Cold Climate Gardening

There are snowdrops under this snow

Some of you, I am sure, thought I was being overly pessimistic when I said the snowdrops sprouting in January wouldn’t be blooming in a month. As you can see above, my assessment of how things would go was pretty accurate. As a matter of fact, at this point I […]

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For those of you who think my snowdrops will shortly be rocketing from the earth and bursting into bloom: fear not. The snow came back. More predicted tomorrow.
Happy New Year.

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One of the nice things about short winter days is that it’s not too difficult to get up before sunrise. These two photos were taken a bit after seven thirty in the morning. It’s not going to be much of a white Christmas, I’m afraid. Sunday the snow pack was dissolved by rain and highs […]

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I wrote this essay several years ago after the winter of 1993-1994 and I dig it out to reread every winter in which I feel I’m suffering excessively. Of course, no matter how bad your winter is, someone else can top you, so I don’t promote this as the worst cabin fever anyone ever had, […]

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I don’t have any bare ground for crocus to be poking up through–we have at least 18 inches of snow on the ground. Is it because the crocus are near the heated greenhouse that they are coming up? I hope some time this winter you and Judy both can tell us what size and type […]

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Ah, November. A little time to breathe and do something besides the hard physical work of gardening. Like, read seed catalogs and go slightly mad with imagining all the things I’ll grow next year. And read gardening magazines–actually read them, not just flip through them and hope to remember them when there’s […]

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Decoy weather–an apt term. Somehow, once October is over, it’s hard to call it Indian Summer anymore. I have noticed around here that we consistently have one day in the first week of November that is warm and sunny. I always give the kids the day off from school then and have a general clean […]

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