We’re bracing for a chilly visitor coming this week from the Great Lakes and although we’re not exactly rolling out the red carpet for her, we’re stocking the cupboards and making sure there’s plenty of cocoa on hand.  When we’re told that the temperatures are going to dip into the single digits with forecasts of windchill in the negative 20′s my anxiety gene kicks on.  I start worrying like I’m told my great grandfather did, over the fate of our precious plants.

The greenhouse has a sophisticated system of furnaces that keeps the temperature of the houses within a very reliable range and the structure is as solid and tight as anything made mostly of glass and aluminum can be.  The only thing we’re lacking is the assurance of a good back up heating system in the worst-case-scenario of the power going out.  What we do have is a temperature sensor hooked up through the phones lines and set up to call us at home if the greenhouse temperature plunges.  And there’s a heater or two ready to go that will probably send out enough heat to keep the houses from falling below freezing.  What would be more reassuring of course is having a generator that could power the furnaces – but that’s a pie in the sky for another budget year.  For now, we’ll bundle up, crank the heat and cross our fingers and toes that our arctic visitor goes back to Canada without stealing any of our stuff for souvenirs.  And since our “stuff” is a large priceless part of what makes the Blithewold gardens the Blithewold gardens and represents hours, days, months, years, decades of work, it’s no wonder that Gail and I get nervous about the worst case scenario.

How do you prepare for cold weather?  Do you worry excessively (like me)?  Do you have a backup plan?

I’m beginning to think that the task Gail and I are working on now might be the most physically exhausting of all the jobs we do.  Forget dividing daylilies, planting, lugging bags of soil or watering at noon during a heat wave.  Sitting in the chilly potting shed, trolling magazines for ideas and browsing seed catalogs has flattened me.  I feel like the bamboo looked this past Tuesday morning.  I feel glazed.  I feel heavy.  I feel like lying down for a while.

A “wintry mix” encapsulated the gardens earlier this week and if it hadn’t turned to plain rain and kept on dripping, I might have lingered outside with my camera to try to capture more frozen images.  But instead Gail and I sat right down at the potting shed table, leaned our elbows on the radiator and began flipping through magazines and catalogs and talking about what we want to see in the gardens this coming year.  And I’m finding that if I don’t invent an excuse to get up and move actively around the greenhouse, I’m liable to sink into a stupor.  Occasionally a plant (a variegated eryngium!) or a germ of an idea for one of the gardens perks me back up like the bamboo which is (mostly) vertical again.  And hopefully as we go through and complete this task (we’ll have the orders sent by the end of January), I’ll get more and more enlivened about the gardens we’re planning and less inclined to glaze over.

Please don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining.  I love this part of our job – the dreaming and planning and browsing – and I’d much rather be doing this than outside digging holes with Fred and Dan!  But is sitting still difficult for you too?  (Maybe Gail and I should set up treadmills side by side in the potting shed for the month of January…)  What do you do to stay alert and focused during your garden’s dream stage?

It’s time to dive into catalogs!  I’ve been staring at the growing stack of them on the potting shed table for nearly 2 weeks now, waiting for Gail to return from vacation, and resisting the urge to begin the browse.  (We shop as a team.)  But there are a couple of catalogs that I just can’t keep myself from flipping through and others that I’m inclined to recycle without a glance because of where my head is this year.  Over the summer I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara and Camille Kingsolver and Stephen L. Hopp; last month I read In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan and right now I’m in the middle of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, also by M. Pollan.  These three books have me thinking differently not only about food but about ordering seeds.  Call me naive, but this time last year I didn’t know that most of the seed companies we order from are either owned by Monsanto (the largest producer of genetically engineered seeds and the largest seed company in the world) or buy seeds from them.  I also didn’t know that

…in 1981 there were approximately 5,000 vegetable seed varieties available in U.S. catalogs. Today there are less than 500, a 90 percent reduction.

-from The gardening game By Jerri Cook Wisconsin

Gail and I will be shopping primarily for ornamentals – mostly flowers, some veggies (Super Volunteer Dick orders seeds for the vegetable bed) – and we’ll still order from our usual array of companies (including Johnny’s, Territorial, Stokes, Burpee, Thompson & Morgan, Seeds of Change, Jung, and Pinetree) because they do carry seeds for some of the plants we love to grow and I’m all for encouraging those sources to keep providing our favorites.  But I’m really looking forward to placing big orders (maybe larger than usual) with Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds because that’s where my head is.  These companies (Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit membership organization) sell open pollinated seeds even though (and because) it means we might save seed (we do!) and not have to buy the same thing from them again.  They sell heirloom varieties that our grandparents might have grown.  The cool thing is that, like me, more and more people are interested in these varieties and the selection grows every year.

Have you read any of the books I mentioned?  (Have they changed your life?)  If you’re in the area and have read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – or want to, it happens to be the selection for the very first “Book Worms” Book Club meeting on February 23rd hosted by Blithewold and the Norman Bird Sanctuary.  Please join us!

Do you have favorite seed catalogs?  Do you make a point of ordering heirloom varieties?  Do you save seed?