People get ready
This is the last full week of winter, and the forecast calls for a few subzero nights. Spring might arrive wearing a parka. We’ll see. So, spring next week, the final frost nights in another week or so after that, and soon enough the garden season is on.
The two activities occupying a gardener’s time nowadays are preparing the soil and sneaking in a few plants way too early. The soil is where everything occurs. It’s the heartbeat of your garden operation. If we take care of soil, it will do its part to take care of plants.
The soil on my rocky hillside is naturally a bit acidic. Huckleberries love it. They grow all over the hillside, but they are in the shade, so they seldom produce berries. Strawberries prefer acidic soil also, and I usually mulch them with pine straw which stays in place as a mulch and starts out acidic as it decomposes. Eventually it turns more neutral and provides a wonderful texture to the soil. Oak leaves are similar, but they take forever to decompose, and they blow around in the meantime.
Asparagus prefers a more alkaline soil, so that bed gets a dose of wood ashes twice a year. Garlic and beets also benefit from wood ashes mixed into the soil. Every vegetable and flower has its preferences just like we do, so a gardener fine tunes a bed for that season. Regardless, every bed every season appreciates mulch, grass clippings, compost and manure if you can get it.
A blanket of leaf mulch moderates the soil temperature and maintains moisture. As it mixes with the top layer of soil a little at a time, it adds minerals and texture and becomes part of the history of the garden. That’s right – soil is historical!
Think of picking up your entire garden – all of it – and holding it like a basketball in front of you. You could look at all the incredible activity going on. Much of the soil economy goes deeper during winter, but purple dead nettles and chickweed are surfacing and bringing with them minerals from below. Their roots are wiggling through soil creating passages for air or moisture.
Look at the basketball to see if what you have contributed has made a difference. I have been working the soil in my garden for 13 years. A couple years ago, I had a few seedlings in the greenhouse that really needed to be transplanted. I grabbed them and a tablespoon – the only tool available at the moment – and went to garden bed. Because of years of adding mulch and compost to that bed, the tablespoon easily dug holes for the seedlings.
Gardeners pay attention, and when we look down at plants, they are looking back and telling us about the condition of the soil. Discoloration means something. Holes in leaves are a cause for chagrin, so we deal with it. We are invested in the health of those plants, but before they go in, we take care of the soil.
I take it as a positive indicator of the health of my soil that so many native plants pop up uninvited in my garden.
Going along with preparing the soil is deciding what plants will go where. December is when gardeners obsess over seed catalogs and order far more seeds than they can plant in a year. I haven’t grown everything yet, so I experiment.
One year, I ordered seeds for Wapsipinicon Peach tomato, a mid-size soft yellow tomato with a creamy, custardy texture. It grew well in my garden, so the next year I gave seedlings to gardener friends a bit east of my garden. The plants performed poorly in their garden whereas they were reliable for me.
The point is, my soil is not your soil, my microclimate is not yours, so we might get different results from identical seeds. I recommend properly collecting seeds from your own plants and planting them in soil generously, respectfully tended year after year.