If it’s cold, we’ll have the meeting at Robin’s house again and we’ll watch some videos.  We had a great meeting at her house and garden last week.

Weather permitting, we’ll plant some pomegranate and fruit tree cuttings.

We are currently harvesting:

  • lettuce (forellenschluss, celtic, romaine, lolo biondo, flame …
  • sheep’s sorrel
  • chard (several kinds)
  • kale (red russian and blue curled scotch)
  • mustard (southern curled giant and black)
  • arugula
  • wild arugula
  • Munchener beer radishes

1/24/12: radish, catnip, celtic lettuce, various chards, strawberries and the mystery berries

We also have lots of winter veggies growing:

Cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi — various heirlooms.

1/24/12: various root crop seedlings in our new fertil pots and trays.

We’re growing hundreds of seedlings: beets, turnips (4 kinds), leek, onions and of course more salad greens and herbs.  I wish our fertil pot shipment hadn’t been delayed by weeks.  But the weather has been good, with lows in the 20s in the hoophouse at night.  The greenhouse is a few degrees warmer and it rarely freezes.

Unfortunately, it could easily get down to the single digits in February and we can expect hard freezes to the low 20s in March and maybe even April.  Last year we were worried about hard freezes until the end of May.

I started 100 berries over the weekend, including lots of hardy kiwi.  I’m determined to get them going.  They’re difficult to germinate, but I got a few seedlings last year. Unfortunately, they died on me.

I won’t give up because a number of plants took two seasons until we got them going good.  The blue hyssop comes to mind and the sage, thyme and oregano.  These plants survived the 2010/11 winter outside in the ground with temps down to 4 F and two other extended cold spells to 9  F.

In our adobe addition where it never got below 43 F (not heated) we have about 10 tomato plants from cuttings from last year’s best plants and they already produce.  Not enough to write home about, but it’s nice to get the occasional “good” tomato.  Our tomato consumption is way down since we just don’t  care for store bought tomatoes anymore.  We’ll have one here and there, but it’s just not the real thing.

We dug up some of the peppers and basil in fall and actually got to harvest all kinds of peppers during the winter.  This year I’ll start the seedlings earlier and we’ll probably have a mini greenhouse in the hoophouse for the warm weather veggies.

It’s very cool to discover plants that I didn’t even know survived the transplant.

In the greenhouse we have several berry plants and I have no idea what they are.

1/24/12: strawberry and ???

The comfrey also came out of nowhere, along with the wild arugula.  Just recently I saw chamomille flowering.  I didn’t even know the seedlings last summer had survived the transplant.

“No till” gardening works well for me. I enjoy these surprises.

Several of the potted pomegranates I started from seed last winter started to grow leaves.  I was afraid they froze in their little 4″ pots in the hoophouse (lows in the mid teens).  Most of the potted palo verde trees in the hoophouse look ok too.

We’re off to a great start!