December dreaming …

It’s a time for curling up with a great garden book, sorting through a season’s worth of garden notes and photos, turning garden produce into holiday gifts, travelling to a warmer place – or at least into a local garden center greenhouse to pick a poinsettia!  Here are some ideas to keep you happy indoors:

1.    Pick a photo or two for an unconventional horticultural holiday greeting.  

                 

Chilean Bromeliaceae Fascicularia Bicolor

variegated Alstromeria

2.    Read the story of the making of a garden.  Some oldies but goodies are We Made a Garden by Margery Fish; A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed, by James Fenton and An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter.  All three gardened in places with enough overlap with Corvallis’s climate to make many of their experiences very relevant and very fun to read!  Or give yourself a treat and rediscover The Essential Earthman by Henry Mitchell, longtime garden columnist for the Washington Post.

3.    Pack jars of your sun or oven dried tomatoes or roasted peppers with olive oil, lemon peel and herbs to give as gifts. Clip rosemary and bundle with a red ribbon for a quick hostess gift, along with a rosemary-forward recipe such as this quick side dish: 1 can small white beans drained, heated with 3-4 oz. crumbled gorgonzola cheese, 1 T finely chopped fresh rosemary, or more to taste, and 2-3 T white wine or broth.

4.    Use dried flowers, seed pods and fresh evergreens to decorate your home and packages.

5.    Finally, add “Join the Corvallis Evening Garden Club” to your New Year’s Resolutions!! 

                           

                        Information at www.corvalliseveninggardenclub.org

What to do in the Garden in November

Maintenance and Clean Up

·  Save your leaves – they can decompose in place if they aren’t where they will cause dead spots in your lawn.  You can rake them up and use them as mulch or make a pile and allow them to become leaf mold (compost) which makes a lovely dark mulch in the spring.

·  This is a great time of year to add mulch or compost to your flower beds, vegetable garden, or shrub borders.

·  Winter vegetables can be protected with garden fleece or cold frames. 

·  Cover favorite tender plants to protect from frosts with bags, overturned pots, or thick mulch. 

·  Don’t apply chemical fertilizers as they will be  leached away by rain and can pollute downstream areas.

Planting and Propagation

·  Great time to plant trees and shrubs! Consider ones that supply food and shelter for birds and other native wildlife. cascara, elderberry, red flowering currant, aronia, service berry, Oregon grape, vine maple

Blue Elderberry, Sambucus caerulea

·  Plant spring-flowering bulbs.

·  Plant garlic.

Fava beans planted as a nitrogen fixing cover crop.  They are just broadcast over the soil and kept damp until their roots get well into the soil.  Usually our fall rain is sufficient for this.

Last chance to plant cover crops for soil building. You can also use a 3 inch or thicker layer of leaves, spread over the garden plot, to eliminate winter weeds, suppress early spring weeds and prevent soil compaction by rain.

Take hardwood cuttings from shrubs.

Propagate begonias from leaf cuttings.

2 small pots with the cut edge of Rex Begonia leaves buried slightly in regular potting mix and kept damp will likely sprout new roots in a couple of months.

 

Two Thoughts from the Evening Garden Club this Month

1.    TIME TO MULTIPLY YOUR PLANTS! 

While weeding (before mulching your beds for winter) look for volunteer seedlings of plants you might want and leave in place or lift and pop into a nursery bed.  (Some may need sheltering.)

It may not be too late to collect seed from overgrown veggies and later flowering plants.  Dry the seed before storing in a cool, dry place.  Old Altoids tins or paper envelopes work well – just don’t seal in plastic.  Label carefully!!  Share seed with fellow gardeners – you almost never need as much as you have.

Learn about propagation and start taking cuttings from your favorite and rare plants.   By late summer next year, you could have well-started plants to give as gifts or add to your own garden.  Here’s a great, well-reviewed book to start with:

American Horticultural Society Plant Propagation: The Definitive Practical Guide to Culmination, Propagation, and Display 

by Alan R. Toogood, American Horticultural Society

2.    TIME TO CUT BACK, COMPOST AND TIDY UP (BUT NOT TOO MUCH!)

Leave seed heads in place as long as possible for the birds and other wildlife who use them and for the beauty of their forms in the winter landscape.

Cut off dead stalks of euphorbia.  Fresh blooms will form for spring.

Leave flowering plants with green leaves to photosynthesize until they turn brown – they’ll come back stronger in spring.  

Remove and get rid of any diseased foliage – keeping it out of the home compost bin.  (Yard waste bin is okay.)

DO NOT cut back hardy fuchsia, kniphofia or hardy cyclamen.  Wait until early spring to cut back epimedium (when you see flowers forming underneath) and ornamental grasses (when new growth is beginning.)

What to do in the Garden in November

Maintenance and Clean Up

·  Save your leaves – they can decompose in place if they aren’t where they will cause dead spots in your lawn.  You can rake them up and use them as mulch or make a pile and allow them to become leaf mold (compost) which makes a lovely dark mulch in the spring.

·  This is a great time of year to add mulch or compost to your flower beds, vegetable garden, or shrub borders.

·  Winter vegetables can be protected with heavy weight floating row cover (garden fleece in Britain) or cold frames. 

·  Cover favorite tender plants to protect from frosts with bags, overturned pots, or thick mulch. 

·  Don’t apply chemical fertilizers as they will be  leached away by rain and can pollute downstream areas.

Planting and Propagation

·  Great time to plant trees and shrubs! Consider ones that supply food and shelter for birds and other native wildlife. cascara, elderberry, red flowering currant, aronia, service berry, Oregon grape, vine maple

·  Plant spring-flowering bulbs.

·  Plant garlic.

Fava beans in Svetlana's garden

Last chance to plant cover crops for soil building. You can also use a 3 inch or thicker layer of leaves, spread over the garden plot, to eliminate winter weeds, suppress early spring weeds and prevent soil compaction by rain.

Take cuttings from shrubs; propagate begonias from leaf cuttings.

Click here for more information on taking cuttings.

Begonia leaf cutting