Well, I guess I’ve been rather remiss with my writing here haven’t I? Particularly when you take into account that my last post was titled, “Building soil in the fall,” and today (at the time of writing) is the first day of winter. It never ceases to amaze me that, regardless of the season, it always seems there’s so much to do.

Spring presents it’s priorities with its usual sense of urgency. Digging, prepping, sprouting and planting hit like a maelstrom to start the growing year. This is the time of projects for us as well; a time to actuate the plans we have for the garden and our home. Next, summer creeps on us, sometimes lazily and sometimes all at once, bringing its flurry of activity and its own urgency. Plants and animals need tending from the heat, fruits are ripening, harvests need to be made and preserves put up for the year. The third course of our seasonal feast is fall, a personal favorite. It’s an interesting time in the garden in autumn. Most plants are beginning to die off while others are being reborn in the cool days. In our climate, fall is when we tuck the garden in for its winter nap. A time to say “Goodnight, see you next year,” and that means lots of labor at times in and of itself, building compost piles with the spent plants, prepping animal shelters for the coming winter and harvesting the last of the year’s plants.

And now we have winter…

Now there’s nothing to do, right? The garden’s asleep, tucked in for the year. Nothing to start yet since it’s too early. On the contrary! Winter is a critical time in our garden, perhaps one of the most critical. It’s when we sit down and assess our successes and failures of the last year. We update our garden journals with the wealth of information from the rest of the year and begin to picture what we see for the next one.

This is critical time to sit by the fireplace, or cuddle a little close to your loved one on a cold winter night and let your imagination run wild with the ideas for the next year. What new plants will you try? What goals do you have? How will you work the rotations for the year? Do you have any big projects planned for next year? If so, are there plans to be made, drawing and sketches to create?

I guess I see winter, not so much as a period of rest, but as a period of growth that’s not seen outwardly until much later, and I try to treat it as such. I’m not resting, I’m preparing. I’ve enrolled myself in a winter session of the Master Gardeners course, I’m working on the plans and ideas that I’ll put into action soon after the new year, and I’m planning my seed orders and starting to picture in my mind what my garden will look like this year. Plans change as we go on, of course, but the important thing is to have a destination in mind and now’s the time to start working on our map to that destination.

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse. 

My garden is not big, at least not by most standards. I’ve estimated it to be about 400 square feet this year and will be expanding it to nearly double of that next year. Even at that though, it’s still not a big area that I grow on. I take a lot of care and time to look into and try out many different methods of growing in that space from using cages, to trellising, to companion plantings and all have helped in one way or another.

Still, even with all the trickery and good use of space and planning, there’s really still only one thing that has the most impact on the small scale growers productivity in my opinion: soil. I need to make sure that I not only use my soil with care in not over using it with the same nutrient loving crops over and over again in one place, but also that I give them the right amount of off time to recoup, rest and regenerate before the next season. And one thing comes to mind when I think of regenerating my garden. Can you guess?

Ever walked through what is normally a lush and fertile summer forest in the fall? What do you see? Leaves. Barren trees, and lots and lots of leaves. They cover the ground, insulating it from the extremes of winter weather and snow and provide shelter and food through the winter for the worms. Worms that will, through the winter and spring, gradually bring all of that wonderful organic material back into the ground to compost and rot and become food for the plants to grown there the next year.  That’s the basis of my plan for my autumn garden beds this year, to try and mimic (albeit very loosely) the way that a natural ecosystem would function. Although I took it a little further.

This year I have at my disposal something that I didn’t have last fall … chickens, or more to the point, chicken manure. As I cleaned and tucked the beds in for the winter, I not only added a lot of very carbon rich leaves to them, I added a few healthy scoops of nitrogen rich chicken manure. It takes a few months for fresh manure to age and compost to the point where it’s no longer so HOT that it will burn young plants, and tucking it in during the fall is a perfect time for that. Come early spring I’ll do a pH test of the soil to determine where I stand, and adjust as necessary.

Leaves are also being used as a final layer to a new bedding area that we just added this fall. It’s a lasagna garden – a garden bed built with different layers of organic materials designed to break down over the winter into a rich humus for planting in – and I gave it a final turn to break up the layers a little before the snow flies, and am covering the entire bed with leaves as a final step. The leaves will help insulate the bed from freezing too hard over the winter I hope, giving it a better chance at completely breaking down before I plant in it next year.

I don’t think there’s a better friend to the small scale farmer, or in my case large scale suburban gardener, than good healthy soil that is rich in nutrients and organic material. It nourishes the earth, helps retain moisture in the heat of the summer, and provides the building blocks for strong plants the next season. And of all the ingredients that I can think of to put to the most useful purposes in building that healthy soil, few can compare to leaves.

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse.