Cold Climate Gardening

Mother’s Day is fast approaching, and many retailers who normally don’t feature gardening products have potted flowering plants and other quasi-gardening gifts prominently displayed. I thought I’d take the opposite tack and share with you my favorite non-gardening garden “thingies.” Most of them don’t qualify as tools. Some of them, quite frankly, would look like garbage to most people, and I am always a bit anxious that some of my favorites might be thrown out by mistake.

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Winter sowing, as far as I can tell, is identical to what, in my self-education as a gardener, I learned as cold stratification. The more traditional description of the procedure is to put the seeds in the fridge for the requisite period of time, and then sow them in pots or flats or whatever your technique is for seed starting.

I learned stratification from Lauren Springer’s book The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty. Her method is similar to what is commonly referred to as winter sowing now, but she didn’t bother with greenhouse-like containers to protect the pots of seeds. Instead, she covers the soil mix with “one-eighth inch of fine gravel (one or two grades coarser than sand)” and after watering them from the bottom, she puts “them outside on the north side of my shed, which stays shaded throughout the winter. This prevents the seed from experiencing the wide temperature fluctuations of warm, sunny winter days.” They aren’t covered because “The ideal cover…is a blanket of snow.”

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Just about half a year ago, I was lamenting the loss of my favorite pink peony poppy. Thanks to one of my readers, I learned that these beauties are being sold on eBay. EBay! I had known that seeds and plants were sold on eBay, but had never thought to look myself.

Julie Calhoun and the One Stop Poppy Shop(pe)
That tip led me to discover the One Stop Poppy Shop.

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Thanks to an eclectic garden, I learned about Value Seeds. This reminds me of Edward Hamilton Books, my favorite place to shop for gardening books. Someone else’s castoffs, but still good quality, one price for shipping no matter how much you buy, get-it-before-it’s-gone selection, and very low prices. I haven’t ordered from them myself, but the reviews on Garden Watchdog seem favorable. As the eclectic gardener aptly put it, “a cross between Thompson and Morgan Seeds and the Dollar Store.” Frugal gardener’s heaven!

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How could this happen? After explaining to Zoey in the comments of this post what colchicums were, I realized I had never shown what the foliage looks like. It’s not exactly breathtaking, so I don’t have many photos of it to share. I had to scan in this photo, which was taken in my very first spring here (1990). I’m sure I took it with the hopes that I might someday be able to identify the foliage. You can see one clump of strap-like daffodil leaves, which are about full height, and the broader leaves of the colchicum leaves behind them. This should give you an idea of the scale of the foliage. Keep in mind the flowers are about the size of crocus blossoms. (As with almost all images on this blog, click on the small photo to get a much bigger one.)

Now this second photo is a bit more interesting.I don’t often get to see this, myself. It is the seed pod of the colchicum flowers that bloomed the previous autumn. This is why one supposedly common name of colchicums is Sons-Before-the-Fathers. In a calendar year, the seeds show up before the flowers do. This is because the ovary, the seed forming part of the flower, is actually located at the base of the perianth tube, just underground. The peri-what? you ask. What looks like the stem of the flower is actually a tube of petal-like tissue, and the seed making parts of the flower that in a rose, for example, would be right below the blossom, are actually in the bulb underground. The ovary, now containing the seeds, is brought above ground in the spring when the leaves emerge.

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I grew this lily from seed. Really. All by myself. Several years ago, my grandma sent me a letter with some seeds wrapped in wax paper. She had carefully handwritten “Pink Trumpet Lilies” on the piece of tape sealing the little package. She told me another woman in her nature discussion group gave them to her for me.

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Now that you have been reviewed, and someone has complimented your writing and synergy, I hate to wreck it by by my disjointed off topic rambling. This is probably the last time I post, since I am very, very pregnant.

I spent a lot of time working out my seed order, knowing that I will not be able to think straight soon, and for quite some time. Kathy wanted to know how I was possibly going to start seeds with a newborn infant. My plan this fall was that I was that I was going to convert all my annual space into perennial beds, so I got all these plants this fall, but we just redid our …

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