Cold Climate Gardening

Forget the weeding. That was an anomaly. Back, sort of, to the real February. I say “sort of” because yesterday and today the temperature is hovering a bit above freezing, which is on the warm side for February around here. (Average high for the month is 30F, and my outdoor thermometer registers 35F right now.) More importantly, the sun was shining gloriously all day yesterday. Don’t ask me how to explain this, but it was spring sunshine. I don’t know the science behind it, I only know that there was a different quality to the light than there had been in weeks past, and I had to be out in it. Had to.

What kind of gardening can you do outdoors when the soil is frozen like iron? All right, yes, I concede I could have just gone out for a walk; there’s no law that says one has to be productive all the time. I did one better than a walk: I went on a pruning walk.

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In my post of October 31st, I told you how Rundy started clearing a path through the Secret Garden and the woods. Since then he leveled some areas of the path with a mattock, chain-sawed some trees that were in the way (including a huge dead pine that had toppled across a path since the path was first created), and brush-mowed the remaining path through the Witch Hazel Grove. If you want to know what using a brush mower is like, Rundy will tell you about it here. Unhappily, I have been sidelined with a back spasm since November 3rd, and haven’t been able to walk the path since he …

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I’m so psyched! Rundy finally started mowing a trail through the secret garden with the DR Brush Mower. It has been my dream for years to have walking trails through our acreage and it’s finally coming true. Ever since I walked the paths in my Grandma LaFemina’s Long Island yard, and followed my Uncle Jimmy along a path through the woods near his house, I have been drawn to paths or trails leading off into the quasi-unknown. When we first moved here, I struggled to understand what I wanted my garden to be–what garden meant to me, psychologically. It wasn’t until I read “North by North Hill” by Wayne Winterrowd in an issue of Horticulture that …

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