Winter Poor Time for Gardening; Plants Grow Unsatisfactorily

Snow, originally uploaded by tpl108.

Not much growing around here these days. Sleep tight, sweet raised garden bed. Your time will come soon enough.

2007: The Gardening Year that Was

The year that was on the Grange.

THE STATS

Last frost: May 7
First frost: October 29
Length of "frost free" growing season: 175 days (5 months, 22 days)
Effective growing season: late April through late September
First Mow: May 3
Last Mow: November 25

BEST & WORST

Best vegetable: Sugar snap peas. One of the first plants into the garden, its fast growth and abundant output made this the one crop that we never grew tired of.
Most disappointing vegetable: Beets. Despite numerous plantings and an NSA supercomputer, our beets were ping-pong ball sized at best and quite bitter.
Best surprise vegetable: Beet leaves. Excellent in salads (much like myself), beets will heretofore be grown solely for its leaves.
Hardiest vegetable: Swiss chard, var. Bright Lights. Kept growing through mid-November. Unfortunately, there were few takers for this leafy beauty. While wonderful when quickly sauteed, a decent serving required a whopping amount of leaves.
Best-tasting tomato: Brandywine, by a mile. Jumping on the heirloom vegetable bandwagon, Low-output and cracking were noticeable downsides.
Most-prolific tomato: Yellow-Pear and Better Boy. Yellow-Pears looked good from a far but were far from good. They may appear gourmet, but they taste is rather ho-hum. Better Boys, however, tasted great and produced a good number of fruit, solidifying their spot in next year's garden.
Most-disappointing tomato: Sungold. While supremely tasty, its low output was a big drawback.

Best flower: Peony. Even though the blooms lasted for a brief week, the huge blossoms were coveted by many a passerby. Hands off, fools. I'm watching you.
Best value flower: Walmart-specials, Cleome and Salvia. Purchased for maybe $2 each, these puppies kept blooming from mid-summer through the early-November. Three-cheers for the category-killer putting the little guy out of business!
Let's-hope-they-do-better-next-year flower: Echinacea. Transplanted in late-May, the Echinacea bloomed sporadically and despite their advertised drought-tolerance were the only casualty from the unusally dry August and September.
Worst planting arrangement: A soldierly rank-and-file approach gave my tulips all the charm of an invading German army.
Pack-your-things-and-get-frank-out-of-here flower: Astilbe. Prominently featured at the front of my south-facing border, its late and somewhat unimpressive blooms monopolized valuable garden space. They'll be transplanted to a shadier location (think: solitary stranger loitering near jungle gym).

Best-garden project: Lawn renovation. There's something extremely rewarding about taking a hardscrabble, weed-infested portion of the back yard and transforming it into turf. Turf-type tall fescues and perennial rye grasses are in my stable of friends.

Winter

Backyard, originally uploaded by tpl108.

Spring (and my garden) never seemed so far away. There's been a near constant snow cover here since the first week of December that has prevented me from amending the soil with fresh compost. However, with some balmy 40-degree weather in the forecast for this weekend, I'm looking forward to hauling a few hundred pounds of compost out back.