winter!

It is winter. I am more cold tolerant than I used to be but still I have no patience for it being dark when I go to work and dark when I get home. Gardening in the cold and in the dark? Not gardening? Well, I can’t not garden! So it is time to sit down with the seed catalogues, maybe do some germination tests on old seeds to see if I need new seeds, and if daylight allows do some fall chores I just didn’t get around to. Like seeding the prairie! Our prairie bed (north of the art room east of the courtyard) is gradually being enlarged and gradually filling in, soon it will be a bird and butterfly magnet. South of Oklahoma it is definitely best to plant wildflower seeds in fall, north of us in spring but here, in the middle? I say plant native seeds when the native plants would plant native seeds. Most fell to the ground or blew in the wind around November but I still have many beautiful seed heads hanging on in “cold storage” in my garden. Some will be eaten by birds some will fall into dense plantings or onto rocks or be combed out of my dogs fur and some will find their way to fertile soil, that is why plants make so many seeds! But Sunday afternoon as it started to snow I knew it was time to seed the prairie, at least a little bit! With the cold wind biting my cheeks and my sensible dog snug in the car (giving me her best you must be out of your mind look) I raked bare bits of soil loose and scattered seeds of big bluestem ( Andropogon gerardii) little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta) cone flower (Echinacea purpurea) and rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium) along with a prairie wildflower mix from Native American Seeds, (a very educational seed catalogue) raking them in, walking on them and trusting the snow to cover them with a gentle blanket that will eventually melt and wash them snug against the soil. Here’s to spring!

“Nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that they bend under the load . This is the real spring; the future is not in front of us, for it is here already in the shape of a germ; already it is with us; and what is not with us will not be even in the future... We don’t know the future because it is within us. Sometimes we seem to smell of decay, encumbered by the faded remains of the past; but if only we could see how many fat and white shoots are pushing forward in the old tilled soil…if we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best thing of all is to be a living man- that is a man who grows.“ Karel Capek in “The Gardeners Year” originally published in Prague in 1929, always a good winter read!

http://www.seedsource.com/catalog/detail.asp?PRODUCT_ID=1814