It is hard to get excited about gardening at this time of the year, when everything’s washed out. The view is limited to bare branches, lichen-covered stone walls and firs. The brown/green/gray palette is somber and, although it can move me, it’s just not as stimulating as a June bustin-out-all-over border.
Still, it’s hard to shut off the desire for gardening. I’m offering a dozen ways to endure the winter – a survival guide – if you will, for the gardener without a place to dig.
1. January is the ideal time to start a garden journal. Your gardening successes and failures of the previous season are still fresh for recording, and you can plan for the upcoming growing season. Jot down ideas, paste clippings you’ve been saving into a book, plain or fancy. Like the little notebook you kept in chemistry lab 101 this is where you will record your gardening experiments – your successes and failures. You might think you’ll remember how you got the apple tree to produce a good crop, or what brand of tomato tasted best, but you really won’t unless you write it down. This is the place to document, design and dream!
2. The ground is frozen – true, but you can still dress your borders with compost if you haven’t yet. Stoke up your compost pile with some seaweed, delivered daily to your local beach. If you want manure, call up a farm near you. Chances are they’ll be more than willing to put you on the receiving end!
3. Get exotic – attend the Cape and Islands Orchid Society’s (CAIOS) Orchid Show. The event will take place on January 24 and January 25 at the Emerald Resort & Hyport Conference Center in Hyannis. The displays are dazzling to say the least and includes a sale of orchid plants and supplies along with mini-workshops.
4. If you didn’t finish (or start) planting the bulbs you bought, put them in a fridge for a couple of months and force them in pots. Among the most popular spring flowering bulbs for indoor use are hyacinths, crocuses, daffodils and other narcissi, irises and tulips. Most require storage for 10 to 13 weeks or more at temperatures of 32-to-48 degrees before forcing.
5. Catch up on reading – all those articles saved, the new books received at Christmas or those you set aside. Acquaint yourself with the various websites devoted to gardening. It’s a good time to trash the old publications, saving any pertinent articles. If you don’t have a file, perhaps you should create one just for gardening. It will come in handy, you wait and see.
6. Can’t stay out of the garden? Learn to split wood. I did and if I can do it anyone can! It will help work off the holiday bulge – right away (Don’t try this alone but get an experienced chopper to supervise at first).
7. Plan your spring and summer gardening strategies. Or plan your new landscape. It’s the perfect time for viewing the bones of your landscape, without the distractions of color and multifarious fillers.
8. Refresh your houseplants. Time for repotting, pinching, trimming, fertilizing, tending, and in some cases, revamping. Use a small brush – a silky paintbrush to “polish” leaves or a soft-tooth brush to dust fuzzy-leafed plants. And when it’s time to recycle a plant, do so. No point keeping a limp, lifeless hunk of greenery around if it doesn’t do what you want it to. [I’m actually trying to revive an aloe that was subjected to a couple of freezing nights… we shall see!]
9. Try this experiment. Using three identical plants with identical light and watering schedules, expose them to different forms of music – one classical, one rock and one without music. See which fares better. Who does your plant prefer: Beethoven or Bad Bunny.
10. If you suffer from gardening hands, then it’s time for some TLC, as in a proper manicure and an effective treatment for those cracked, dried-out palms. Take the trouble to fuss a little over yourself, just as you would over your favorite rose bush.
11. Later in winter start seeds indoors under lights. My aerogarden – a hydroponic system for growing lettuce, herbs and other plants – will come out of storage soon for a place on the kitchen counter over winter. It’s a delight to have your own home-grown edibles handy.
12. Last but not least, start shopping for your spring and summer plants from the many catalogs. They are already beginning to trickle in.
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang…”
-Sonnet 73, William Shakespeare
The Seaside Gardener
By Laura McLean
