As you can see from today's cute Google Doodle, today is the start of winter, and thus time for the final Gardeners' Holiday of the year. This year at our house, The Changing of the Garden is extending beyond the vegetable garden and into the front yard. As you know, we've had very uneven results trying to grow flowers in front of the house. They looked great to start with, but eventually they all flopped over in a strong storm, and they never really recovered. Our first attempt to tame the unruly flowers with of stakes and string proved unsuccessful, and our second attempt this spring was doomed from the start because by that point, the bachelor's buttons had completely taken over, crowding out everything else. I finally got fed up and decided to yank them all out, and once they were gone, we discovered there was nothing left but a few scraggly daisies and poppies. It looked less like a bed of wildflowers and more like an abandoned plot of land in which a few wildflowers had managed to pop up.
So we decided that this fall, we'd just pull everything out and reseed the bed, this time with an all-perennial mix that doesn't have any of those pesky cornflowers in it. However, this plan was complicated by the installation of our new front stoop. We didn't want to put the seeds in before the stoop was completed, for fear the workers would just end up ploughing up the area and disrupting all the seeds. Unfortunately, while the steps themselves went in at the start of December, the railings didn't get installed until this Monday. (First we had to wait for the new railings to be constructed, and then our appointment to have them put in kept being rescheduled on account of freezing temperatures that made it impossible to use the water-cooled drill.)
So it wasn't until Monday afternoon, after the ironworkers have been lengthy long gone, that we subsequently controlled to get seeds in. We ended up having to apply our big spade to dig up?Or greater successfully, chip away?The region without delay next to the stairs, which have been soaked with the spray from the drill and absolutely frozen over, however we finally controlled to scatter the seeds and compress them into the dirt, leaving them uncovered due to the fact the package deal informed. Now we definitely must skip our fingers that they manage to germinate and provide us a few thing nicer-looking than we had the primary time round. (We'll probable want to put in stakes and string with the modern-day bed, too, because the brand new perennial combination moreover has some very tall blooms in it.)
Once that became taken care of, we had been in a function to expose our attention to cleansing up the vegetable lawn. On Tuesday, Brian tore out maximum of the withered remains of this year's flowers. It became out to be not possible to tug out the squash vines without ripping out most of trellis netting with them, so he just ended up pulling the whole mess out, leaving that trellis bare. He'll want to placed new trellis netting in next yr whilst we plant our spring vegetation on First Sowing day.
Before he can do that, however, he's going to most possibly need to replace the entire garden mattress body. His home-grown design for raised beds constructed of two-by using-four's has held up remarkably nicely until now, but after eight years, the forums are starting to warp and rot to the factor that the mattress can not maintain itself collectively. So next spring we will need to replace as a minimum one of the beds, and possibly all four. This time round we're going to maximum likely use strain-dealt with wood, which should hold up higher to the factors. I turned into unwilling to apply it closing time because of the fact I stored reading warnings approximately the dangers of the arsenic utilized in maintaining the wood leaching into your soil. But it appears this particular chemical, referred to as chromated copper arsenate (CCA), is not used in stress-dealt with wooden supplied for domestic use, and extra moderen preservatives appear like a good buy greater steady. So I determine at this element, I parent the first-rate real downside to the usage of this material is a genuinely better one-time price, and it's far nicely without a doubt worth it if we do not come to be having to update the beds each eight years.
As you may see from the photographs above, we've got not completely stripped the lawn bare. The parsley and the wintry weather lettuce are nevertheless inexperienced and growing, so we have left them in location in the desire that we are able to keep to harvest them throughout the wintry climate or, failing that, allow them to overwinter and pop up again in the spring. We've also left inside the Brussels sprouts flowers due to the fact they truely do have tiny but identifiable sprouts on them, and we can't quite supply ourselves to pull them out if there can be even a threat those sprouts should stay to tell the story to emerge as big enough to devour. It's a long shot, however we've not whatever to lose at this factor. However, given the notable loss of success we've got had with this crop during the last three years, we're without a doubt now not devoting any of our precious garden area to it next yr.
Another crop we've decided to leave untouched, sort of as an experiment, is our raspberry canes. When we first sold these vegetation lower again in 2013, we decided to conform with the reduce-every-year approach of growing, which offers you one big crop inside the fall in preference to a constant circulate of berries all through the summer time. We chose this technique specially because it's lots less complex than the extra traditional method of developing them, this is to selectively prune the wood each one year, cutting off the two-yr antique
The other bit of garden-related news is that our new Fedco seed catalogue has arrived. So as per our new holiday tradition, we'll bring that with us on our Christmas jaunt to Indianapolis, perhaps even taking it in the car so I can browse through it and propose new crops to Brian as he drives. By the time we return home, we should have it all figured out what new goodies we want to plant in next year's garden. (We'll probably be devoting a bit more of our time to the garden in 2017, as focusing on the one bit of the planet we can control should be a welcome relief from all the upsetting things happening elsewhere in the country and around the globe.)
So that wraps up our Gardeners' Holidays for 2016. We're off to Indianapolis shortly, and I may or may not have time to update the blog while I'm there—so in case I don't post again this year, a happy Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, or winter solstice holiday of your choice, and I'll see you all in 2017.
