Bare root now and reap the benefit later... apples.
This is the month for pruning and for reading seed catalogs—armchair gardening. My current favorite catalog is The Natural Gardening Company’s comparatively thin but well-curated missive from Petaluma, California (it’s local for me, that’s part of why I love it). I also subscribe to Johnny’s Selected Seeds because my dad always did, and Seeds of Change because it’s gorgeous and it’s a powerful good idea.
But really what I want to recommend is that you buy a book about your local gardening, and for Northern California I love Katherine Grace Endicott’s Northern California Gardening; a month-by-month guide. Whenever I look out my window and I’m not sure of what I should be doing next (and I can’t remember which chores Sara Winge, my gardening mentor, would give me this time of year) I turn here. This is where I first learned of bare root plants and I love the idea so much I think about it all year. Winter is when plants are dug up that are dormant and they are sold without soil—they’re easier to handle and therefore less expensive. Think of apples, pears, roses, vines, shade trees, berries, rhubarb, artichokes! And if you plant them now they will be in a good position to make the most of the slowly shifting temperatures and transition strongly toward big bushy joyous bounty come spring and summer.
Cattle Branding, Pampachiri, Peru
Cattle Branding Ceremony, Pampachiri, Peru from The Seedling Project on Vimeo.
For your viewing pleasure I have put a very simple video of a cattle branding ceremony up on vimeo. This is very much an anthropological experiment—there are so many records of events that Hannah and I filmed when we were in Peru that don’t really fit into any specific narrative arc but are enlightening simply in how different they are from life in the U.S. I also feel that this kind of minimal editing fulfills some of the promise of the original Seedling Project proposal, which was to record methods of Andean farming before they are lost. When I wrote that proposal I thought I’d come back with a tidy list of how-to advice on terrace farming like the Incas did it. Once I was in Peru I could see that individual tips and tricks of farming (start your plowing on the outside of the terrace and work your way in, for example) are really quite useless unless taken as only a part of the whole. How different life is there! I could not expect us here in California to elect three water mayors per town (every year) and for them to run along the canals every August to see that they are in good condition. Would you dig up a bottle of homemade hooch from last year and drink it down though it has a little dirt in it, and bury a new bottle along with a few coca leaves and a prayer for a good harvest? I suppose if you are reading this blog you just might.