Winter Harvest

June 19  1:00 - 3:00  Quimper Grange

It's hard to think of next winter, when the last one is barely over, but now is the time.

Winter is when fresh food matters most. The vegetables in the markets are expensive, and never as fresh as when they're just picked from our gardens. In winter our bodies crave the sunshine captured in the kale leaves or broccoli stems and flowers.

Jesse Hopkins from Collinwood Gardens will discuss sowing schedules and plant varieties for an abundant garden next winter.

Diversity Workshop

We can fight the weeds and insects, or we can offer them a modest share of our gardens. Yesterday I harvested some six-foot-tall giant milk thistles with their mottled leaves and their red-pink flower buds just opening. It was a shorts and t-shirt day, and I was uncomfortably warm in a jacket and gloves.
I have pokey holes all over where the thorns penetrated through my layers of clothes and gloves, like little thistle love bites.
Making compost changes your relationship with weeds. I could have got grouchy, cursing and gnashing my teeth, but I was grateful for so much fresh greens for my compost heap.
Milk thistle is a gift of the garden. It neither weeps nor toils. We eat the milky leaves, taking scissors to cut away the thorns. The seeds are favored by finches and used herbally as a liver-cleanser.

Even though it's a weed I introduced into my garden, I'm taking out this patch of milk thistle before it goes to seed - to avoid too much of a good thing.
Diversity in the garden begins with an attitude of accommodation. Milk thistle works in out-of-the-way places where it won't poke people walking by, or close in where you don't want people poking around. There's always a place or two for it in my garden.
I could have weeded it out a long time ago, but I wasn't ready to plant that bed. Milk thistle made a beautiful cover crop that kept down other less desirable weeds. The secret of weeds is knowing when to take them out - before they go to seed or start competing with your crops. Otherwise your weeds are a cover crop.


Workshop Themes
The Other Greenhouse Effect

In a greenhouse, or a tropical rainforest the air is warm and moist - creating ideal growing conditions. The relative humidity increases as plants exhale warm moisture from their leaves. We can mimic this greenhouse effect by growing plants close together in our gardens. 

Shelter
Windbreaks conserve moisture in the garden, create habitat for critters and can include fruits, nuts and herbs.

Attracting Pollinators
Flowering plants provide food, pollen and shelter for beneficial insects that limit outbreaks of garden pest populations.

Stocking the Weed Bank
The agonies and ecstasies of creating your own garden weeds from your favorite plants.

Companion Planting
Mixed plantings for healthier plants and more vegetables

More Tulips

Parrot tulips go wild.

Lily-flowered with Princely Early Mix

After a month and half, the early princes are fading, while the lily flowers flaunt their classic tulip shape - a style of tulip that you don't see often enough in todays gardens.

The Lily-flowered mix included a red and yellow combo that added a circus-y feeling when thrown into the mix with the pastel princes. I yanked those suckers out, and all of the other tulips heaved a sigh of relief.

Black Tulips, Parrots

and

Geranium Ann Folkard

Opposites Attract

Tulips

       Bulbs bloom so early, they often end up all alone in bare gardens. They look better when they're mixed in with some early foliage.

         Fire Chief Tulips with Euphorbia 'Jade Frost' and Thalictrum 'Elfin'.

Species bloom early and last long in the cool of the earliest Spring days. They only open when the sun shines. The buds open and close with the rising and setting of the sun. On overcast days the buds open only enough to test the waters.


Tulipa humilis violacea 

                                                                                                By the time these tulips bloom I've forgotten what kind I planted. This group starts out a rather ordinary yellow. They're 'nice', but thought we planted some outstanding tulips.

Two weeks later, the yellow flowers blush orange, mixed with swelling red buds of their companions - the kind of red that your mother warned you about.


Tulip Bastigone and Tequila Sunrise







Tulip Angelique with red lily-flowered tulips and Scilla, Hyacinthoides non-scripta. Watch out for Scilla, it will naturalize. I know this sounds like a good thing, but I've been paid to take it out of older gardens by the truckload.

 Tulip Clusiana    photo: j jaman     (click to enlarge)

Spring drags it’s feet, arrives in fits and starts. After a winter that timed its killing freezes to do the most damage with the least effort, the kale plants are short knobby stumps, pushing out miniature leaves just barely as fast as we can pick them. Everything grows in slow motion.

Where is all the miner’s lettuce, the tastiest green this time of the year?  Usually by now I’m picking salads piled high with succulent stems and tender cup-shaped leaves, and hauling away heaping wheelbarrows-full to the compost pile. This year it should be called minor’s lettuce, the juvenile and delinquent salad green.

And where are the orange and yellow flowers, called Calendula by the Romans because they bloom every month of the year, a calender of flowers to garnish salads and anoint the skin?

Spring drags its feet, and my seedlings creep when they should jump. I could complain, but there

are other compensations, like the clusiana tulips that are new to my garden this year. For the longest time, ever since the crocus flowers faded away, a small colony of these pointy buds on long, slender, spear-shaped stems, have gathered to wage war on a winter that drags on against all odds.

They grow next to a small clump of arugula plants from seeds that blew away with the chaff when I was cleaning the seed from last year’s seed crop. The arugula makes a lovely green backdrop to view the clusiana tulips against. I’m letting this arugula clump go to seed, even though it’s in an inconvenient spot, too close to the path to my front door.

I ate so many leaves through the long winter from this tiny little clump that I want to honor it by letting it make babies, and age with dignity and grace. I want to let it stand like a prayer that I pass every time I come home. I want to eat its babies and its children’s children. I want to age with dignity into a graceful old age.

Maritime Northwest Seed Growers

(click to enlarge)

At last Winter's Quimper Grange Seed Workshop, I took notes of the seed companies that were recommended. The complete list is here: Recommended Seed Companies

Most seed companies buy their seeds from different growers and bundle them into a catalog. A reliable seed company will insure the quality of it their seeds.

As an alternative, there are small-scale growers who sell regionally grown, organic, open-pollinated seeds. In the Northwest we are fortunate to be a hothouse of grower-to-gardener seed companies.

Grower to Gardener Seed Companies 

of the Maritime Northwest
Seed Dreams
Port Townsend Food Coop
Washington 98368

Oatsplanter Farm
Port Townsend Food Coop
Washington 98368

Uprising Seeds
2208 Iron St. Bellingham
Washington 98225
http://www.uprisingorganics.com

Wild Garden Seed
Box 1590 Philometh
Oregon 92570
http://www.wildgardenseed.com

Horizon Herbs
PO Box 69, Williams
Oregon 97544-0069
http://www.horizonherbs.com/

Victory Seeds
Box 192 Molalla
Oregon 97038

http://www.victoryseeds.com/

(click to enlarge)

More Seed Information Coming

This is the first list to come out of the Quimper Grange Winter Seed Workshop. I'm hoping eventually to have a list of recommended seed varieties for our area, and the best places to find those seeds. I started a list at last winter's workshop, and have entered the recommended varieties into a spreadsheet. 

The list is not complete and represents the opinions of only a few people. Ideally I might have something to show by next winter's workshop.