What in the One Green World does “well-draining soil” actually mean? We’ve all seen this listed on indoor, garden, and orchard plant descriptions. We all know most varieties grow best in this elusive, mysterious medium. But what exactly is it? How do we tell if our soil is well-draining? If our soil isn’t well draining, should we reject gardening as a hobby altogether? What are some signs we’ve finally attained it?

Let’s get down to it!

The goal is to have (or create) soil that supplies both air and water to plant roots in about equal proportions. If you have coarse, sandy soil, you may notice that water drains quickly through it, so your plants dry out and wilt sooner. But in heavy clay soil, you may have the opposite problem, where water takes a long time to drain, causing roots to rot from a lack of airflow. Fortunately, it is possible to improve your soil if your garden suffers from either extreme. Improving its drainage will go a long way toward creating a healthy, successful garden or orchard.

Simply put: well-drained soil allows water to enter the soil structure at a moderate rate without pooling or puddling, hang out for long enough for the plants to absorb the water they need, and then move along, making way for good ol’ oxygen to join the party; the oxygen is also absorbed by the roots and allows them to “breathe” between waterings. Cool, right?

What are some characteristics of well-drained soil?
Imagine you fill a jar with various sizes of marbles. Each marble represents a soil particle. The spaces between the marbles are filled with oxygen and water, both of which are necessary for healthy plant growth. When it rains or you water your garden, these pore spaces in between the soil particles fill with water. As the water moves downward through the soil, it’s replaced by air. This movement is referred to as soil drainage, so let’s talk about why the speed of this process is important.

Well-drained soil retains water long enough for roots to absorb what the plant needs and dries out sufficiently between rains or waterings so that roots can take up oxygen in the air that replaces the water once it drains out. Puddles that form after heavy rain are absorbed quickly by well-drained soil. Generally, these soils have a loose structure that makes them easy to dig in. When soil drains too quickly, plants do not have enough time to absorb the water and can die. Likewise, when the soil does not drain quickly enough and plants are left in pooling water, their oxygen intake from the soil is reduced, root rot can set in, and the plants can die. Plants that are weak and suffering from insufficient or over watering are more susceptible to disease and insect damage too. Bad news bears!

How do I tell if my soil is well-draining?
Determining how well your soil drains is pretty easy. Just dig a hole approximately 15” x 15” and fill with water. After it drains completely, refill it with water and note how long it takes for the water level to drop. In soil with good drainage, the level should drop about an inch per hour.

How can I improve drainage?
To improve soil drainage, begin by simply digging organic matter (like compost or shredded leaves) into your existing soil. Compacted, clay, and sandy soils all benefit from being amended with rich organic materials. For areas with poor drainage to either extreme, too wet or too dry, thoroughly mix in organic materials such as peat moss, compost, shredded bark, or manure. Nutrient-rich, properly drained soil is very important for healthy plants. This is a straightforward solution and works for almost any soil that drains too fast or slowly. For an unplanted bed, spread 3-4 inches of your organic matter across the surface of the soil and work it into the top 8-12 inches (a garden tiller or pitchfork will do the job). For a bed that is already planted, add a couple of inches of compost to the soil surface each year and over time, nature will do the mixing. Compacted and clay soil can drain poorly and cause plant roots to sit too long in wet conditions. We advise against adding sand to clay soil to improve drainage– this will just make the problem worse! If you have heavy clay or compacted soil, either amend the soil to make it more porous or choose plants that can tolerate wet areas. Clay soil may be improved by installing a drain tile. Sandy soil can drain water away from plant roots too quickly. For sandy soil, amend the soil or choose plants that can tolerate dry and drought-like conditions. If you’d rather avoid lots of digging or want a quicker solution, you may find your solution in installing raised beds. The beds should be at least 6-8” above the existing soil level. Recipes abound for soil mixes for raised beds, but they are basically combinations of high-quality topsoil (40-60%) and compost or other well-decomposed organic matter. Creating well-draining soil in pots is similar. You can either buy bagged potting mix or make your own blend. We don’t recommend using soil from your garden in containers, no matter how well-drained.

Why are some parts of my garden or yard more well-draining than others?
It’s important to note that drainage may be different in different parts of your yard. There are many reasons why this occurs, including the removal of topsoil during construction, compaction with heavy equipment, drainage towards or diversions from municipal systems and utilities, or simply the lay of the land. If there is an area of the yard where the soil stays wet for long periods, the best solution may be to simply select plants that thrive in poorly drained, soggy soil such as Elephant Ear, ferns, and willows. Similarly, if an area of your yard stays on the dry side, no matter how much it rains or you water, that’s where you should place drought-tolerant plants, such as ceanothus, lavender, and yucca.

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So, here you are with your new baby fruit tree, maybe you picked it up locally or received it in the mail. After all that winter planning, you picked out just the right spot so that it can grow into a beautiful fruiting specimen. Now, it’s finally time to plant!

You grab your shovel, maybe a pickaxe depending on where you live, a few soil amendments. Off to dig that mighty hole your new fruit tree will call home. With great care the soil is put back in the hole, gently you apply a thick organic mulch, water it in. Repeating the process until all your trees are in the ground.

But, when you stand back somehow it looks…rather disappointing. Just sticks with a few side branches sticking out of the Spring mud. You notice that 8-15 feet of barren ground between all those trees, it will take some years before the tree mature and their canopies fill in to fully soak up all that great sunlight. Surely, there must be some other way. Let’s fill up this empty space – companion plants for fruit trees to the rescue!

Which companion plants are the best has been hotly debated amongst gardeners for decades. There’s plenty of room to experiment. But, what is for sure is that good companion plants are the ones that are beautiful, ecology enhancing, soil building, pollinator attracting, drought tolerant, dynamic accumulating, pest predator attracting, and more. A list of beneficial plants could fill many a page, but we’ve come up with a list of our absolute favorites based on their ease of cultivating and their benefits to the young orchard.

Nitrogen Fixers

The first group of companions most home orchard and permaculture folks think of are the mighty nitrogen fixers. A special group of plants that are able to turn atmospheric soil nitrogen (N2) into a form of nitrogen that can be uptaken by plants (Ammonia – NH3 and Ammonium – NH4) through a symbiotic relationship that occurs in their roots with certain bacteria.

Many of the most known nitrogen fixers are in the Fabaceae or Pea Family. These associate with Rhizobia bacteria in root nodules. But, there are also many in other families, such as our native Red Alder, Garrya, Willow, Sea Buckthorn and Elaeagnus, or the Ceanothus genus that instead associate with Frankia and other bacteria to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a usable form. For our needs, it is one of the most useful adaptations in the plant kingdom . Prior to the chemical fertilizers, farmers and gardeners alike relied heavily on the nitrogen fixing powers of these plants. But instead of going down that rabbit hole, let’s list some of our favorite nitrogen fixers in the perennial garden…

• Baptisia australis, also known as Blue False Indigo, is like the Danny DeVito of perennial nitrogen fixers, growing only 3-4 feet in height but is incredibly deep rooted. This prairie native is so vigorous, more often than not, we have to cut the pot off the plant because it’s vigorous root system has made it impossible to get out of the pot otherwise! It is not the most multifunctional of nitrogen fixers but it can be used to make an indigo dye, bees love the flowers, and last season’s flower stocks and seed pods are beautiful in winter. Blue False Indigo deserves to be lifted from its benchwarmer status on the nitrogen fixers all star team to a full time starter.
• Lupines! Who doesn’t love Lupines? They hold the spring rain water droplets on their leaves like the precious jewels each drop truly is! Their large spikes of pea flower towers in mid-spring are a cause for pause and wonderment. Yeah, we love Lupines in all their various cultivated forms. Deep rooted, drought tolerant, and tolerating a wide range of soils, Lupines always deserve a place beneath your young fruit tree especially in drier climates.
• Ceanothus, also known as the California Lilac, is an impressive genus that comes in many forms from ground covers and tiny shrubs all the way up to a large shrubs, there is surely a Ceanothus variety out there that will fit the bill and it seems the nursery industry finds new varieties to introduce almost every year. This genus might be exclusively useful to all of us here on the West Coast as most are not hardy below USDA Zone 7 but there is not a flower more enticing in the entire Apiary Candy Shop than the Ceanothus flower. Its drought tolerance, compact evergreen foliage and variety of forms place it as a perennial starter on the Nitrogen Fixers All Star Team.
  • Vandenberg has dark green crinkled leaves and beautiful fragrant blue flowers in late spring and grows 3-5 feet tall by 4-6 feet wide
  • Julia Phelps Ceanothus has been one of the more popular Ceanothus for the past 50 years and continues to be one of our favorites!
  • Midnight Magic is the perfect Ceanothus for small spaces or a low growing hedge. Compact dark evergreen green leaves contrast beautifully with the fragrant blue flowers. Midnight Magic grows to only 3 feet high and spreads 5-6 feet.
  • Centennial Ceanothus  this ground cover is a multi-functional and extremely tough plant. Centennial Ceanothus explodes with blue flowers in late spring as hundreds of its tiny blue blossoms open up, much to the delight of bees that seem to cover every blossom. If that weren’t enough, Centennial is also a nitrogen-fixing and drought tolerant evergreen. A truly wonderful plant for a permaculture guild planting or as a companion plant to one of your young fruit trees.
• Sea Buckthorn! Yes, you can have your nitrogen fixer and eat it too. We have gone on and on about the abilities of sea buckthorn to heal degraded soils and grow in the most gravelly nutrient deficient of soils, but suffice to say Sea Buckthorn really is a mighty vigorous nitrogen fixer with incredibly nutrient dense fruit and leaves as well. Plant it between your fruit trees and reap a wonderful harvest of sea berries until the canopy closes in on them at which time you can cut them down and get that big old boost of nitrogen in the soil. Dig up the suckers and repeat on a new planting area!
• Goumi! The more humble and equally as handsome cousin of the sea berry in the Elaeagnaceae Family, Goumi is one of the more well behaved fruiting nitrogen fixers, can tolerate a wider range of sunlight conditions and has some of the most unique fruit you will ever taste. It tastes like it sounds, goumi-ish! The dormant twigs are a gilded and speckled Winter pleasure. In the early Summer, red fruit hanging from the shrub must have surely been placed their overnight like a hundred little ornaments hung by an army of fruit bearing elves and fairies.
• Autumn Olive is similar in some ways to goumi, but with a tarnished reputation on the east coast, Autumn Olive grows larger with a more slender leaf shape and produces smaller but equally tasty fruit. Amber is a personal favorite here at the nursery and is proof that gems do grow on trees…nitrogen fixing trees!
• Silverberry is the elegant evergreen matriarch of the whole Elaeagnaceae family, boasting evergreen, or rather ever-silver foliage year round. Silverberry is unique in that it flowers in October-November and ripens its fruit overwinter to be eaten in mid-Spring! How wild is that! Not as cold hardy as goumi, or autumn olive, but it makes a great hedge. Try alternating Pineapple Guava and Silverberry for the ultimate nitrogen fixing, fruit producing evergreen hedge!
• Crimson Clover– If all this perennial nitrogen fixing sounds like too much work or if you’re the type that can’t bear to cut down a plant in the name of ecological succession than perhaps the annual nitrogen fixers are more up your alley, Crimson Clover makes the top of the list for its ability to fix boatloads of nitrogen per acre and it’s incredibly ornamental flowers, and maybe most importantly how easy it is to manage. Unlike it’s cousin the Dutch White Clover that doesn’t know how to take a hint when it’s time for it to leave, Crimson Clover with gracefully bow out after its spring flower show if mown down before it sets seed. Or let it go to seed and repeat its beautiful dance next year. With anything in the Pea Family, try a Rhizobium inoculant boost to insure your young plants have their bacterial companions alongside them at the time of planting.

Dynamic Accumulator Companion Plants

What exactly is a dynamic accumulator? You can think of them as deep soil miners that send their vigorous deep root system far below the depth where most plants send their roots, bringing to the surface nutrients that have slipped down through the soil horizons and concentrating it in their leaves. Over time, these types of plants rejuvenate soil by pulling up more and more nutrients and creating humus around their root zone.

The most famous of these is Comfrey and has long been touted as the best plant choice for “chop and drop” mulching, where you simply chop its abundant foliage back a few times per year and use that as a nutrient rich, weed suppressing mulch. Comfrey also has many medicinal and therapeutic uses and is an incredibly multi-functional plant. It has gotten a bad rap for its ability to rapidly spread via seed, but the varieties we carry cannot produce seed and are much more manageable.

One such plant is the Bocking 14 Russian Comfrey which is a clumping variety which can only be spread if you till and spread the roots through the soil. For a more aesthetic garden look, consider the gold leafed Variegated Axminster’s Gold Comfrey. It looks like a soft leaved hosta, and though it is not as vigorous as the Bocking 14 Russian Comfrey, it still has all the same wonderful properties. If you wish to remove comfrey after your fruit trees are established a thick sheet mulch will easily do the trick and you can take great joy in knowing that your comfrey plant’s root mass will act as a deep soil compost for your fruit trees.

Chives and perennial onions are an often overlooked companion plant. They are not only easy to grow, but many are worthy additions to the kitchen. Carpets of these plants may confer some immune system benefits to surrounding plants. Their beautiful small flowers provide nectaries for many beneficial insects including tiny harmless parasitic wasps that hunt pest insects. Many onions often intermingle very well with other forbs planted in the understory.

Globe Thistles (Echinops ritro) and Green Globe Artichokes  and Purple Italian Artichokes are huge clumping plants that produces tons of biomass, habit for beetles, and are great insectaries – while pulling up nutrients from great depths with their huge taproots! All the power of soil building properties of thistles but with without the spines. Plant these giving them plenty of space to flop around.

Yarrow is our other most revered soil miner! This plant can be found growing in lawns and fields nearly all over the temperate world and the reason for this is that it loves growing in disturbed soils. Like a diligent soil repairman, yarrow sends its deep roots into even the toughest rocky soils. Many new cultivated forms have been selected for their graceful foliage and flower colors, so you can now customize your ecological plantings. Yarrow is also a beneficial insectary plant as well as a useful medicinal herb.

Time to Go Get Planting

This is a short coffee-fueled morning rambling of some of our favorite companion plants chosen for their multifunctionality, ease of cultivation, and beauty in the landscape, but many other species can fit the bill as a companion plant. Water needs for your site may increase but by planting a diverse array of ground covers, small shrubs, and herbaceous perennials you bring in all sorts of beneficials to your site which decreases weed pressure by filling up the empty spaces.

Go out and experiment, try all sorts of new plants between your fruit trees and other plantings. Plant up those edges and borders. If the hydrozones are managed correctly, drought tolerant and xeriscaping plants will thrive amongst your more water thirsty fruiting plants. Don’t be afraid to cut things out if they get overcrowded. Study nature and copy examples you see using analogous plants of your choosing. Try alley cropping with vegetables. Create different patterns, textures, and smells! And plant more Monkey Puzzle trees – they are long-term human companion plants. Your grandchildren will thank you!

The post Companion Plants for Fruit Trees appeared first on One Green World.

Bags of dried fruits and a universe of jars of wonderful treats. Winter salad greens and fresh cut herbs could grace your plate. Your onions and potatoes seasoned with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, and more – if you’d only planned (or maybe you did!) Like they say, it was best to have planted a fruit tree 7 years ago. So, let’s get started on garden planning!

Well, what do you want to grow?

Focusing around economics, kitchen recipes, and personal/family/friend preferences will help shape that list. What do you spend most on in your monthly food budget that you could instead begin to grow? Think of the produce items that never look great or are devoid of flavor at the grocery store, especially in the winter. What does your family enjoy eating? That vegetable or fruit your friends really adore when they come over for a shared meal. The ones that the kids get excited about. Or, maybe that they should get excited about. What will make the neighbors squeal with joy when you share your abundant harvests? Hmm… Create a list to grow based on those considerations.

Part of the garden planning process is remembering what worked and what didn’t turn out as well as we hoped. Sometimes we get lucky and even get to figure out why things turned out as they did. When planning, whether you have a small backyard, patio garden, or even a full-on farm, it’s good to take an inventory of what we have and where we want to go. What’s growing well? What’s been struggling all along? “Right plant, right place.” Sometimes the plants we had high hopes for our growing conditions for whatever reason limp along while other times it’s nothing but uncontrollable gangbusters from the start!

Planting varieties proven for your growing area is essential especially if we don’t have a large area to experiment with. It’s good to strike a balance between honing on the tried-and-true, what provably works, but going out and trying that wild-hair experimental idea. Strike a balance, that way you won’t get in trouble with your spouse for being too “out there”. Thankfully, OGW’s got you covered with the right plants no matter where you live!

Designing Your Garden

Creating a map of your site and how everything relates to each other is important for best long term success. Gaia’s Garden by the late Toby Hemenway remains one of the most important works toward understanding the basic workings of an integrated garden design. Worth checking out and digesting its contents.

First off, we’re going to be interacting with the space, right? So, that means thinking about how people including yourself will use that space. How can they move around efficiently. Plan around what tasks currently happen there, what tasks you will want to happen there in the future, and how people need to move around in that space to complete the tasks. Design your garden so that it is both easy and safe to move around that space quickly and with ease but also so that physical movement time is minimizing by grouping tasks around the function they perform. This will look different to each person and that’s perfectly fine.

What are the permanent features of this area? The buildings on the property, the water features like ponds and downspouts, the paths and how they fit into the lay of the land, the trees, shrubs. What about the surrounding neighborhood and greater area. Then think about how the annuals fit into that scheme.

Think of your garden in terms of time. Creating a four-season plan for your garden that includes season highlights, planting schedules (both short-term growing year goals but also long-term), rotations, and processing storage time estimations can really help ensure you make the most of your growing season and also that you have the time to “put away” as much of your produce as possible. We all know the person that grows a ton of tomatoes but never finds the time to can! Maybe this means getting together with your neighbors to help share and preserve the harvest. This is obviously a huge subject, just broad-brushing over some greater concepts that we’ll touch more on later another time.

Timeliness and Garden Planning

Part of successful winter gardening is often starting with planning the year before. Many of the garden vegetables we love like Brussels Sprouts (Mar), Garlic (Sep-Nov, or Jan), winter hardy salad greens (July) require planning ahead usually at the height of Spring or Summer. Not a time our intuition screams WINTER! and yet, the seasoned gardener knows how to plan in advance during that time. To the maxim “right plant, right place”, add “right time”. Of course, the entire practice of gardening or farming revolves around starting and finishing tasks with the correct seasonal timing.

You’re in luck because there are many different books, guidelines for your bioregion, and blogs that have been published for pretty much any region of the US or Canada. For us in Cascadia (Vancouver Island to Northern California), Seattle Tilth’s Maritime Northwest Garden Guide Second Edition continues to be a great for not just winter, but throughout the seasons as well. Strangely despite its popularity, it’s been out of print for the last year, but it’s still easy to find and pick up a copy online. Two other excellent books on this general subject continue to be Binda Colebrook’s Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest despite the planting dates being a bit off and a number of the Elliot Coleman books like The Winter Harvest Handbook and Four-Season Harvest. Here is our recommended books to plan your own food forests and gardens – OGW BOOKS

When planning for winter gardening, we need to pay attention to not only how we are going to help our plants cope with the typical lows and winter conditions like snow or ice, but also provide some planning for how to do with the occasional extreme winter weather. Getting to know your areas first and last average frost dates can help with planning ahead. It’s a bit technical, but NOAA publishes this information. Just select your state on the website to get your list.

It All Starts From the Soil

Speaking of temperatures, remember that soil life is basically dormant below 45 F. Which means if the compost doesn’t have core heat, no composting will happen. It means that the nitrogen fixing soil organisms are dormant and not ready to feed your plants. Which is part of the reason many plants stay dormant during the cold months. Which leads us to chatting a little about soil health.

Once the ground begins to thaw, typically in Feb, it is a great time to get a comprehensive soil test. I personally recommend the company Ag-Source – they are geared towards organics, very competitively priced, have great customer service that make the process simple, give excellent recommended fertilizer recommendations. and have offices throughout the US. Often us in the “ground yer own” crowd are driven by a desire to produce food that is not chemically contaminated and flavor rich. A big part of flavor equation is ensuring that our harvest is not only nutrient rich but nutritionally balanced. This is part of insuring that our homegrown isn’t an empty promise – having been chemically contaminated and/or devoid of nutrition. For more information about soil fertility in layman’s terms, see the book The Intelligent Gardener by Steve Solomon. Biology also plays a role of central importance with which Dr Elaine Ingham has extensively written about. The marriage of these two ideas achieves balance.

On the biology side of things, as you are cleaning up your garden and assessing winter damage, remember to recycle those on site nutrients as well! One of best ways to build soil fertility is by feeding it all sorts of vegetation. It has been said many times that composting is both an art and a science. But, by adding those clippings and woody debris to all those vegetable scraps you’ve been dumping on the pile, this will both help keep the compost pile aerated, heated and active, but will also help balance the carbon to nitrogen ratio in the pile which will make the best compost and in turn the best soil. Sometimes I like to compost in place for some things in layers, but for vegetable scraps I like to make layered piles in new locales over time, slowly enriching more and more space. Bio-intensive Approach to Small-scale Household Food Production shows the mineral makeup of different compostable materials. The rest of the guide is pretty cool, too!

By working on that compost, you’ve probably already checked on your tools a bit. But, take the time to clean, sharpen, repair, and replace those trusted tools that allow us to complete our vital work every day. Fix that wobbly wheelbarrow, repair or replace those leaking hoses and water lines, etc. Also, don’t forget about those motors! Periodically starting and briefly running will prevent later work flow problems in the early Spring or Summer when you need them most! Two-cycle engines like weed wackers and chainsaws don’t like their fuel/oil mixture just sitting in them indefinitely. Refer to your equipment’s owner manual for specific information about how to preform maintenance tasks for them.

A Lil’ Bit about Seeds!

Are your vegetable seeds still fresh? Check the dates. Try to keep records of when/where/who they came from. Save and learn the stories. Memorize like the keepsakes they are. Even if its scribbling on an envelope. Periodically check over your winter squash, potatoes, bulbs and tubers to keep your produce and planting stock in good order.

Seeds can be started early for transplant using southern facing windowsills and a chamber to keep humidity high. A great place to start those slowest growing seeds for transplanting months later. You can also test the viability of those heirloom tomato seeds that you got at that seed exchange several years ago. Taking out a few and planting them to see if they germinate in warm indoor conditions, will save later wasted time. A good wealth of information for starting seeds inside can be found at Wintersown. Some great local companies to check out are Adaptive Seeds,  Green Journey Seeds, Nichol’s, Peace Seedlings, Siskiyou Seeds, Uprising Organics, Wild Garden Seed and many more. OGW also has a great selection of seeds from these amazing NW growers in online and at OGW’s Garden Center in Portland. Don’t forget your local seed exchanges either!

Maybe you want to build some infrastructure? A bigger dedicated space to growing like a full-on with lights indoors grow space or a heated greenhouse. Perhaps building heated propagation beds in simple hoop house is the way to go? It’s also very easy to build germinate beds in a hoop house using a thick layer of finished compost a top fresh manure or hot compost bed. Also, cloches and cold frames can both help us start plants earlier, protected from winters worst, but also extend the growing season into the Winter. Floating row covers help keep winters worst off already established plants. Decisions, decisions.

Some Things to Think About

If you live in a more maritime climate or a milder area, January and February are excellent times to prune many types of fruit trees. While thinking about pruning, it’s good to also think of pollinators like mason bees. Check out our Mason Bee Guide. Check the bases of your trees for signs of girdling from voles or mice. There are various products you can add to the bark of tree bases to prevent damage. Learn the difference between mosses and lichens. Lichens as they fall to the ground over time actually feed the soil and thus the trees nitrogen while mosses, if not gently rubbed one, can actually cause harm to trees over time. Finally, most bareroot and potted plants can be placed into the landscape if the soil is not frozen.

January is also your first window to start planting those early vegetables like cabbage, onions in trays to transplant, peppers and tomatoes (indoors). While in late January/early February it is a great time to direct sow certain flower seeds like poppies that need to settle in and stratify (receive cold wet conditions) for some time before they will germinate. Some vegetables can also be direct sown like peas and fava beans directly into fresh earth.

While it is perfectly fine to prune many fruit and nut trees as well as small fruits, it is best to wait to do summer pruning on peaches, plums, and cherries due to the potential to cause disease issues in cold wet conditions. Grapes should be pruned and trained late Jan/ early Feb. In fact, I’ve laid my eyes on more than one old farming book relating that the best time to prune is actually in late Spring/early Summer but that they’d always learned to prune in the winter because they didn’t have time to do it when it’d actually have been best. Something to think about.

Winter is a great time to do some pest management. The organics-approved Dormant Oil can be used to stop a wide number of pest organisms that are living dormant on or in the wood like certain aphids, mites, and scales. And, don’t forget to set out those crowns and divisions like asparagus, rhubarb, horseradish, onion sets, potatoes, artichokes, dahlias, lilies, gladiolas, and friends.

March is typically the month where many of our plants are awakening and is a great time to make divisions of many clumping or spreading plants like hostas, mint, strawberries, raspberries, bamboo, iris, daylilies, etc. It is also a great time to prune more winter sensitive plants like blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.

Speaking of friends. I think of plants as friends, some are old friends, some I’ve just met. During the winter, it’s nice to have some plants that call out their presence during the silence of the winter. Some of my favorite winter interest plants include Garrya x issaquahensis which the males have these long white catkins, Jerusalem Sage  (Phlomis russeliana) which has interesting persistent flower heads, and the beautifully vivid yellow flowers of Witch Hazel and ‘Winter Charity ’ Mahonia. Winter flowering fragrant plants like some types of Jasmine, Winter Flowering Honeysuckle, Sarcococca, Daphne, ‘Dawn‘ Winter Flowering Viburnum (Viburnum x bodnantense).

Okay! It is time to reach out beyond your garden! Garden planning is more than just being an indoor study. Get to know your neighbors. Find ways to bridge differences and strengthen ways to collaborate. Go to workshops and outings. Gain inspiration from those neighbors. Get to know your county’s extension agent. Join the local garden clubs and fruit societies, many are actually really lively and fun! If you live near Portland, OR come check out Home Orchard Society events and within Western Oregon, the Agrarian Sharing Network propagation fairs. And.. don’t forget to visit OGW and say hello!

~ Chris Homanics – OGW Community Coordinator.

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