In this unusually mild winter where it’s looking a lot like it’s not going to freeze after February (actually, February itself is starting off in the 60s day and 40s at night), my recent attempts to clean out the beds so they can be prepped for early plantings has taken on a bit of urgency. Moon is waxing (rising) for the next 8 days, so I’ve been folding newspaper pots by the dozen while sitting here at the desk.

Waxing moon is for above-ground plantings, so I’ll be starting peas, collards, bib lettuce, spinach and kale over the next week. The little pots fit tightly into glass cake pans, which makes it easy to evenly water from the bottom, which encourages early root growth. These will go onto shelves built to the big south facing window in the library. From there the seedlings can go straight into the ground (paper pot and all) by mid-february. If it freezes after that the pea cage can be covered with plastic at night, and milk jugs with the top end cut off fit nicely over the new greens. A new rush of peas should be planted as soon as the moon turns waxing again.

Once the moon has passed full it will be time to plant seeds for root vegetables. Which for early spring are beets, bunching onions, leeks, potatoes, carrots and radishes. Now, radishes are best planted to ‘mark’ rows of direct-seeded crops beginning in April because they grow so quickly and can be harvested early as the primary seedlings get established. But I like to grow a row of radishes for the spicy little seed pods they produce after flowering, so those I’ll start in paper pots indoors and interplant in the bed with leaf lettuces around the first of March.

Now’s a pretty good time to start the summer’s tomatoes and peppers as well, so the seedlings will be sturdy, well-leafed and quite full by the time they go into the cold frame in late March to early April. I’ll wait another six weeks to start the cukes, squashes, beans and pumpkins, as they don’t go out until May. Won’t need many new seeds this year, just carrots and more beets. Going to try Johnny’s “Atlas” carrots this year because long carrots tend to come out of the ground looking like man-roots in my soil, and the Atlas carrots are short and round like beets.

As for beets, I have to say I’m impressed enough with the hybrid “Moneta” I planted last year. Nice red roots that peel and slice easily and greens that are excellent in salads or as side greens. They also keep well and are vry juicy. In these days of leftover radioactive contamination from Fukushima, beets are about the best food-derived blood tonic anywhere. And since the blood/lymph system is where radiation does its most immediate damage, that’s something to think about. High in antioxidants, vitamins A, C. B1 and B6, beets are reported to have anti-cancer properties and also contain ample amounts of iron, magnesium, potassium and calcium.

Beet juice is also a fine health drink, always with a sweetness that is very palatable. I’ve been slicing those and the leeks I finally finished harvesting last week for drying, as they’re too old to make good side dishes or salads. I’ll powder the dried slices when I powder dried leeks, celery, carrots and tomatoes to use as soup broths and veggie-based table salts. As they are sliced I’ve been popping them into a bowl of cold spring water with ascorbic acid (powdered vitamin C) until I’m ready to line them up on the trays for drying. The water turns the most gorgeous shade of deep red, and I’ve been using that water to make lemonade (from bottled lemon juice). It’s redder than cranberry juice, but pretty and the sweet allows me to use less sugar. So far nobody’s complained, and it just makes the juice healthier than it otherwise would be.

Because so much of the garden was allowed to go fallow last year due to a constant excess level of fallout from the Fukushima nuclear accident’s plumes, I’m hoping to make good use of the extra months this year. Will plant twice as many beets and peas, spring and fall. More leeks, more bunching onions, more carrots and squashes. And yes, I am going to once again attempt eggplant and artichokes, even though that never seems to work out well. You never know what the weather’s going to be like, and global warming isn’t making things any easier to predict. But a peach tree ‘volunteered’ from the compost bin last year and is already over 10 feet tall, I’m hoping it’ll bear this year. Apples, pears and grapes all suffered miserably in the heat last year, I didn’t get enough out of any of ‘em to bother harvesting. If the peach does fruit I’ll get more, along with plums and figs.

And it’s not just me. The USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] just last week released a brand new Plant Hardiness Zone map (pictured above) which reflects changes due to warming climate. I’ve gained a whole zone, so peaches and figs should do fine. If I gain another one I’m going for oranges!

Do check out the new zones for where you live [Map Link], because for many of us this represents a whole new plan for how we go about growing our food. We can start relying on the extra weeks and/or months of growing season to plan our crop rotations, and even choose different cultivars we may have always wanted to grow but couldn’t.

Since this is one of the warmer winters in many regions, get busy right now making those plans. If I waited until 6 weeks prior to last frost in my old zone (May 10), I’d lose 10 entire weeks of growing time. So Happy Paper Pots all you homesteaders out there! Let’s make 2012 a super-abundant year for our yards, gardens and croplands in the hope that this year, none of our neighbors – far and wide – go hungry.

In another [post] the idea of porch and kitchen gardens was introduced. Growing herbs and some vegetables in containers in your own kitchen (if it has a sunny window or two), on your deck, porch or patio can be a lot of fun, and can lend personality to your environment through the different types of containers you choose and arrange.

There are some great ideas out there, as well as some wacky ones. You can add height with hanging planters, accessibility with window boxes, depth with different size containers arranged in groupings. You can build your own, go ‘thrifting’ at your neighborhood garage sales and secondhand shops, or raid the shed, garage, basement and attic. Heck, you can even put those discarded fixtures from when you remodeled the bathroom to eclectic use!

Old copper teakettles, worn out cowboy boots, old 55-gallon trash cans with holes (metal or plastic, cut short), old buckets, boxes and drawers… anything that will last awhile in the weather, can be made to drain water and will hold dirt can be made into a planting container or patio/yard conversation piece.

How about an old toilet with flowers growing in the tank and a bird bath in the bowl? An old claw-foot bathtub on the patio edge with a recycling fish tank water pump fall, water lilies and goldfish? That rusty old oil space heater can be sanded and painted, set in the kitchen or porch corner to hold that gallon-size copper kettle full of basil.

Old Easter baskets can be turned into hanging containers, just line with plastic and attach some chain or rope. Those 55-gallon plastic trash cans can be cut down and filled with enough dirt to grow tomatoes, peppers and herbs all planted together and trellised into nice arrangements. Paint them any color you like, add some decals or designs.

Coffee cans and cookie tins make excellent planters for herbs. Your kids’ old toys and wagons work nicely as containers, either for small succulents (in the bed of that big old Tonka dump truck) or a nice clip-able lettuce crop. An old chest of drawers can make a very nice kitchen planter, with drawers opened step-wise and sectioned with boards to hold dirt only in the space of their opening.

Check out some of the cool links below, and see what you can create from the ‘junk’ you’ve got sitting around!

Links:

6 uses for your old bathtub

Weird, Wonderful and Whacky Planters

Unusual Ideas for Planters

DIY Network: Container Gardening

In the last post I talked a bit about planning to use your yard space in such a way as to minimize expanses of lawn that serve no purpose other than making you mow them regularly. Before getting into the fine points of ‘naturalizing’ your yard space, I wanted to talk a bit about planning your herb and kitchen garden.

This is the most fun and useful bit of growing green things any homesteader can do, and it will add a great deal of pleasure to your living space with wonderful scents, beautiful plants and flowers, and the tastiest fresh herbs for your cooking that you could ever find anywhere.

In addition to culinary herbs that you’ll use a lot of, there are some handy medicinals that can also be grown in a yard-based herb garden, and more herb seed and plant suppliers are offering these usually wild-growing seeds, roots or plants for home gardeners and yard ‘naturalizers’. Which means you won’t have to displace any wildings in your area in order to grow your own supply conveniently to your kitchen.

Some will find it easier to begin with potted herbs on a shelf or sunny sill in the kitchen proper, then add to the collection with pots and stands arranged on the porch. Or you could grow your herbs in pots on the porch and just move the most commonly used into the kitchen during the winter. Some will want to plan a formal or informal herb garden to take up a significant portion of the yard, with raised beds and walkways covered with fabric and mulch, pebbles, flagstones or bricks – no mowing, and weeding raised beds isn’t too much of a chore.

I’d go ahead and advise collecting the herb seeds and plants you most want to grow from a supplier and starting them in pots even while you’re planning and constructing a more formal garden space in the yard. You can always get more later, and the root-propagated herbs you’ve already got growing will just keep on multiplying as you get more and more accustomed to dealing with them.

Choices should not begin with anything particularly exotic, just the basics that a homesteader will use a lot. Parsley, thymes, basils, rosemary, sage, chives, tarragon. Be wary of the pretty herbs you’ll want to plant in your garden but tend to become invasive – the mints, nasturtiums and wormwood are the worst offenders. Even out in the garden it’s a good idea to keep these crops in containers. Otherwise they’ll grow right past your bed confines, into your paths, into other beds, and show up in places you don’t want them and can’t seem to get rid of them.

When you plot the garden – even if it’s all in containers – be careful of the height requirements for the different herbs. Things like dill and fennel are tall and gangly when they’re grown, not really strong enough to hold themselves upright and more than three feet tall. If you plant them close to the path border they’ll fall right over onto the path and make a mess of your pretty design. Put them at the back of the bed, preferably against a fence, wall, or planting of self-standing taller plants like 5-6 foot tall sunflowers (very pretty!), or a stand of Joe Pye. Joe Pye can grow to 10 feet or more in height, but will stand and when in bloom is a better butterfly attractor than butterfly bush!

Conversely, you’ll want low-growing plants near the path borders. Thyme is good for this, and will tend to creep over the border. It smells great, is beautiful in bloom, and more useful than phlox. Chives behind the thyme gives an 8-inch level and the purple poms of their blooms are lovely. If you plan properly, the growth levels in your beds will complement the flowers and herbs they front or support, and everything will be easily accessible.

And if you choose to take up a chunk of the yard with an herb and kitchen garden, don’t forget to plan the veggies you grow as carefully as you plan your herbs. Establish some perennial beds for such herbs as rosemary and sage, and such edibles as rhubarb and artichokes. I have seen a kitchen garden centered around an artichoke patch that was beautiful. ‘Chokes can grow to 10-12 feet, and if you don’t harvest the buds in time they go on to become huge purple thistle-like blooms. Surrounding these are the shorter Jerusalem artichokes, which are a wild sunflower. You’ll be digging for some tubers in the fall, but artichokes have to be separated every year too, as does rhubarb. When you thin these perennials from the formal kitchen garden, you can always transfer the excess to a section of your truck crop garden, where they’ll happily keep right on producing food even if you let the formal plantings just look pretty.

Lettuces, several colorful varieties of kale and chard, even dark green collards can be planted in spaces among the herbs, harvested and replanted two or three times through the season, and they will add to the beauty of your plantings. Lettuce and kale also grows well in pots or flats, so can also be part of your porch or window garden. I like the leaf lettuce mixes, where you get everything from light yellow-green varieties to deep purple oak-leaf lettuces. When the plants get 2-3 inches tall, just clip them off (leaving half an inch) with a pair of scissors and you’ve a fine young leaf lunch salad. Spinach can be grown this way as well – these plants have shallow roots, the flat need be no more than 3-4 inches deep. Mix good potting soil with real garden dirt to get the most nutrition from the plantings, and it’s okay to fertilize with a little Miracle-Grow or organic fish fertilizer once a month.

Check out some of the resources below or seek your own on the magazine racks or library. Once you’ve aimed your mind in the direction of growing things, you’ll begin to notice there’s information everywhere! Take your time, start with some pots and cuttings from a friend, or try your hand at mixing good dirt and planting seeds. You may find you’ve a positive flair for it!

Links:

The Herb Garden

Kitchen Herb Garden

The New Kitchen Garden by Anne Pavord