Seeds of Life

Contemplating a Garden in the Depths of Winter

As I write this, a blindingly cold winter sun fills my office with a light that does not warm. Outside it’s two degrees. Tomorrow morning it will be -20. Six inches of snow covers the world.

I look out my window and see my raised beds entombed in snow, the little metal anti-rabbit cages buried and askew like the Statue of Liberty at the end of the movie “Planet of the Apes.” In the front yard, which I’d planted as a Minnesota meadow, the corpses of my sunchokes shiver in the breeze. More anti-rabbit cages imprison my blueberries, serviceberry, rugosa roses and my precious lingonberries, which, if they take, will require years before rewarding me with enough fruit to make lingonberry sauce for Christmas.

Those rabbits have grown desperate in a winter exponentially harder than last year’s. The snow and the neighborhood’s decision to protect their expensive shrubberies from the gnashing teeth of the lagomorphs have driven the cute varmints to gnawing the bark off the few unprotected bushes. I spotted my first dead bunny last week. The White Queen of Winter will take many more to pull her sleigh before the flowers bloom.

But February is not December.

Light is returning. Sundown is nearly 90 minutes later than it was on Solstice, and each day the sun grows stronger, until, one day, the snows will recede. This is the time of pitched battles between the two forces, whose strength is well matched for another month or so. I enjoy watching it on my walks.

Lethal winds roar down from Canada on one day. The next is so blindingly sunny and still that you can hear the robins muttering about springtime.

It’s a muttering I listen intently to, because now is the time to plan for a verdant and lush summer. It’s seed time.

This year will be my first full year gardening in Minnesota. As I wrote last fall, I have let go of the desert plants I loved so much in Sacramento. My new friends will better reflect my new home: Hidatsa squash, Lakota tomatoes, and Arikara sunflowers for the front yard.

I’ve not totally abandoned my roots, however. I am still growing the Atriplex hortensis I love so much. It’s an orach variety grown at altitude in New Mexico that will thrive here. The leaves are five times as large as spinach, which is how you cook them. I am trying out several other quelites, wild greens from Mexico, such as a cultivated lambsquarters and an odd brassica grown for its greens by the Tarahumara of Chihuahua. Again, at altitude, so the growing conditions should be similar here.

Already in the ground are several carrot-leaved lomatium plants, Lomatium foeniculaceum, which are used as an herb by the indigenous people of the Great Plains. I have no experience with this lomatium, but I gathered many other kinds in California’s Sierra Nevada when I lived there.

My great project this season will be the beginnings of a bed of prairie turnips, Pediomelum esculentum. These are among the tastiest plants of my region, native to the plains, but growable — if you have patience. They typically require 2 to 4 years for the tuber to grow large enough to harvest. And so it begins…

I planted ramps and the Great Plains onion Allium stellatum last year, so we’ll see. I also buried several dozen camas bulbs around the property, too. Camas is another westerner, an edible bulb that rivals prairie turnip or wapato or hopniss. North America is rich in tasty tubers.

It’s not all wild and weird here, although anyone who knows me knows that I skew wild and weird in most things.

No, I have plenty of “normal” herbs to plant, such as chervil and flat-leafed parsley, lovage and borage and summer savory and cutting celery. It remains to be seen if my oregano, tarragon, sage and chives survived the winter. I have high hopes because they’ve been insulated by snow, which protects them from truly fearsome temperatures; it’ll drop to -32 overnight one night this week.

I will have to start seeds indoors, notably the Lakota tomato and a German pink tomato I have seeds for. I might start my English greenhouse cucumbers inside, too. I’m thinking that’s a March thing here, but if you’re an experienced northern gardener, I am all ears.

Same for rabbit-proofing the garden beds. I imagine some sort of wire fencing will be needed. Blood meal helps, but only until it rains. And no, I can’t just shoot them: price of living in a city.

All of this lifts me up, a bright and hopeful thing in what can be an otherwise dark time. Yes, it’s still cold. There will be more snow. Probably lots more. But the robins are murmuring. The ducks have started to pair up. I can feel the earth stirring, not yet awake but no longer deep in slumber. Soon I’ll get to see my rhubarb again, something I miss terribly. And it won’t be too long before I have dirt under my nails, red skin on my neck, and a big smile on my face.

Hang in there, everyone. Spring is coming.