Cold Climate Gardening

Upstate NY is drowning! At least, my county is. It’s been raining all week, so the ground was saturated, and then this afternoon it really started raining! Must be the kind of downpour they get in Texas all the time. I can’t even check how fast it was coming down, because everyone in town is doing the same thing and the weather sites won’t load. What’s causing landslides and washing out roads is “just” runoff, but runoff like I’ve never seen. Yet even with our high water …

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This past September, Stuart Robinson of Gardening Tips ‘n’ Ideas interviewed several garden bloggers to find out what got them started. Just in case you are as far behind in your reading as I am, the intro is here, and you can easily follow the links at the top of each post to find the rest. Since I am a nosy–er, curious, person, I was very glad to learn a bit more about some of my favorite writers, and to be introduced to a few I didn’t know.

And I think Stuart was a smart cookie to find a way to keep his blog going during his vacation by promoting a sense of community among garden bloggers. Kudos!

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Sooner or later, most ornamental gardeners wind up getting a basic encyclopedia of perennials. Usually sooner. The novice gardener, planning his or her first garden, needs to get some idea of “What’s out there? And will it grow here?” Most of the general, try-to-cover-the-whole-country perennial encyclopedias make the cold climate gardener’s job more difficult, trying to weed out all the plants that aren’t hardy before even deciding what looks good. And if you read more than one of this type of book, you begin to realize that not all authors have the same idea of what a hardy plant is.

But Growing Perennials in Cold Climates makes your job easier.

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We perceive something to be technology only when it is still new and, like most new things, not quite working the way it’s supposed to. Nobody thinks that the wheel is technology, though it’s as important a piece of technology as humanity has ever invented. . . .

It is when people stop thinking of something as a piece of technology that the thing starts to have its biggest impact. Wheels, wells, books, spectacles were all once wonders of the world; now they are everywhere, and we can’t live without them. The internet hasn’t quite got to that point, but it is getting there.
from A bigger bang | Weekend | Guardian Unlimited

I am old enough to remember watching black-and-white television and playing music on a phonograph, when a map was something you unfolded from a glove compartment and searching was something you did with a flashlight, looking for socks under the bed. I feel like I stand over a gap, one foot planted on each side, and I’m always looking for ways to narrow that gap, to bring the two sides together. The older gardeners, the ones with the most experience and knowledge to share, often just don’t see the point of the internet and all that has become available through it. Yet I have read many garden blogs, written by gardeners of a certain age, who say, “I never dreamed how many friends I would make, and with people from all over the world.”

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Say you just moved from a supposedly more reasonable climate to the far north. Winter is fast approaching; you know you won’t be able to get anything done before the snow flies, but you’d sure like to know what you were in for before spring comes. Wouldn’t you like one of your new neighbors to be a veteran gardener, who just happens to invite you over for a chat and a cup of something warm, and shares all her hard-won experience?

Wanda Ferguson is that gardener.

A glance at the hardiness zone map for Maine reveals a range of climate zones, from the near-sultry zone 6 of the coast to the frigid zone 3b of the interior. Wanda Ferguson has been gardening in zone 3 for, oh, about 50 years now. With that kind of experience, you’d think she’d have a thing or two to share, and you’d be right.

. . . the first thing you need to know is that most of the soil in this area tends to be on the lean, mean and rocky side. Winter’s frost hangs in there with a vengeance, and summer’s gardening season is shorter than the hair on a Chihuahua.

(Sorry, you’ll have to fix that warm drink yourself, and just pretend she’s sitting across the kitchen table from you.)

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Have you ever walked 250 feet uphill to the asparagus patch with a bucket full of hand tools, only to realize after you get there that the weeds have gotten a lot worse than you imagined? So you trudge back down the hill and carry the garden fork back up the 250 feet, only to realize that that fork is too long, it will root up the asparagus as well as the weeds, and so you trudge back down with the big fork and trudge back up with the border fork, and then ten minutes later you realize there’s nettles in there, and you don’t have your gloves, so you trudge back down the 250 feet and get your gloves, and about halfway back up the hill you think it would really be smart to bring up the watering can, too, because after pulling all those weeds the asparagus would appreciate being watered. And then after the bed is all cleaned up, you realize if you had a leaf rake and a wheelbarrow it would be a lot easier to gather up all those weeds you just pulled and bring them to the compost pile, which means another trip back down the hill, in which you forget to bring down the tools you’re done with, which means another trip back up the hill to bring them down. Has that ever happened to you? Well, there have been many times when I’ve had to go back for another tool, but this particular instance drove me to muttering, “There has got to be a better way.”

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This is what greeted my eyes Friday (Nov. 3) morning: the first snow this season that remained on the ground instead of melting on contact. After the freak snowstorms in Buffalo and elsewhere, it’s rather yawn-inspiring, I know, but it does help one turn one’s face like flint toward the coming storms. No more remaining in denial, telling myself surely there will be a few more good days to get my yard-long “things left to do” list whittled down to size.

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