Garden Report for 12/12/24
This will be the last Garden Report for 2012. It’s more of a tidying-up, because the garden has been pretty well frozen since the beginning of the month.
Winter Garden
On the 5th of December, we ate the last of the homegrown tomatoes. These were ones that were harvested green and left to ripen on the living room floor. We had probably five pounds left, but not all were salad-worthy. A few were beyond help, most were destined for the tomatosauce pan that day, and the ones that were not too soft or wrinkled went into the chard and lettuce salad .
Also on the 5th, I pulled up the last of the carrots (we finished those yesterday), the last few frost-blasted chard leaves, and the green onions. These were interesting. They were not intended to be ‘green’ onions. In fact, some of them were leeks. But I had planted them late (they were in Section 3 of the KHG), and the dull weather kept them from developing properly. So I had about a pound of mixed scallions (including a nice purple Italian variety). We’re still using them. They’re a little hot because of their size, but still good.
I have a whole box of unused seeds. One website says that if you have seeds that have gone past their plant-by date, just clear a patch of disused ground the next Spring and throw them all in and see what comes up. I might try that with the herbs and the greens, but not with the squash and corn.
We had 4″ of snow overnight, and it looks like we’ll be bouncing along right at freezing for the rest of the year (which means there’s a reasonable chance that this snow will still be here on President’s Day), so I don’t expect any garden activity until February, when the seed-ordering takes place.
In the meantime:Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and for Setsubun: !鬼は外! 福は内!
Tags: garden, keyhole garden
January 2, 2013 at Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:39:02 +0000 |
We still have kale in the front banks that I’ll let sit–hopefully, in our relatively mild PDX winter, it’ll go dormant at worst and continue to gently produce at best. (Or take one look at our pasty January faces and start sprouting leaves in sympathy.) Hmm, I see the dog is harvesting my early crop of vent plugs before their springtime pull date. Best be off…
January 2, 2013 at Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:01:45 +0000 |
We dropped below freezing two days before Christmas, and won’t see anything above that until the weekend, when it gets warm enough to snow. Fortunately, the last week of December is historically the coldest week of the year, so we’re upward bound.