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January Garden Calendar: Planning
Although spring still feels far away, now is the perfect time to start planning your garden for the coming season! Using your reflections from December, make some decisions about what you want to plant, where, and how. You can put as much or as little effort into these decisions as you like. Planning your garden can be as simple as committing to planting tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce. Or you can select your varieties, check your companion planting charts, and design your ideal garden paradise! Don’t be afraid to dream big!
The Spruce has collected 11 Free Garden Planners and Programs that will let you mock up your layout. These tools range from simple grids to full-on visual simulations of what your garden will look like. Feel free to play around to find what works best for you!
If you feel like trying your hand at companion planting this season, here are some great resources to get you started:
Cornell University Companion Planting Guide
Virginia State University Companion Planting Guide
Sonoma County Master Gardeners Companion Planting Guide
And lastly, don’t forget to jot your plans down in your garden journal! It will be much easier to keep a garden journal during the full swing of the season if you get into the habit now. Happy gardening!
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Seed Library Update: 2022 Goals
On behalf of the Door County Seed Library planning team, we’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year filled with new adventure and good fortune. As we turn the page on another year, it’s a good time to reflect on our accomplishments (and failures!) in 2021 and consider our goals for 2022. We encourage our members to consider ways to help cultivate the power of seed with us next year.
- If you haven’t tried saving seeds yet, why not start with some easy-to-save bean or pea seeds? They are great for beginning seed savers and the process of learning to save seeds is so empowering that we guarantee you will be hooked.
- If you have the space and ability, consider starting some vegetable or flower seedlings to share on our plant swap stand next spring.
- Consider growing an extra row of produce to share with your neighbors or food pantries. Gardening is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
- Another rewarding activity is getting kids involved in tending plants – it teaches patience, thrift, and trust. Teaching kids to garden also encourages respect for nature. Plus, it’s fun!
Whatever your goals are for 2022, the Door County Seed Library is looking forward to growing together with you.
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Community Connections: Cathy and Rob Edmundson
By Renee McAllister
Baileys Harbor is known to have beautiful and quiet scenery. Cathy and Rob Edmundson knew it would be a great place to live when they settled there after their retirement.
As young adults, they both experienced the rampant inflation of the 1970s and found vegetable gardening not only a satisfying hobby, but also a budget-saver for groceries. Rob learned to garden and hunt during his youth and still enjoys tending his garden and harvesting his hunt. Cathy grew up not knowing much more about produce and meat than what she saw at the grocers. Until she started gardening as an adult, she didn’t realize it was okay to eat imperfectly shaped vegetables. It didn’t take long for her to get hooked on the benefits of gardening and hunting to put food on the table.
Rob favors planting and tending their gardens, while Cathy loves the harvest and preserving process. Gardening is something they both enjoy, so it seemed natural to incorporate gardening into their plans for their Door County home. Over time their garden has grown to include 16 raised beds, several berry patches and a variety of fruit trees in a small, fenced in orchard. A root cellar under their garage provides easy access to preserved foods. Potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic overwinter nicely in the root cellar. Apples and pears also store well for a few months. And shelves are filled with home-canned goods by the end of each harvest. Cathy estimates the amount of food they’ll need to preserve and shares the remaining harvest with friends and family. The Edmundsons have learned to minimize the need to grocery shop, and now find it rare to purchase more than staples and paper products during a run to town.
Planning an enjoyable garden takes forethought. Cathy explained: “We hope our raised beds will be easy to access as we age. We spaced the beds to make enough room for the wheelbarrow, watering equipment and other gardening tools. A thoughtful watering system, two near-by compost bins, and garden sink take a lot of the burden out of everyday gardening chores. And a garden bench to enable relaxation and contemplation is the perfect place to reward yourself after a hard day's work.” A favorite early resource for them was the original Square Foot Gardening book by Mel Bartholomew.
The Edmundsons find joy in each garden season: the late winter seed selection and sowing; the early spring sprouts of perennial herbs, walking-onions, and asparagus; working compost into the raised beds and planting process; checking on the strawberries, then early harvests of lettuce and herbs; watching the vegetables take over the garden throughout the summer; harvesting and preserving the bounty; and finally, the respite after the first hard frost to simply enjoy the year’s bounty.
Door County Seed Library has become a valuable resource for Cathy and Rob, providing a treasure trove of additional information and seed sources. “We changed some of our gardening practices because of the Door County Seed Library and have been able to avoid purchasing seedlings and a number of seed packets because of the library,” said Cathy. “We are now much more aware of the value of heirloom seeds and have learned how to start our own seeds indoors. We are particularly delighted with the flavorful Purple Cherokee tomatoes, and I love using sweet Belgian Peppers instead of the standard bell pepper in many of our recipes. Crops from heirloom seeds are so much more flavorful than those from hybrid seeds. We have begun to save some of our own seeds to replant and share with others. Most recently, I’ve learned to test seed viability, to determine if my seeds are worth saving or sharing. Learning through the seed library has been a very rewarding process.”
Although much has changed since the ‘70s, inflation is again nipping at all our heels, and people of all means are looking for ways to avoid the high cost of food. Gardening is certainly one way to stretch the budget. And gardening is beneficial in so many other ways. Food from the garden is fresher, tastes better, is more nutritious, and has fewer chemicals than many store-bought foods. Who would have known that gardening could be rewarding in so many ways?
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Seed-Saving Tip: Do you need to worry about cross-pollination?
By Penne Wilson
The short answer is, it depends. If your goal is to keep your seed varieties pure and true, then you need to make sure that your plants don’t cross with anything outside of their specific variety. For example, if the flower of an acorn squash is fertilized by the pollen of summer squash (both members of the Cucurbita pepo species), the resulting seeds will be an unstable mixture of the traits of both parent varieties instead of the desired variety. This is the same thing that happens when two different dog breeds mate – you will get a mutt that has random characteristics of both parents.
Some crops, such as tomatoes, lettuce, common beans, and peas, are self-pollinators, which means they are much less likely to cross-pollinate. If you are a beginning seed saver and want to save true-to-type seeds, we recommend starting with these crops.
On the other hand, if you don’t intend to save the plant’s seeds, then it doesn’t matter if your plants cross-pollinate. Even if your plants are cross-pollinated during the current growing season, it won’t change the taste, shape, color, or other aspects of this year’s vegetables. The results of the cross will only be evident if you save the seeds and grow them out next year. Therefore, if your primary goal is to grow veggies to put food on the table, you don’t need to worry about the effects of cross-pollination.
Although cross-pollination doesn’t normally alter a vegetable’s taste and shape during the current growing season, there are a few notable exceptions. When sweet corn is cross-pollinated, the taste, color, and texture of the corn can be negatively impacted. The results of cross-pollination can sometimes show up in the color of bean seeds too. Another common example is the English cucumber (also known as a greenhouse cucumber). It is parthenocarpic, which means that it produces fruits without being fertilized (and its seeds never fully develop). If it is pollinated by a normal cucumber that is growing nearby, it will produce a bumpy, irregular fruit that contains seeds.
And finally, as we discussed in last month’s column, if you want to increase biodiversity and/or breed your own varieties, then you actually want to encourage cross-pollination! When you find some traits that you like, you can save the seeds from fruits that exhibit that trait. Over several years of seed saving, you will eventually stabilize and create a new variety.
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Recipe of the Month: The Best White Bean Soup
By Deb Moore
 
This past summer I had the privilege of growing out some of the Ken Paschke beans for the DCSL. These beans are like cannellini beans, which happen to be one of my favorites; the best way to use white beans, in my humble opinion, is in a soup or baked bean recipe. Since we’re on the tail end of the holidays and plenty of heavy eating, I thought I’d include a lighter version of a hearty Italian white bean soup using some of the Ken Paschke beans. This is a vegan recipe that made good use of the vegetables and herbs from our summer garden. I’ve also included a link to a recipe for a quick, easy bread that bakes up in a Dutch oven while the soup is simmering. It’s the perfect winter’s night meal – enjoy!
Ingredients:
1 TBSP olive oil, plus more for serving
1 medium onion, diced
1 large carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1-2 garlic cloves, diced or pressed
2 cans cannellini beans, drained
(*I substituted a cup of Ken Paschke beans for one of the cans; I soaked them overnight, and then covered them with water and cooked for about 2 hours the next day before adding them to the recipe.)
1 Tbsp tomato paste
2 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
1 sprig of rosemary or ½ tsp dried ( I love rosemary, so I tend to add more…)
½ tsp paprika (Optional-I like the flavor it adds.)
1/3 cup dry white wine
1 cup frozen spinach
2 cups vegetable broth
½ tsp salt, plus more to taste
1/8 tsp black pepper, plus more to taste
Directions:
Warm olive oil in a large pot over medium heat; add the onion, carrot, and celery. Cook, stirring often, until the onion has softened, about 5 minutes.
Add the garlic, beans, tomato paste, potatoes, rosemary, and paprika. Cook for about 1 minute, stirring frequently.
Add the wine, stir well, and let it simmer until the wine has evaporated. Then add the frozen spinach, broth, and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Raise the heat and bring to a boil; cover the pot, reduce the heat, and cook gently for 15 minutes.
When the potatoes are soft and the soup is starting to thicken, remove the pot from the heat. (If the soup is too thick, add more broth.)Taste and season with salt and pepper. Divide into bowls and drizzle with olive oil before serving.
Bonus recipe: Freshly-baked bread is a perfect accompaniment to homemade soup. I recommend this super easy, no knead Easy Crusty Vegan Bread recipe from Veggie Society.
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Book Review: The Story Garden, by Ellen Sheppard Buchert & Johanna Buchert Smith
By Renee Borkovetz
What stories come to mind when wandering through your garden? I have plenty, almost too many to count. I could tell you about my grandpa’s spider plant in the house, or the rhubarb from my mother-in-law, or the irises from my neighbor…the list goes on and on. We hold memories of people, places, and events in different ways, and a garden can be a multisensory journal for all of these life celebrations.
Every chapter in this book explores a different method of propagating plants from water rooting to crown division to seed saving. When you can successfully propagate plants, you can have a whole garden from the places you have been or important people in your lives. The authors, a mother and daughter duo, share their own memories and recipes throughout this book as they explore the joy of cultivating plants to nurture these memories.
This book is available at the Door County Library.
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Jessika Greendeer, seed keeper and farm manager at
Dream of Wild Health
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Featured Grower: Jessika Greendeer
By Mikayla Kifer
Meet Jessika Greendeer, a native Wisconsinite, a Ho-Chunk Nation Tribal member from Baraboo, and a member of the Deer Clan. Jessika is also a US Army combat veteran and launched a career in seeds, farming, and agriculture after completing a Veteran-to-Farmer training program in Pennsylvania. She now works as a seed keeper and farm manager at Dream of Wild Health, an intertribal nonprofit in Minneapolis. Dream of Wild Health teaches Native American youth about gardening, cooking, and culture, and runs a working farm which preserves and reinvigorates traditional seed varieties and growing methods.
Jessika and the organization are part of a much larger movement called seed rematriation. This movement works to reconnect seed varieties with their original native communities and restore foodways that have been threatened due to forced migration. The term “rematriation” emphasizes that the seeds are returning to their motherland and to the women who hold the traditional roles of seed keepers which maintain the health and longevity of different seed varieties.
It’s clear that Jessika takes this role very seriously: “Being a seed keeper, it’s a big responsibility. It’s a heavy title to carry. Everything we do as Native people, we always think about our future generations: being able to hold the future in your hands and also being able to hold the past in your hands at the same time. It’s an amazing journey and I’m grateful to be on it.”
To learn more about Jessika, Dream of Wild Health, and the seed rematriation movement, check out this interview, this video, and this website.
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~~The Door County Seed Library planning team
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