Winter Gardening

We are very lucky - the woman who owned this house before us (in fact, built this house) loved to garden. There are wonderful flower beds running the perimeter of the house like a colourful moat. She also had a couple of vegetable garden spaces carved out, and we were rich in self-seeded cherry tomatoes our first summer here.

We spent the first winter researching timing for starting seedlings indoors, when to plant various things outdoors, companion gardening techniques, and other ways to reduce pests and weeds organically. This past summer was our first attempt at planting the vegetable gardens ourselves, and we had good luck with garlic, onion, peas, beans, zucchini, squash, lettuces, kale, spinach, carrots, and parsnips. And not such good luck with a handful of other things, including Brussels sprouts and leeks. You can’t win ‘em all!

And now we’re back in winter.

There’s an incredible soft stillness to winter in the country.

Spring and summer were endless amounts of activity - planting, weeding, mulching to avoid further weeding, watering, and then beginning to harvest some of what we’d planted. Fall was a blur of seed-saving, harvesting, preserving, and prepping the garden for next spring.

Now.. a lovely blanket of soft snow insulates the gardens. No weeds are growing. No pests are pesting. It’s literally impossible to do anything IN the garden right now, so we’ve switched gears to doing things FOR the garden: making wish lists and ordering seeds, learning and planning for this spring. So that’s what we’re doing. Imagining expanding the vegetable beds a little bit at a time. Adding “build a cold frame” to the long list of projects, in the hopes of extending our season in 2023. Trying to learn the language of solar panels, so that we can make an informed choice about whether or not to install them (and if so, how many? Grid-tied or off-grid??). Starting to reach out to friends who might be happy to help with some of these projects, in exchange for a soul-nurturing escape to the country.

And amongst all this peaceful, quiet, dreaming and research and planning, trying to figure out how on earth the little flying squirrel keeps getting into our house.