Thanks for the tour--it certainly is grand! I also love your bachelor buttons, will have to look for some of those purple and pink ones as they are lovely. That cerinthe is spectacular.

Why do you plant in containers rather than the land?

Hi mnwsgal,

The bachelor buttons are "Polka Dot Mix" with this seed being old seed from Moles seed company in England. My hubby comes from a family of market gardeners in England and he brought a few of their old trade packs of seed for us when he moved to the US.

I'll be seed saving off of these plants when the seeds ripen this summer so I should end up with plenty available for trading.

As for containers, there's two reasons for that.

We've always done tomatoes in containers because that's the way Pat's family did it in greenhouses in England. Here in Ohio it has the advantage that we can give the plants high quality compost to grow in instead of marginal garden soil. We are also in an area that's very prone to blight, so at the end of the growing season we dispose of all tomato plants and their soil in a way that keeps it isolated from next year's tomato growing compost. (We dump them out in our hills to enrich parts of that land.)

This year we switched to container growing almost all of the vegetables. Part of that was because of trying to manage watering around here. The weather is mainly downpours and drought, and it just washes the nutrition out of garden beds, floods stresses seedling, and then everything gets scorched to death. In containers we can control the moisture and avoid significant flooding and baking.

I really helped that our compost heap is so giant and mature. (I need to get a photo of that to show it off!) and this year we had access to an unlimited supply of free five gallon buckets. If we didn't have our own compost supply it would have cost us over $350 to fill just the buckets. (I didn't add in the nursery pots to that.)

One other factor is also that the soil here is just the most hard, depleted, rocky stuff you'll ever find. There's a reason that there's not a lot of farming in Appalachia unless you happen to have land near a creek bottom. I've never seen soil like this in places I've lived before. It's all either flakey rock and coal, or it's rich land downhill in a creek bottom and getting flash flooded out every time it rains.

I guess most of Ohio is much richer land than this, but our area is the hilly part where the glaciers never went, and is like the lean soil parts of West Virginia. It's good for growing coal, but gardens are scratched out of the soil through brute force and ornery persistence. :)

Lynda

Lynda - I love the tour through your gardens - looks to me like you will adapt to WSing like a duck to water - you already have the seed starting down pat - I am so very impressed with all your little seedlings - the BB's are so pretty. I love looking at what other gardeners do and pick up tips and ideas from each and everyone of you. I am really looking forward to seeing your WS set up. Thanks for the tour.......

Lynne

I should probably ppoint out that I am actually doing more today than reading winter sowing archives and looking at everyone's seedling and flower photos.

I'm also smiling at my garden and thinking about what to use for winter sowing containers, what to plant, where it will all go. And I'm stalking all of my flower blooms eyeballing ripening seeds with a greedy eye.

I'm sure you all remember what it's like to stumble across winter sowing and suddenly see an easy and manageable way to utter garden abundance. I'm sure I get less starry eyed about it all in a couple of weeks as the initial novelty wears off.

Until then, though, expect and awful lot of forum lurking on my part. :)

And guess what?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I've got a flower bud on my Painted Daisy (Pyrethrum Robinson's mix.) This particular plant was started in the house, but he has siblings that were started outdoors in sort of cooler weather - facing the elements but without their owm milk jug houses or ziplock bag hats.

Still, this plant is a future winter sowing parent plant - so I guess I can write all about him here. :)

I really did not expect flowers this year on my pyrethrum. Certainly not early in the year like this. I'm already planning this bud's future as a foundation member of my winter sowing seed team.

Part of the excitement is because this guy is a PYRETHRUM daisy! That means that once I get a good foundation stock, I can have an abundance of these guys to grow in one or two gallon pots as well as in the garden beds. With our veg plants in containers, we want to try doing some insect control and balancing through the use of comapnion plants - and having several dozen gallon pots of mature blooming pyrethrum daisies is part of the master plan.

This years goal was to get some started to see if I could get it to germinate and them starts som parent plants for future division. But winter sowing opens up the door to mass seed planting as well as vegitative division.

And now Pyrethrum Mama has her very first bud. I'm just so proud.

I really am glad the the winter sowing group seems to be a magnet for the garden abundance crowd. And I like the way the folks here appreciate garden standards as well as this year's hoity toity new fancy hybrid of the moment. A lot of garden web seems to be full of people buying the season's latest exotic named cultivar of this or that. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's nice to find folks who also appreciate plain old flowers or the odd sport that pops up in the garden.

Guess it's time to put the forum aside for a while and go smell my four O clocks!

Lynda

WOW Lynda! Give a hug to the Compost Queen for me. I think she's a darling. :O)

Just love your pics.
Jill

Oh, yes - you are gonna love winter sowing!

Thanks for the tour ......

PV