Oakstead Homestead: The Winter Interest Garden

Before we explore the winter garden I am determined to bring you all up to date with the gardening and related delights experienced at Oakstead during the past 8 days.

The Bad News.

The Oyster mushrooms are a disaster. We ate some (Yummy) but I should have picked them all at once because the ones that were left were so disconsolate that their big sisters had been taken and eaten they gave up and shrivelled up. I am hoping they will revive and we will get our $12 worth somehow, but it has been fun watching them grow. Please ignore the organised chaos on the potting bench. It's temporary in a permanent sort of way.

The cat grass sown last week is thriving and will be ready to present to the cats any day now. Just as well as the last tray, already a bit decimated, was ultimately doomed to the dustbin after I inadvertently left it and our little orange boy cat Stewart shut in the study, where he eats, for a little too long. Please use imagination. Clue: The word "Tray" is one half of a thing used by indoor cats.

You may well ask why the lovely pots of Tete-a-tete daffodils remain in the growing room and not outside or as a centre-piece in the lounge/ living room. Well it has been a very cold week with temperatures down in the -20 deg C's and with wind chill it was -40 deg C for quite a bit of the weekend and daffs don't like it that cold. Then on Monday it warmed up so, of course, it snowed and then the wind blew the snow about vigorously all over the place. Now, we are talking about a wind of at least 50km/hour, (31mph) for hours on end, (all day and most of the night) and gusting to at least 70kmph (44mph) and everybody was grumpy and had snow headaches and cabin fever. Maybe the daffs had cabin fever too but they are staying put: a) because of the frigid nature of the weather and; b) the lack of cat grass which means that anything is game to be eaten by the cats, especially Georgie our longer haired orange female. If Stewart is our special needs cat then Georgie is our little hippie cat who like to chew on all things green and who is, we suspect, being poisoned by, or getting high on, the aloes, the tulips, the daffs, the Valentine roses and anything else she can get her pretty little paws on. So we visit the daffs every day and appreciate them in the growing room.

The wind blew all the snow from the top meadow/lawn/ paddock/yard to the bottom next to the house and Tuesday morning we found all our lovely paths were completely obliterated. Little sticks (three feet high) poking above the snow showed where the paths had been, except for where the sticks had been covered. These covered sticks will not be seen until The Momentous Melt which will happen either at the end of the world or in about 8 weeks time, whichever happen first.

p.s. There are no little sticks in this picture so don't worry if you can't see any. Worry if you do.

The Good News.

The 3 Weather Indicator Gnome ( hats)
are almost clearly visible

The WIGs are back in business. I did think of offering this blog to the UK's Royal Horticultural Society as a cheery addition for their posh magazine but I have it on reliable authority that they are a bit too posh for Garden Gnomes in general so they would probably not be too impressed by my use of WIGs and then there is a whole group of other people who probably feel that I am exploiting the Gnome genera and they will be forming an Everybody Against Relying on Weather Indicator Gnomes Society which of course will be known as the EARWIG Society. Then the earwig enthusiasts will get upset by the silly name and so it goes on.............................. By the way did you know that the insect order Dermaptera (earwigs) are found everywhere and most are related to each other as there are millions of them and only twelve families.( Some of these facts come from Wikipedia.)

We did dig and snow-blow a new path to the top on Tuesday afternoon and it is still there today. Who knows where it will be tomorrow! It has already changed direction three times since January. The black thing is Molly the Dog
Below is a picture with Little sticks showing the fate of previous paths.

We have Ruffled Grouse (Bonasa umbellus)
coming almost every day to feast on something we don't know about, but it's obviously on the ground now the snow has blown away. Perhaps it's acorns. We did have rather a lot of acorns in Autumn and I certainly missed quite a few in my clean up operations. Yes we do clear them: a) because they are like ball bearings and en masse can lead to rapid encounters with the ground and b) because lots of them germinate and we don't want too many more trees in that part of the garden and c) because we might get lots of deer coming in and eating them. The Grouse are rather large (Bigger than a guinea fowl) and I am amazed they can fly at all. They arrive every morning in a big chatty group of about 30 birds and run around for as long as they don't take fright at something and then they flutter/fly off together looking for more of whatever they eat. Eat or be eaten I suppose. They are a hunted bird here so no wonder they take fright and flight at the least sound or distraction.They do look a bit small in the picture but they are relatively very far away.

We have been dreaming more of Summer and what we are going to grow. Suzanna already has some Zinnia seeds from Vancouver and I am planning to get green manure on the veg beds as soon as I can as well as seeing if I can grow some comfrey to make smelly tea which is a wonderful organic fertiliser. I think it's ok to grow comfrey (I checked) here in Manitoba Canada and I have seeds from a reliable source. Yippee! We are also scouring a most fascinating seed catalogue called the Whole Seed Catalogue from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds from the www.rareseeds.com site in the US. Lovely winter reading and now it's time to order if it's not already too late. Unfortunately they have thousands of seed items in the book and I want a packet of each!
Please note Wilfred made it from Tesco UK but had an accident.

And now for the Garden in Winter as promised in the title: