Where Do Gardeners Go in Winter?


weeks
  • Galanthus (Snowdrops) 9-12 weeks
  • Scilla pratensis - 8-10 weeks
  • Scilla peruviana - 8-12 weeks Start them now and you'll have February flowers. Just make sure the scilla never experience any freezing temperatures.

    Take photos of your bare, snow-covered yard
    Right now your yard is as close to a blank canvas as it will ever get. Take photos. This is the perfect time to spot design flaws and see if the beds need to be extended, changed in shape, etc. It will also show you were there are blank spots that could benefit from a structure or perhaps a tree or shrub to lend interest. When things are in full bloom the charm of the plants can blind us to these things.

    Some activities are more mental

    Browsing and shopping the catalogs
    Most gardeners dream of a winter spent lazily browsing the seed and plant catalogs while wrapped under a comforter sipping hot toddies by a blazing fire. Unfortunately, not all of us have the required fireplace, but the rest is easily achieved. One of the advantages to being so busy over the holiday season is that when the festivities are over gardeners rarely feel a letdown. Instead they brighten up because at long last they can sit and really look at that stack of catalogs that has been piling up since autumn.

    I actually went through one of those catalog ordering services one year and had every catalog I could find sent to a gardening friend as a gift. Browsing through them, checking off plants that look interesting, maybe taking some time to look them up in our garden books or on the web is a great way to wile away the winter. Then we tally up the lists and find that it resembles the National Debt. This means we need to go back again to try to narrow our wish list down to something reasonable.

    Of course in the process we see new things that we missed on the first go-round. So we probably tally three or four times per catalog.

    And then we need to compare want lists to see if we have potentially ordered the same thing from two or more places, and which place seems to offer us the best deal. If you have enough catalogs this means you can easily spend the entire winter just trying to consolidate wish lists.

    And THEN you need to go look at the yard and make a

    The copyright of the article Where Do Gardeners Go in Winter? in Virtual Gardening is owned by Carol Wallace. Permission to republish Where Do Gardeners Go in Winter? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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