Manure, Manure Manure

Happy New Year Gardeners

Wishing you and yours a perfectly joyous, incandescent, New Year filled with love, light and manure.

To the garden novice manure is some foul, stinking, odious substance best to be ignored and avoided at all costs. But to the the experienced gardener, manure is black gold which is vital to a healthy, happy, productive garden of any kind.

The 2010 Farmer's Almanac has an article on manure, not to be missed. The Farmer's Almanac is filled with humor, random earth/sky facts that one wouldn't find elsewhere. This year they put forth a great article regarding the importance of manure. Manure can be green, black, brown or compost which is still laced with shards of green veggie, reluctant to metamorphosize, specs of white or brown egg shell, or maybe a piece of walnut shell left by a foraging squirrel as a tribute to our effort. And his hunger.

"Manure, manure, sir, is the thing!!" A quote from The Old Farmer's Almanac, 1818 .
Read the article in this issue of the Farmer's Almanac, 2010. it's fabulous. Check out the photo of the bearded old Dude holding a cabbage the size of an asteroid. This is the result of healthy, nutritious soil. The Almanac always gives a projection for the weather ahead for the current year. I have never found them to be wrong. It's a miracle that year after year they get it straight. I use this information to plan ahead, because it helps to know what sort of weather we will be working with in the warmer growing months to come.

Is it going to be a cold summer in the N.E.? A rainy year in the Northern States, or perhaps an extra dry growing season in California. The Farmer's Almanac will give us a preview.

A tid bit about weather. In the Municipal Building in Stowe, Vermont, the annals of history record a time in the early 1800's when a group of farmers who had immigrated to the States from Sweden, pulled up stakes, plows and wagons, and in mass, left as they came for a warmer climate. Probably Minnesota. The year that pushed them out of the Green (so called) Mountains yielded snow every day; 360 days of the frozen white stuff, hardly a place to farm.

Children who are properly nourished look and perform at a much higher level than children who are denied healthy nutrition. A lack of awareness is the root cause of the physical and intellectual malnutrition that fundamentally disables so many children from getting what they need to be healthy, creative and productive. Many children are starving in the McMansions they live in, as they retreat to their state-of-the-art techno studios they call "their room", gorging on chips, soda and micro-waved food. Most American children don't know where their food actually comes from.

The Obama's, bless them, especially Michelle Obama, are teaching American families about respecting the Earth by growing and using healthy food, and beautiful flowers in the White House. Garden excess is shared with soup kitchens in their neighborhood. They are keeping honey bees at the White House as well as encouraging recycling of bio matter, and promoting the creation of our homes by using "green" materials. Much gratitude that we finally have conscious leadership.

Gardening, for most of us, is a seasonal activity. Dreaming and creating a garden plan is a quiet winter time activity. It is also the time when we are eating the veggies were have stored, or put -by using last year's garden produce. I miss the pantry and root cellar I once had, where we stored the canned tomatoes, peaches, jam and pickles we made from our garden produce. We had a root cellar as well, where we could store produce that grew beneath the ground, and kept so well in the cool dry cellar. Some we stored in sand. Carrots, potatoes, rutabaga, celeriac, parsnips and turnips all store beautifully in a cool dry place. Left in the soil over the winter,root crops such as carrots, and parsnips must be dug early in the Spring so that they don't rot, but taken out of the soil as soon as the soil begins to warm, they are more delicious than any one has ever tasted. We used shellac to preserve watermelons grown the summer before, so that we could have our own fresh watermelon for Christmas.

A favorite was the violet syrup we made from the violets that grew wild in the Spring. The snow on top of a mountain is as clean and pure as it gets, so in the winter we would fill paper cones with fresh snow and pour the violet or new maple syrup over the snow. Wonderful to taste and beautiful to see. Kids of all ages love it.

If your garden passion is floral rather than vegetable, this is still the time to hunker down with seed and plant catalogs and start to design the garden for the year ahead. I have a personal passion for heritage seed. This is seed that can be kept and used from one year to the next. They can be shared or traded with friends or on a trading site - why not start one of your own. Heritage seed is also referred to as heirloom seed. Organic seed means that they were produced without the use of chemicals or artificial substances, but they can still be hybrid. Heirloom/heritage seed is usually grown naturally with the use of healthy bio-organic techniques and products. Look for this information before ordering.

Hybrid seed, as you may know, cannot reproduce itself from one year to the next. This is seed that has been genetically tampered with so that it looks perfect, has extraordinary color and size, but not much flavor and no longevity. It's a freak. Highly recommend using seeds that still are alive with genetic memory and will give us healthy, and abundant crops from year to year. If, God forbid, the U.S. experiences some form of devastating weather patterns, what would the masses eat, when the hybrid products they have relied upon commercially cannot produce.
There are many heritage seed purveyors out there. Have a look and see which appeals to you, and give them a try. I like http://www.seedsavers.org/, founded in 1975 and who are a non-profit organization who offer 25,000 varieties of seed "saved for future generations".
There are many heirloom seed sellers on line, so have a look and choose the ones who speak to you.

Before signing off this morning, I would like to suggest to you that you watch PBS television Saturday mornings. They offer so many great food programs, cooking shows and last but not least, great garden shows that teach and inspire. Not to mention the Australian hotties on the garden shows. Definitely a plus. Gardens are a beautiful art form, and so are gardeners.

Happy garden dreaming.
AVC

Will be posting another blog later in month to review garden design, and what it means to you.