Carrots In Winter

What I love about gardens is that you plant seeds and a few months later, on dark days, you find that you have grown something better than rubies in the soil at your feet.  Even in the bleak winter January days there is treasure there- waiting, waiting for warmer days to develop further- keeping still in the frost and the burn of ice.  Out in my monastery garden I plucked carrots whose seed I set in place in August, a late planting.  Better to get your winter seeds planted in July.  Yet see how sometimes even if you are scrabbling to get it all together you might be rewarded by something aromatic, nutritious, and pretty on a day when it seems the canopy of the sky is inches from your pathetic hair?

What needs to be going on in my garden right now is some selective weeding, late bulb planting, and sprinkling of wild flower seeds.  If you are planning on planting any wild flower seeds, it would have been ideal to do it in fall.  Rugged seeds require stratification which means that they need to go through a period of cold either by sitting in the ground during the winter or being stored in winter temperatures in your fridge or freezer. 

However, you can sprinkle them right now and you should get at least some decent germination.  There's enough cold left to do some good.  I am already excited about cutting gorgeous wild flowers- like thin stems of toadflax, lush blooms of black eyed susans, and pretty stalks of lupines.

Now is the time to order any bare roots you want to plant this spring.  If you wait too long your selection will be reduced which is such an annoyance.  This means figuring out which fruit trees, roses, and fruit bushes and canes you want to get established.  A good tip (that I rarely follow myself) is to only order the plants you already have the space prepared for otherwise you will get a bunch of stuff and no place prepared for them which means they will sit around in their vulnerable bare root state and languish.  Ask me how I know.

This is one of the most exciting times of year for me.  I love poring over the plant catalogs trying to narrow my choices down to an affordable few selection...I love restarting my lists and plotting what I will do with everything.  My garden is my eden and this is the month in which I spend the most time imagining what I really want to get from it, what I want it to do for me, and making the blueprints of my future gratitude.

Max recently offered up this excuse for not playing more in our yard "I would play outside more if we had more bushes but there isn't anything to hide behind so it isn't fun."  He's right.  We liked this place because of its clean slate aspect- not being filled with hedges and bushes we loath.  One of the most exciting things about a new garden is playing with its potential.  At some point you have to nail down a plan and that's such a serious moment.  Here in my hibernation anything is possible but when spring comes with its inevitable mud I will need to  be hard at work building, planting, cleaning up the debris of my neglect.

How about some Hawthorn, Mallow, and Elderberry to hide behind kid?

A garden is not a place for perfection.  A garden is an evolving landscape in which things thrive and die, in which we impose our vision and are humbled by results; sometimes just what we drew out in the dark winter days, sometimes unexpected entirely.  We are stewards of the soil but not masters.  Perfection is disease to foliation and the emergence of blossom.

Stumble through your path and you will find many discoveries to brighten the hardest minutes of your life.  Lie in the weeds and listen to life thrive, move, and exclaim all that is worth your worship in cricket chirps, the slow crawl of the snails, and in the spider's stealthy crocheting* of webs.  It's all there.  Even in the dark of winter, living impossibly beneeth the ice and snow.  If you put your ear down you may lose it to frostbite, but not before you hear the earth move.

Nothing gives me more pleasure than crouching down to my carrot greens and yanking them up to find what has been brewing in the dark.  Brewing while I've been struggling.  I believe that all of my enlightenment lies there at soil level.  I believe that many people in the coming years are going to find their answers in growing their own carrots.  Their own beets.  The cost of food will become so personal and how they get it is going to become a question of great import, as it always should have been.  We are all going to be lying close to the soil listening to the great earth turn and asking ourselves what we have done for it lately?  Because there will be a direct relationship again between man and the food he eats and it will become elemental for us all to put more value on the food we eat than in the cars we drive.

Until then I will pull my carrots out of my garden like I used to pull beets out of my mother's garden and inhale the aroma as though it was the most expensive and intoxicating perfume on earth.  If you come and say hello in my garden I might let you pull one up too.



*This makes me think of you, my dear Alice!