in what might be sprouting out in the garden.....