Each year I post four seasonal Garden Kalendars, each posting preceded by a short introduction to explain the history of the text and how it’s organized. Although each preface basically repeats what was said in the previous installments, I will continue to repeat this information so it’s not necessary to check out a prior Kalendar and figure out what garden situations I’m writing about.
The Winter 2022 Garden Kalendar is composed of edited excerpts from my daily, hand-written garden journal for January-March, 2021--accompanied by occasional commentaries on those passages. The journal records my work in four gardens:
• The Alumni House Garden at Coe;
• A half-acre vegetable garden on a small farm adjacent to the Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center near Toddville (a garden typically identified as the Wickiup garden);
• The gardens and landscape at Buffalo United Methodist Church, a small church that we attend not far from Mount Mercy College;
• The gardens at my home on Elmhurst Drive in Cedar Rapids.
Kalendar excerpts have usually concentrated on journal entries dealing with the Coe and Wickiup gardens. The residential gardens on Elmhurst Drive, prior to the derecho in Augus 2020, were primarily stable, perennial shade gardens populated with several hundred hostas and requiring minimal maintenance. The wind storm, however, profoundly changed that landscape, destroying all our shade trees and necessitating a dramatic redesign of the gardens around the house–and thus in the past two years a substantial portion of my gardening (and writing about my gardening) has focused on these new gardens in our front and back yard.
This Kalendar constitutes about 50% of my journal entries in the first quarter of 2021. While most passages are quite mundane and not likely of interest to anyone else, I enjoy looking back at the previous year, being reminded of moments in the garden I had forgotten and being periodically surprised by previous year’s plans, noting what worked out okay and what was not successful. In case someone would want to see the layout of the gardens, here are links to maps of the Elmhurst Drive back yard garden and the Wickiup vegetable garden. The Alumni House Garden map is posted on the website’s “map” page. As for the italicized quotations inserted between some journal entries, they are passages from Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, a marvelous book on George Orwell as a gardener. Because of the length of this document, most of the Winter 2022 Kalendar is posted as a pdf. ~Bob
The writer and actor Peter Coyote once remarked that no one cries over artificial flowers,
and there’s a particular kind of disappointment when you begin to admire a bouquet
or a blossom at a distance and find out closer up that it’s fake. The disappointment arises
in part from having been deceived, but also from encountering an object that is static,
that will never die because it never lived, that didn’t form itself out of the earth,
and that has a texture coarser, dryer, less inviting to the touch
than a mortal flower. ~Rebecca Solnit
2 January 2021. The beginning of a new year. No “real” gardening yesterday; I never even left the house–though I did start organizing seeds and my ‘21 planting table. This is an amended version of my Jan ‘20 table, whose existence I had forgotten until I accidentally stumbled upon it while looking for another document. It’s a lot faster to update an old file than to create a new one. Yesterday I emptied all the old vegetable seeds stored in the two green seed boxes, laid the seed packages out in the basement on the floor, two tables, and the freezer. After checking various package dates, I threw away seeds likely to have marginal germination rates. The remaining seeds that might be used this spring I returned to their boxes. Today I brought from Coe the vegetable seeds I started in the greenhouse: peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, and a few melons. I purchase new seeds for most varieties each year, but since I have so many seeds remaining from last year, I may relax my commitment to fresh seed stock. My primary reservation is how timing can be so critical with seeds sown directly in the garden–such as carrots. The window of time for optimal sowing can be quite short, particularly when sowing schedules can be so profoundly affected by the weather and soil conditions. If the first round of sowing doesn’t work, the conditions may not allow for a do over.
At Coe this afternoon I shot my first garden photos of 2021. Because of the snow cover, I limited my walk to the path I had shoveled between the Alumni House and the garden shed via the “A” and “B” walkways. Many photos were dependent on long-distance zoom. That limitation in my movement might influence how I organize this set of photographs, assuming some are worth posting to the website.
After the photo excursion, I returned to planting spring-flowering bulbs in pots. Today I arranged several plastic pots with daffodils in the center and snowdrops circling the daffodils. I started with a bag of 100 Galanthus woronowii, originally intended for the crevice garden, but I never got that bed cleaned up in the fall. And now it’s too late. I’m hoping, however, that putting the bulbs in these pots will keep them alive (so they can then be planted in a perennial bed later this year), and we might also enjoy a few blooms this spring. My big challenge is lack of space–and it’s going to get tighter in the green house once we start sowing flower and vegetable seeds in February. Fortunately, these bulbs are super resilient and most of them can be moved outside in early spring. It would help if I could have constructed a decent set of cold frames for Coe and here at home. I’ve got the materials. I just can’t settle on the design.
10 January. For the past 5 days I’ve been entering data and comments into my vegetable garden report for 2020. As usual it’s disheartening how incomplete are my records. I’ve often failed to write down what got planted or where it got planted or when it got planted or what the harvest was like. My notes on the West Field melons, for example, is a patchwork of guessing, primarily because I did not write precise notes on which plants were producing which watermelons or cantaloupe. I was so thrilled to have something to harvest that I didn’t bother to record the harvest. Despite the absence of so much information, my meager records and memory are sufficiently complete to identify the major winners and losers.
At Coe I’ve continued planting bulbs in pots, trusting it’s cool enough in the greenhouse that some bulbs will produce flowers later this spring. The thermostat on the space heater is set at 50F–but it’s much cooler along the outer walls. I just read that if you store spring bulbs in a frig and plant them early in the spring, they might still emerge and produce flowers. I have refrigerated all the remaining bulbs at Coe, and I might take to Coe the large bag of daffodils here at home. Perhaps I can jam them into the small refrigerator. I did set outside the greenhouse a large pot of bulbs and covered it with leaves and dead foliage. On other fronts, yesterday I sowed 9 cowpots with old basil seed: Purple Delight (Richters), Finissimo verde a Palla (Territorial), Red Genevese ‘Freddy’ (Richters), Genovese (J. Scheepers), Gemma (Richters), Persian (Richters), and Newton (Seeds ‘n Such). Most of the seeds are 2-3 years old; the Persian basil seeds must be at least 4 years old. Basil is supposedly viable for an average of three years so we should see some germination. I was quite liberal in spreading seeds in each pot, 8-10 seeds per pot.
As for weather conditions, our world has been quite stable this year: solid snow cover of at least 6" deep, high temps around 30, night time in the lower 20s, cloudy most days. No storms forecast, though it’s supposed to get colder at the end of this coming week. Given this is winter, we should have no complaints.
Garden Kalendar: Winter 2022 pdf