winter gardening

winter gardening is not for everyone.  it is cold and damp and the soil is often too hard to work

with.  that gives living in nashville a definite advantage.  we very rarely have long stretches of cold weather that allow the soil to freeze solid. never the less, we do experience enough cold weather hours to produce some fruits like cherries and apples and to promote the germination wild flower seeds outdoors.  this fall, i selected a number of wildflower seeds from a website and added those to seeds we collected and we began to plant a wildflower garden.  The main purpose of this garden is to attract butterflies, bees and birds to our yard but the best part, the plants will be tall and will hide the unruly yard next door (for more on this, read the previous entry on privet).  we also planted a california wild flower garden in the front yard in our little lasagna bed.  linda sent us a bag of seeds that were simply labeled, california wild flowers and we added new layers to the bed as well as some of the seeds.  everybody keep their fingers crossed and let's see if we get some pretty flowers to show off out front.

here is the first new layer going on, leaves.  we always collect the leaves in the yard and place them in a large pen out back.  during the year, darry uses them as the brown component in our compost.  as the year progresses, they begin to break down and form leaf mold.  

the next layer was finished compost from the pile out back.  we always have at least 3 piles. one that is complete, one that is aging and one that is in the beginning stages with new products being added to it regularly.  we do not have a lot of sunshine out on our piles so they take longer and aren't quite as hot as some but they are still good for the garden.

we sprinkled the seeds generously over the compost and finished it off with a layer of grass clippings.  in the bed is our cardoon plant.  we decided to move it from the side of the house to the front where it will be a centerpiece in the bed.  only time will tell if this was a good idea.

here we are in the back yard where we have begun to build the wild flower bed.

we began by staking out two large rectangular areas.  darry dug random holes through out the areas.

i followed behind him placing random selections of seeds that i mixed.  some we bought and some we collected.

we then covered the seeds lightly and added some compost.  now we wait for spring.

the string should help us keep track of the area and ensure that it doesn't get mowed until we can identify the plants.  if we are lucky, we will have big tall flowers that hide the mess next door and attracts many butterflies and bees.