Overwinter Rosemary

Tis the Season

March 15, 2010

…For Poop

Sorry for that sick photo, but you either a) get it, or b) don’t. If you don’t, then you obviously do not own a dog in a northern state that receives any appreciable snowfall.

I do.

And I am making my annual rounds on poop duty. It is a thankless job. If you miss the precious window of time where the poop is exposed from under the snow, yet still mostly frozen, all is lost. You will find yourself smearing and fighting waterlogged masses that you would far prefer not to ever have to even look at, much less try and pick up and dispose of.

So that’s what I did yesterday. That and pretty much take all my clothes off and run around in the Mid March Minnesota HEATWAVE! It was sunny, after five straight days of rain and dense fog, only to have the clouds vanish, the sun appear and the mercury soar to SIXTY! In the cities, I heard it got to 64 which was warmer than PHOENIX! Crazy talk.

I worked outside all day and felt my winter fat melt away.

I wish.

The fat. I wish the fat had melted away in one day. Wouldn’t that be awesome? I can’t be the only one who thinks things like that.

I cleaned the chicken coop out and let them outside for the first time since last December

I used the manure-laden shavings to fertilize the raspberries

And to feed the small rodent-chasing dog, known as Poopy. For not only does she like to poop in my house, but she clearly likes to eat it as well!

I spread the rest in the garden which is starting to emerge from under the snow and found these amazing living things!

Thyme and strawberry plants? Do strawberry plants typically look like this after a winter of subzero days and nights? I wouldn’t know because I just planted them last year…

And I found this mess staring at me. I know what I have to do soon and I don’t want to do it…. one of my most hated jobs of spring is cutting the old asparagus plants. In fact, it reminds me that this blog is a year old, because it was one of the first things I ever wrote about!

I raked driveway rock off the grass and nearly died from exhaustion. No photos.

I went in to the greenhouse, found the fat cat lolling in the sun (it was about 80 degrees in there)

Then noticed that my previously mentioned crispy rosemary plants had some glimmers of life (see the brighter green in the second pic)

So happy! Plus, the healthy ones are starting to bloom!

Note cat hair above and to the left of bloom and what looks like a human jennie hair directly behind bloom.

Never mind.

I’m sure we’ll get walloped with more snow and sub-zero temps, but this one day was pure heaven.

Spring?

March 4, 2010

Yes: when the mud starts flowing, it’s Spring.

It’s about time for a gardening post, don’cha think? Even though I’m getting my annual end-of-the-winter cold and feel pretty crappy, I was still chomping at the bit to go up to the barn and clean out the greenhouse yesterday. For crying out loud, the thermomulator said 40 degrees!

I didn’t get to it until early evening, right after I walked The Sociopath and before I started dinner. Given that my greenhouse is single-paned glass, I finally gave up heating it in the winter. Oh, I tried everything: bubble wrap insulation, Refletex (or whatever that silver bubble stuff is called), shrink wrapped film, plastic, passive heat (water filled 40 gallon drums painted black). You know I gave it my obsessive all.

And I also gave it most of my money.

Even with all my tricks, it still cost a lot to heat it, so I gave up.

Now, my program is to keep whatever I am trying to overwinter in the greenhouse until the sub-zero temps hit. Then I move everything into the garage, where it sits until the sub-zero temps are over — without light or water, at about 33-45 degrees.

I always screw it up.

This year, I failed to get the plants out of the greenhouse when the temps dipped into the -20 range. Amazingly, I only lost two plants, albeit two of my favorites — the two 5-foot tall upright rosemary plants. Boo. There is still a chance that they will come back, but as of yesterday, they were looking pretty crispy.

I’m sure I will continue to battle low temps as we wade our way through March. Why, just this morning it was only 7 degrees! I do have a small heater in there, but the energy miser is resistant to turning it up much above freezing.

[The energy miser is me. Just ask anyone who comes to my house during daylight hours during the winter.]

Anyway, I swept the greenhouse out, being that it is pretty much a giant home for the fat cats all winter long. They while the days away in the sun with my giant garden toad,

making a mess, whittling away the legs of the benches.

…Eventually these redwood posts will simply collapse. But that is probably better than scratching the other stuff in the barn, right?

It was fun to drag all the plants back into the sunshine and water them. Just look at the rosemary plants — all ready to bloom!

It amazes me that they make it through the dark winter in the barn. No light, no water. Even the transplants from last fall look pretty good. Nice and green.

Soon I’ll be filling the spaces with little pots of seedlings.

So that I can forget to water them and throw them away.

Nice to know that there is someone out there more disorganized than you, isn’t it?

Rosemary: Out of One, There Were Many

October 6, 2009

What a stupid title. Some days, I just don’t have it.

I’m chronicling my fall garden tasks and since rosemary is one of my top two flavors (the other being garlic), I always take care of my rosemary plants.

I live in Minnesota. Global warming (or marketing gimmicks) have pushed the Minneapolis/St. Paul gardening climate into definitive zone 4 and even zone 5 according to some. I, in the hinterlands of Watertown, down in my deep hidey-hole, am a committed zone 3 gardener. It’s just plain colder here. Plus, I hate buying plants that don’t make it through a marginal winter. Some talk about micro-climates. Well, I live in a ass-freezing macro climate of cold. So that’s why I have to take special pains with my rosemary.

Rosemary can take a bit of frost, no problem, but I don’t push it too far. We’ve had two frosts so far, one was a pretty good killing frost for almost everything: beans, pumpkin & squash vines, tomatoes, cucumbers, edamame)

…The hardiest garden dwellers live on: chard, kale, carrots, parsnips, cilantro, sage, beets, raspberries, even my strawberries still look okay.

So, this weekend, I figured it was time to start digging stuff out. First on the list: Rosemary and Lantana. I fear I might be too late with the Lantana, since frost nicked the tops pretty bad in that first frost. When I’m done, I will still need to dig the sage and the thyme. I shouldn’t have to bother with thyme since it’s “hardy” (ha!) Sometimes my thyme makes it through, but it always looks horrible, so I just dig it out to be safe.

For the record. I have a single pane glass greenhouse which is totally useless in the winter, unless you happen to have money dripping off trees and don’t mind 80% of your heating dollars melting away through the glass. I use it as long as I can without heating. When the subzero temps threaten, I drag all these pots of herbs into the dark barn, which doesn’t dip below 32 degrees, but hovers somewhere around 40. I stop watering and basically just leave them alone for a month or two, with the exception of scooping out the inevitable barn-cat poop that appears magically sometime during January.

When the sub zero temps are mostly past, I haul them back into the sunlight, cut them back and begin to water. I’ve been doing this for years with pots of rosemary and sage. You could do it in a basement, too.

One thing that has never worked for me, though, is keeping rosemary in my house. Honestly, I just can’t do it. Sometimes, when my pots burst into flower during February or March, I will bring them into the house to enjoy, but I have seriously almost killed them in just a couple weeks. I have no idea why. Maybe I’m cursed.

Anyway, while digging out the rosemary, I noticed that one of the plants had long, drooping branches that touched the ground. Where they touched the ground, they took root and made it difficult to dig out and put into a pot.

Being an opportunist, I decided to take advantage of this. It’s the same concept as deliberate layering — a complicated process to propagate plants and some woody shrubs which always eluded me up until now. But here, I’m a better gardener than I thought! (Take that, smug people who can keep rosemary alive in their houses!) I layered my rosemary! Which is really nothing more that pushing a branch down into the dirt and letting it root, then cutting it off the main plant and potting it up.

So that’s what I did.

Now we’ll see if I can remember to water the little pains-in-the-ass.