The Winter Garden Is In!

Hurrah! At last I managed to break free enough time to dig some compost and manure into the soil and plant the winter garden next to the pool. Nothing much to photograph…besides, iPhoto has decided it won’t read my pictures or download from my camera, so that’s moot anyway. Right now the garden is mostly dirt, with a couple of bell peppers and a cuke that La Bethulia gave me, plus a few pots hosting an Italian parsley plant, a basil plant, a  thyme plant, and a sage plant.

Soon, though…soon we’ll have Swiss chard, bok choy, leeks, fennel, lettuce, cilantro, red onions, and enough parsley to garnish Brennan‘s dinner plates for a week.

It should be interesting: I’ve never grown bok choy or leeks, but from what I can tell they’ll do all right here in the cool weather. It may be too early to start leeks from seed here; temps will be in the low 100s for at least another week, and I expect we’ll have 90-degree weather for another three to six weeks. Oh well. If they don’t germinate now, plenty of seeds are left over…some more can go into the ground a little later in the season.

It’s been years since I grew fennel. Make that decades. But the last time the stuff was invited into my yard, it thrived, producing feathery sweet anise-flavored leaves for months. In those days—I was just a dumb kid—I had no idea it made a tasty bulb. But now I do. 😉

Haven’t tried to grow cilantro here, but from what I understand, it’s a weed. People who do grow it say to keep an eye on it, or it’ll try to take over your patch of the world. Consequently, the seeds went into a big pot, where they’ve already germinated.

I’ve given up on imagining that gardening is an especially frugal activity. Really, I think it costs more to pay for manure and compost, fertilizer, gardening tools, hoses, plants and seeds, and water than it does to just buy the food in the grocery store. KJG recently joined the Bountiful Baskets co-op. For $15, she brought home more produce than she and Mr. KJG could eat. Last time I was at her place, she shared a gigantic head of romaine lettuce that was just gorgeous, along with several other high-quality veggies.

So, given that we have here a hobby and not a pursuit of frugality, this year the garden will be heavy on herbs, which are expensive at the store and grow happily for months on end. I love cilantro, but it doesn’t keep well in the fridge. Every time I buy a bunch of it, the stuff spoils before I can use it up. Parsley lasts longer and I should buy it, but I’ve become so accustomed to stocking up at Costco, which doesn’t carry fresh herbs, that I now hardly ever buy parsley, or cilantro either.

Bok choy! Yum! I love bok choy. Hope it will grow this winter. That is something that I will eat. Ditto Swiss chard, which has occupied a fair amount of the little poolside flowerbed for the past three winters. That stuff is the Southwestern veggie, as far as I’m concerned. It grows here all winter and well into the spring. It’s resistant to frost, and it tolerates weeks of warm weather before bolting to seed. Even after it throws out seed stalks, the leaves are still edible—unlike lettuce, which gets bitter as soon as it goes to seed.

Eagerness to bolt notwithstanding, some red lettuce also will occupy a little of the garden’s real estate. Costco does sell lettuce, but in much larger packages than I can consume, and so—again, because I rarely go into grocery stores anymore—I don’t buy much of it. And I love lettuce! It’s a great convenience and joy to be able to step outside the back door and pick a few leaves for a meal.

Last winter’s red onions were somewhat mixed, in the success department. A few sets didn’t grow at all. But some did, and the result was pleasing. When M’hijito grows them, they come out juicy, sweet, and truly superior to the grocery-store version. Mine were just OK…but again, there they were, and I didn’t have to drive to a supermarket to get them.

The carrot seeds didn’t get planted—ran out of room. I may put them in a pot, but that will have to wait until next weekend.

I wish there were more space in the yard for a garden. Because of the fruit trees, most of the backyard is too shady for veggies, and besides, to break loose more gardening space, I’d have to dig up the (expensive) desert landscaping. It has occurred to me to build a raised garden in a low area where a bunch of leftover flagstones form an unused and unusable “patio,” but that would be a lot of work, a lot of expense, and it’s in an area where dragging a hose would be a pain. Knowing me, I expect that if I had to lift a finger very far, a garden in that spot just wouldn’t get watered, and so everything would die.

Better to have a small garden full of favorites and unusual newcomers than a big one that’s so much trouble it never produces much, eh?

Images:

Red Bell Pepper. Fir0002. GNU Free Documentation License. Please note that this image is not in the public domain.
Parlsey. Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler Medizinal-Pflanzen. Public domain.
Fennel in blossom. Carsten Niehaus. GNU Free Documentation License
Bok Choy. Public domain.
Red Onions. Agricultural Research Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Public dopmain.