Gardening is ultra complex

It's Halloween and it's garden clean up day. I love Saturdays. This is the one day that I save for taking care of my home and garden. I don't actually "work" on Saturdays. We have a light drizzle here in Enumclaw today and its warm. It's nice and I'm just in from cleaning up my garden. Tomato plants and Shasta Daisies are out and composting. Sunflowers are cut for the chickens and I'm making a dent in that pile of junk that I pulled out of the shed when we made the stall for Abby.

A master gardener from our local Garden Club clued us all in this week about how to prepare our gardens for Winter. We are all tres attentive to all of her advice. I learned a lot of things I didn't know and I didn't even know I didn't know them. I am eating it up because the improvisational approach I take to art doesn't work so well for gardening and I've suffered the consequences of this approach this year. I learned how to garden and to paint by watching and helping my mom and then by reading and trying things out over the years. The garden club is really great because there is so much gardening knowledge in the room; now I have a whole lot of moms I can learn from.

I think gardening is ultra complex. It's at least as complex as designing software; maybe not quite as complex as theater. Oregon, where I learned to garden is different than California is different than MA is different than Washington. The light and soil conditions are different every few feet. The seasons come and go and are different every year. We learn new things about growing plants all the time, aesthetic goals change. MAN.

So here are my personal take-aways from Maureen's garden clean-up advice:

1. Dahlias rot in the ground over the winter because rain water drains down to the root through the stem. If your soil drains and you cut the stems and protect them from the rain you have a good chance your Dahlia's survive under our gardening conditions. Sword Ferns and Fir limbs make good winter cover for Dahlias. My first year of growing a lot of Dahlias I left them in the ground and they rotted. The second year I planted a new crop not quite so big, I dug them up and stored them just like they said in the book and lost those. If you dig your Dahlia tubers; don't wash them before you store them in a cool dry place for the winter.

2. Don't put shavings from the horse barn directly onto your garden; compost it first, then spread it in the Spring. Sawdust draws the nitrogen out of the soil. Who knew? In MA I grew my pumpkins right on top of the horse manure pile, lots of shaving there, they grew great. I learned that from my farmer friend.

3. Maureen recommended cutting Raspberry canes to the ground. In MA, I cut them about a foot high and had bumper crops.

4. Clean out all your weeds; these keep growing over the Winter in in WA they look ugly and they are really bad by Spring; not so in MA where we usually had a foot or two of snow or ice for months.

We've got a lot of dairy farms here and I'm longing for a truck load of manure; gotta get out there and mingle with the neighbors to find that. What I don't know is if I should spread it over the grass that is covering the garden area now or if I should till the whole thing so that I can flatten it out and then spread the manure. I've got to do something or I won't have more than a a few jars of current jam and a bowl of tomato soup from my garden again next year. I'll shoot Maureen a note and ask her.