Garden Journal: Winter in the Laughing Dragon Garden

The winter winds and driving rain seem to be taking a break today, and that felt like an invitation to have a quick walk around the garden. It has been a while...

Our garden mascot enjoying a bit of winter sunshine

While hard freezes and mountains of snow are fortunately rare guests here in the Pacific Northwest, we usually still stay indoors during the winter because being outside when it is 40° with a 30 mile an hour wind and driving rain is just not very entertaining!

Looking out across the garden it would be tempting to say that "everything is dead for the winter," but that would actually not be true. There are, in fact, quite a few signs of life.

The roses are setting new leaves already!

Because it has been a fairly mild winter, a rose bushes are already setting shoots. There are even a couple of buds in evidence. I just hope we don't have a late hard freeze that ends up killing those tender shoots!

Lately, we have had a few days of what is locally known as "false spring," but we know better than to put much stock in it. Snows are still possible till about mid-March.

But let's have a look at the garden!

Rosemary... trying to bloom. It's hard to photograph those tiny blue flowers clearly!

In the herb bed, most things have died back for the winter, but we have some pretty healthy rosemary that's even trying to set bloom, and the two thyme bushes in their pots are also doing quite well. In addition, we have a single very healthy parsley plant that seems to have self-seeded there.

A heathy forest of thyme!

The chives seem to have completely disappeared but I imagine they will start sprouting up from the bottom as soon as the ground warms up slightly. There were lots of blooms last summer (that went to seed), so hopefully those will create plants, as well.

Meanwhile there's still some pretty healthy marjoram plants growing here. There are some leggy dead flower stalks that need to be trimmed back, but lots of new growth from the bottom.

Marjoram at the edge of the driveway; self-seeded.

We've discovered that marjoram is a rather stout ground cover as well as a lovely fragrant herb, and we even have some growing on the other side of the driveway, fully self-seeded as a result of the seeds falling on the pavement and the rain washing them clear across to the other side.

The leeks look pretty healthy, but the bed needs weeding, of course!

In the next bed over we have some fairly healthy looking leeks that are continuing to grow. Leeks around here tend to be 2-year plants that you can start from seed in the summer and then have a healthy crop of leaks in the spring about 18 months later. Certainly you can grow them same-year, and if we fertilized more perhaps they would be bigger but our experience has been that they take a couple of years to fully mature.

These spinach plants are three months old and never grew beyond about 3" in height.

At one end of this bed we also have some very small and sad looking spinach. We tried planting a late spinach crop which is apparently doable in this part of the world, but the plants never grew beyond dwarf size, most likely because we just don't get enough sunlight in the winter time.

Of course, it might also just be a sign that the bed is overdue for some conditioning and fertilizer.

We actually had a few strawberries all the way till November!

The strawberries are doing their winter thing, with just a little bit of greenery growing. A little bit later — maybe in early March — we will dig them up, condition the soil, trim the dead bits off and put them back in the soil as a result of which we will (hopefully!) have good berries by June.

I know many people subscribe to the idea that you have to replace your strawberry plants every 2 or 3 years, but ours are getting on for 6 years old, and we've learned that they just need to be treated well and fertilized and they'll just keep going indefinitely. The only potential problem is that if you don't start out with heirloom plants, they might "go wild" and only set very small hard fruits.

Our "drainage ditch" is pretty overgrown, but still doing it's job.

At the back of the garden, our moat/water catchment channel continues to do its job and we have not had any problems with flooding since runoff/groundwater unexpectedly started draining into the garden during last winter.

For a while we were really afraid that we might lose our garden completely, or that we might have to put in a major drainage system, but it turned out that a simple bit of a trench leading to an existing drain was enough to keep things dry during the summer and now during this past winter.

A few calendulas don't seem to be aware that it is mid-winter!

As a testament to the fact that we haven't really had any hard freezes this winter — at least not so far — there are still a few unripe tomatoes hanging around. As soon as we have a few nice clear days we need to get in and clean out those beds.

A few dried old beans from last summer still hang above the fence...

In the enclosed space that we affectionately refer to as "the Beanery" — instead of the winery — we have some pretty healthy winter arugula that has self-seeded from the plants that were there previously.

Our forest of winter arugula... it's quite peppery, as a result of growing very slowly.

There's quite a bit of work coming up in the near future, one of the less pleasant tasks will end up being delegated to @denmarkguy who needs to cut back all the dead blackberry vines to make room for new growth. We also need to get the old bird netting off the dormant raspberry plants and trim those back a little bit so we can have a nice big crop of wild raspberries by midsummer.

One of the larger garden projects that is still "in process" actually is going to happen outside the fenced garden area. There, we need to bring in more concrete blocks and build up what's going to be another potato bed.

A single fuchsia has decided to bloom... in FEBRUARY!

As part of conditioning the garden beds, we need to also need to bring in a few yards of rich soil/compost mix. We just don't generate enough compost ourselves to have enough. Thankfully, we have a good supplier... it's spendy, but worth it!

A couple of extreme storms we've had has also beaten our fence one of our neighbors to death, and that needs to be fixed and repaired even though that is not directly a garden project. However the fence is important for the garden because it keeps out the neighborhood heard of deer... they like to come in and basically treat everything you're trying to grow like it's their own personal salad bar!

And that seems like a pretty good stopping point for this garden update. I really need to get better at posting here more regularly... good intentions, and all that stuff!

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