“Now, by two-headed Janus…”
Shakespeare
The solstice is the beginning of winter but it’s also the start of longer days and our turning towards the light and faraway spring. January is named after the Roman god, Janus, who is represented as having two faces. One face looks forward to the future and one backward to the past. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature quotes Ovid who describes Janus as the custodian of the universe and the opener and fastener of all things.
So let’s look back on the year that was. I always look at my garden journal at this time of year. I write usually in haste and in point form and I make note of what I plant, first and last frost and other details that I know I would forget if I didn’t write them down. I note mistakes and changes that I would like to make the following year.
First in my list of changes I intend to make this year is that I won’t bother to start tomatoes from seed. I took a lot of time and trouble to do this last year and they ended up not tasting particularly good because of all the rain. They were better by the end of the season but not good enough to warrant starting them myself. I had forgotten that determinates are all ready at once and then the plants are done. So I won’t plant too many of those this year. I would rather have indeterminates which keep going through the fall. And someone else can do the work of starting the plants. I will be quite happy to buy them.
Also not so successful last season were my various varieties of glads. There was not a frilly double glad to be seen and only a few of the singles actually bloomed. I’m guessing that they didn’t like the rain. The corms looked fine when they were planted and fine when they were dug up in the fall. Of course I will plant them all once again this spring and hope for the best. I’m an optimist after all.
The flower bed hot peppers, though, were very successful. I bought plants, Hot Portugal, and these survived several cold nights after they were planted. They went on to produce into the fall and I now have two jars of dried peppers; enough at least for this winter and next.
Late planted potatoes did well and these combined with butternut squash make one of the best winter soups. I’m a fan of winter food if not so much of winter itself. I’m not a very careful potato grower; I usually just plant whatever potatoes are sprouting in the pantry. Most years this is successful.
Onward to the season to come. There is an expression that failing to plan is planning to fail. I do make a rough plan for the vegetable garden. I try to rotate all the vegetables and not plant anything in the same place as it was last season. The exception to this is the self seeded morning glories in one corner of the garden. All I do for those is put up the cedar poles and they come up on their own. They don’t need particularly good soil and have been in the same place for years.
But everything else gets moved around. I try to put something that is a heavy feeder where the nitrogen fixing beans were last season.
I made note of my best ever sweet peas that I planted where the salad garden used to be. I’ll move the sweet pea trellis about five feet from where it is now so that it’s still within the limits of the old salad garden. And I’ll add lots of sheep manure and hope for the best.
At this time of year I tend to reread some of my favourite gardening books. We all know that the garden of the imagination is always better than the real thing. The books that I have collected over the years definitely help me imagine possibilities for the upcoming season.
Just a few of these include the Harrowsmith books, all the Geoff Hamilton books especially the ones about cottage gardens, Anna Pavord’s The Curious Gardener and all the Highgrove books.
I was particularly amused to see a reference in one of the Highgrove books to removing all plastic handles on tools and replacing them with wood. That’s what you can do when you have staff.
Finally, because this is winter and both reading and cooking season, I would like to recommend a memoir that I recently enjoyed.
Ina Garten’s memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens is the story of her life and her adventures in the food business. Her voice is positive and the stories she tells are entertaining. I wish I had discovered her cookbooks sooner than I did. Her recipes are simple and her food philosophy is to take dishes that we all love and make them just a little bit better. Who could argue with that?
She’s also pretty good with the psychology and has some good insights into the human condition. Highly recommended.
By Jill Williams