Fiskars 9424 Garden Bucket Caddy

Extend the gardening season

Harvesting that first salad of the year, or enjoying one long after other gardens have succumbed to the cold, is always satisfying. By using some simple techniques you can get the drop on Old Man Winter and extend your gardening season in both fall and spring.

Grow the right produce. Go with greens that stand up to cool weather such as kale, corn salad, spinach and parsley. There are varieties of lettuce bred for cold weather, and they're easy to identify by name: butter heads like Arctic King and North Pole, loose-leaf Winter Marve, loose-headed Rouge d'Hiver, Continuity Red, a red crisp head, and a butter head/romaine cross called Blushed Butter Cos.

One of the hardiest winter greens is kale, especially the top performer Winterbor. Give the unusual but delicious miner's lettuce and corn salad a try, too, along with arugula, mizuna, French sorrel, Denali smooth-leaf spinach and both flat- and curly-leaf Italian parsley. Carrots, beets, Brussels sprouts, endive and turnips round out the list.

Source: The Seattle Times

McLain on Gardening -- Getting close to sustainability | Yakima ...

For a number of years, one of the buzzwords in gardening has been "sustainability." It seems like just about every other new gardening book, magazine and television show has been about sustainable gardening, at least in part. But what does it mean?

There are a lot of definitions floating about. Here's one: "Sustainability is the concept that man can achieve his social and economic goals without damaging the environment or endangering either biodiversity or natural ecosystems."

That sounds like it's straight out of an Ecology 101 textbook. Applied to gardening, I think sustainability means we can garden year after year in ways that won't damage the soil, water, air or the many diverse forms of life that live above and beneath the soil's surface, while continuing to enjoy the rewards of gardening.

The first step toward gardening sustainably is to become aware of how Mother Nature grows things. The vast grasslands and forests that once covered our country are prime examples of sustainability in action; these ecosystems evolved and grew over thousands of years without a single person spreading fertilizer or spraying for pests. The dead plant parts simply rotted and returned their nutrients to the soil with an assist from countless microorganisms and small critters. The nutrients were then recycled into new growth and new plants.

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