Planning for winter
We’re entering the holiday season.
There is a free-range turkey from a local farm in my freezer, right next to packs of frozen green beans, apples, peaches, strawberries, basil, squash, zucchini, and greens — all grown by me or harvested at a local farm. The pantry is filled with strawberry and blackberry jam, apple jelly and applesauce, pickled jalapenos, cucumber pickles of all types, pickled okra and summer squash, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and sauces of all kinds (among them, barbecue, sweet & sour, and ketchup) — again, all made by me. Dried beans rest in mason jars. Garlic and cayenne peppers hang from the pantry walls. Four large butternut squash sit on the hearth, where they’re part of my autumnal decor … only later to become dinner. The large table in my office is strewn with sweet potatoes set out to cure. We harvested two bushels from one 4- by 8-foot bed.
The new flower bed in the backyard — which I’ve dubbed the jewel garden after Monty Don’s much larger and more glamorous garden — is still alight with blooms, as intended. The idea of this bed is that at least one plant will be blooming (or at its most beautiful) every single month of the year. Right now asters, hardy chrysanthemums, gaillardia, and anemone are blooming, along with the last few blossoms of salvia. On the hill by the greenhouse, I’ve discovered that a lovely yellow iris with sweet fragrance is a reblooming iris. I’ve cut the flowers and brought them into the house — the first fresh bouquet I’ve had since before Halloween, when the dahlias succumbed to an early hard freeze.
The trees are rapidly shedding their scarlet and orange leaves and we’re collecting them like they’re dollar bills. We pile them a foot deep on the third terrace in the garden, where the soil is poor and compacted. Over the winter they will rot down, feeding the soil and the organisms that live in it, and loosening it from the top down. We’re also using the leaves to mulch a hillside that I’m slowly converting from scrub and weeds to a shrubbery. Situated beneath three pine trees, the soil is highly acidic … but the right plants will be happy there. There are four blueberries, two elderberries, two crape myrtles, three azaleas, an Annabelle hydrangea, and six oak-leaf hydrangeas. This year I’ve added witch hazel and forsythia, and next year the final additions will be rhododendrons.
The leaves will serve the same purpose here: enriching the soil, which is currently poor, stony and dry. Such a thick mulch will help conserve water and enrich the soil. We cover the old scrubby weeds and grass with cardboard, then leaves, then about six inches of chipped wood mulch … after the puppies have played in the leaves, of course.
Over the next few weeks, the weather will begin to turn cold in earnest. The rain, ice and snow will move in, and winter will be here.
I’m hoping to take advantage of the next month or so to improve a bit of infrastructure on our tiny farm. Our chickens have had a permanent run for just over a year now, but are still living in the movable coop we intended to be temporary. While it does the job, it’s not easy to clean and it’s certainly not pretty. Today I’ve sketched out the design for a new permanent chicken coop — with easy cleaning access and better nesting boxes (a big complaint of our current setup) — and hope Josh can get that finished before the weather turns nasty. Next year, I’ll plant vines and plants around the coop and run, helping to beautify it further and improving the lives of the hens who supply us with eggs. Among other things, the plants will provide shade and shelter, and will attract bugs that will be very exciting to our ladies.
Our only other major winter project — burning a large brush pile and marking out a cut flower garden in its place — will wait until we’ve had several good rain showers. It’s too dry to be safe to burn right now. Other items (screening the HVAC unit, repainting a gate, replacing the mailbox) are relatively minor.
A quiet winter. How nice.