December’s First Friday events in town found Chris playing at The Hive for their Artists Night. It was a lovely evening and we all enjoyed not only the artists and their works, but listening to Chris play the evening away. Very nice!
We have loads of propagation tubs full of native plant seedlings and this week Lizz began the process of transplanting them into pots and larger plugs. These will be for sale in our Farm Stand store this coming spring and there will be a great many to choose from. We’ll have a large selection of Penstemons, Globemallows, Zinnia grandiflora, woody species like a few species of oaks – all sorts of plant varieties.
Next week she will be sowing the next batch of perennials, some of which will be natives, all of which will be good choices for gardeners, especially gardeners interested in growing plants with a lot of uses or which are appropriate as wildlife habitat plants.
Yay! Yesterday I finished my seed orders for next year’s growing season. I’m glad to have that task completed and now I can hardly wait until the seeds begin to arrive in the mail! So many varieties of plants – old green friends and new green friends.
When Lincoln School of Science and Technology came to visit the farm the first week of October, many of the children planted seeds, and some of those seeds were different kinds of beans. Of course, I planted a pot of seeds for each class that planted bean seeds as I demonstrated the process of planting a seed to kindergartners thru 2nd graders. Now those demo pots of beans seeds are big plants and producing bean pods. We will be eating freshly harvested beans before much longer.
Of course, Shrek is always involved in the daily happenings of greenhouse and other farm work.
Grow your own Climate Victory Garden this Winter
So those have been some of the tasks happening this past week on the farm. But now I’d like to talk to you about something really fun, inspiring and important you can be doing this winter season in your own lives.
Some time back ago, maybe it was in late spring or early summer, I wrote about growing a Climate Victory Garden and how in this day and time that would be an incredibly good and important thing we can all be doing. For most of us, at least those of us that live in places where winter is a cold season and its not really possible to do much, if any, outdoor growing, the traditional food gardening season has come to a close.
That does not mean that the food gardening season cannot continue indoors when winter weather outdoors is too cold. If you think that you cannot grow a food garden in the winter, I would challenge you to re-think that thought and get busy planting yourself a winter food garden indoors. It won’t matter if you live in a house, have a sun-room or greenhouse or not, live in an apartment or even a collage dorm room. It is possible to grow many types of food plants indoors!
Remember during the World War when there were food shortages and the government asked people to ration their food and to grow as much of their own food as possible? Well, people did just that and they benefited in many ways by growing a “Victory Garden”.
Now we are in a different kind of crisis with climate change a very real challenge for all of us and every living thing on this planet. It’s time to grow as much of our own food and herbs as we can do and besides it feels great to do so. It’s time to start growing “Victory Gardens” again, but now we will call them “Climate Victory Gardens”. I challenge you to grow whatever you can starting this very month. You won’t be sorry and it will leave you feeling great. You’ll be a wonderful example to others and inspire and teach kids how to take good care of themselves and the earth. It’s the right thing to do and it is pure pleasure besides!
So, let me encourage you to become a winter food gardener with these ideas:
This is a sunny spot in my kitchen and we use this as a gathering space. I have an end table there sitting about 2 feet away from a window that is filled with pots of herbs and veggies. There are salad lettuces and greens, chives, parsley and spinach all growing on a space that is about 15″ x 24″. It looks like a very sunny spot, but that is deceiving, as the only time the sun shines directly through this window is for about 2 hours in the mid afternoon. The rest of the day it is indirect light.
How about growing veggies like carrots or green onions, radishes and the like, in addition to salad greens and lettuces. These types of veggies will grow well in bright, but indirect light, and they are pretty much trouble free. Sow them in any kind of pot you have that has drainage holes in the bottom (remember to put a water-catch tray of some sort under the pot to catch the water that drains through the pot when you water the plants). I like to grow nantes or paris market carrots indoors because they don’t grow quite as long in length as other types of carrots, which means you can grow them in a pot that is about 6″ deep.
Green onions or leeks and shallots are great grown in pots indoors.
Once your carrots get to their proper size, you simply pull them out of the pot, twist off the tops (I toss the tops outdoors for the wildlife to forage on), wash your carrots and your ready to enjoy eating them. They are so much sweeter than the carrots you buy at the grocery market!
There are a great many other types of food plants that can be grown indoors, like figs! Figs are easy to grow indoors, as they like indirect light, temps that are compatible with house temperatures like 60-80 degrees. Your fig will produce fruits on-going and when they turn chocolate brown, they are ready to pick and eat fresh. Delicious!
Don’t forget to grow some herbs too. This is a ginger plant and ginger is really simple to grow indoors. Like figs, they prefer indirect light and warm household temperatures. In January or February, the ginger plant will start to go dormant with leaves getting yellowish and floppy. When this happens, it is time to harvest your ginger rhizomes (roots) for cooking or herbal medicine making. Simply, dump the pot out, remove all the soil from the roots, then wash your roots and store them in the fridge crisper until you are ready to cook with them, make tea, tincture or herbal vinegar.
Remember to save back one section of the ginger root to plant back in a pot with fresh soil. This piece of root will re-grow and begin multiplying the rhizomes for the next January’s crop harvest.
You can also see in front of my pot of ginger is a pot of scented geraniums. These can be a fun addition to your indoor food and herb garden. The leaves and flowers are edible and very fragrant. They bloom all winter long and are easy to grow. You can use the leaves and flowers in bread or salad or float them in a pitcher of ice water.
Purple Beauty Bell Peppers are one of my favorite indoor veggies to grow. You could choose other types of peppers to grow instead of these, but I like these best. The outside of the peppers are dark purple and the inside is bright lime green and the flavor is very sweet.
It’s not unusual for these pepper plants to be loaded up with peppers ready to use in stir fry, vegetable roasts, casseroles and so much more.
Some folks like to grow citrus trees in pots indoors. I grow limes and kumquats. I do get some limes to pick, but not that many, but any I can pick I enjoy eating immensely. The kumquat tree always produces a lot of fruit in the winter and I pick a handful every day for a couple of weeks.
If you grow citrus indoors, you will need to have a location with pretty bright light, but it doesn’t have to be direct sunlight. Don’t over-water these plants. Mine get watered once a week.
Pomegranates do well indoors too with low water and bright indirect light. I do set my pomegranate plant outdoors on a shady porch all summer so that the hummingbirds will find the bright scarlet flowers and pollinate them. You can see the pomegranate fruit above that starts to grow in mid summer and gets bigger and fatter and juicier with the passing weeks.
Then around Thanksgiving, I harvest my pomegranate fruits to eat.
One of the very best tomato variety for growing indoors is called Red Robin and it produces large red cherry tomatoes. These plants don’t get all whiley and huge and floppy like most tomatoes would. Instead these stay bushy and about 15-18″ tall. They are self-pollinating and prefer to be in indirect light, not direct sunlight (which they kinda hate). If you fertilize them every 3-4 weeks, they will continue to produce tomatoes for you to pick each week all through the winter and spring months.
There are loads of herbs you can grow indoors, including this cutie, called Spilanthes or Toothache Plant. It is a medicinal herb and you can make a mouth rinse from the leaves and flowers that help keep gum tissues healthy. It will bloom with these sweet yellow flowers on-going.
Remember, that whenever you grow plants indoors it will be important to fertilize them every 3-4 weeks with an organic fertilizer. Don’t fertilize them more often or you will have luscious foliage, but not much flavor, fruits or smell if they are an aromatic herb.
There are many good brands of organic fertilizer to choose from, so visit your local garden center to see what they have available. DO NOT use non-organic fertilizer, as this is not good for you and the earth.
For heavens sake, don’t forget to consider growing some strawberries indoors. If you grow an ever-bearing variety, like Eversweet, Tri-Star or Ft Laramie, you will have fresh berries to harvest all winter since strawberries will flower and produce fruit indoors and outdoors both.
One must have breakfast food after all ;-}
You could even plant a rather large herb garden if you want to like this one and it can double as a fairy garden for indoor magic and fun. This fairy garden has alpine strawberries (edible leaves and flower and fruits), violets (edible leaves and flowers), thyme (for cooking and herbal medicine), dianthus pinks (edible flowers) and lemon verbena (leaves and flowers for cooking, tea and as a bath herb or sachets).
Once I brought an old birdbath indoors and planted it as an herb/fairy garden. It was fun and beautiful and I could water it carefully and it wouldn’t leak on the floor since it was a birdbath converted to a growing container.
In this time in our earth’s existence, we need to do whatever we can to help the planet and ourselves in a time of climate change. Growing a food garden outdoors in warm climates or during warm months of the year, especially a garden with a lot of perennial food plants included, and growing an indoor food garden during the cold months of the year is a way that you can do something incredibly positive for the earth, yourself and your family.
By growing a Climate Victory Garden you will have fresh food and herbs to use at a hand’s touch. That means the food and herbs do not have to travel to a store via planes, ships or semi-trucks and that is a much smaller carbon foot-print. The food will be picked fresh and that gives you best flavor and nutrition over something that may have been picked before it was truly ripe or a fruit or veggie that might have been grown using a lot of chemical fertilizers and pesticides – which of course isn’t good for your health and it is terrible for the health of the planet! Often you can have exotic types of foods that you grow fresh yourself that you might not otherwise have during the winter months if they aren’t something the grocery market stocks in the winter season (think figs, fresh chilies, ginger, all sorts of things).
Remember during the World War when there were food shortages and the government asked people to ration their food and to grow as much of their own food as possible? Well, people did just that and they benefited in many ways by growing a Victory Garden. Now we are in a different kind of crisis with climate change a very real challenge for all of us and every living thing on this planet. It’s time to grow as much of our own food and herbs as we can do and besides it feels great to do so. It’s time to start growing Victory Gardens again, but now we will call them “Climate Victory Gardens”.
I challenge you to grow whatever you can starting this very month. You won’t be sorry and it will leave you feeling great. You’ll be a wonderful example to others and inspire and teach kids how to take good care of themselves and the earth. It’s the right thing to do and it is pure pleasure!
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And Shrek says to remember to include a pot of peppermint or spearmint in your indoor Climate Victory Garden for tea, sore muscle relief and mint chocolate chip cookies.
With Green Thoughts, Tammi
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