Peter- Wow. Sounds like you're getting into my head. Had some questions a while back about whether people only tended/tilled their rows, or tended/tilled their entire garden. I was thinking that it could be more cost/labor effective if you only tended rows year after year and let the aisles kind of be... with some sort of cover crop. Sounds like it can be done. I'm very interested in that. Is the white clover you mention, "dutch white clover"? When it creeps, will I be able to bring it under control when I till as normal for my fall/winter garden, and my spring/summer garden, or will I need to do additional spading/ edging of some sort then, and throughout the growing season? Can I plant it now, along with my winter garden? The book sounds interesting. I'm going to pick up a copy. Thanks for the clarification on the fact that, yes, I can grow hairy vetch and cereal rye now and still have organic matter to till in, in the early spring. Great news for me. I'm being thick headed here, but I'm still not understanding how the cereal rye affects seeds/seedlings. You say "cereal rye will suppress small seeded vegetables, but will not kill healthy transplants". Do you mean that ANY healthy transplant will not be harmed, and that only small seeds sown in place may have issues? Or do you mean by "small seeded vegetables", even transplants that are grown from small seeds can be affected? No till eh? I might be interested and your experiment suggestion is certainly something I'd be interested in trying. Do you think that even with the poor soil conditions that I have currently, it would be worth experimenting with that right now? Or, as I'm thinking maybe better to bring up my organic matter by tilling in pine bark fines, bring up my potassium levels with sulfate of potash (currently very low), add alfalfa meal to supply nitrogen needs, plant the garden, mulch with either shredded leaves or straw or hay.... Then next season try the no till part of the equation? Frankly, I'm just a little unsure about how the whole no till thing is going to work for me. Don't know a whole lot about it, but kind of thinking it might be better to do "next phase" because my soil is so poor. Please feel free to argue this to me, offer suggestions for no till on poor soil conditions viability. Do you (or anyone reading this) have a good source for cover crop seed? I was going to purchase from Johnny's selected seeds, but they are out of some of the varieties I was interested in.

Actually, I just remembered a long time ago my friend had a California fan palm in his back yard, and it was grown locally from seed. I believe it was in the ground for quiet a few years and it was well established. It pulled through the winters unprotected, but his neighbor hood "code" made him cut it down because it still had the beard on it and even when pruned they still did not like it, he was not so happy about that. But I think I will be going with the California fan palm. Our winters are dry and it only gets really cold here for about 2 weeks until it starts to warm up. I'll give it a try!

I almost forgot about this post I made, so thank you for reminding me! Here's a sizeable update on how things went during the winter months. Even in the December armageddon, the lowest it got was 7-8C inside the greenhouse. Outside it was -19C at the lowest. You don't even want to know what my heating bill was. But just know that it wasn't anything like what I would've spent if I heated it fully with electricity, I also used s small space heater on the other end of the greenhouse to not use as much propane. But now that that's out of the way, here are some pictures! The Smith Red Sanguinelli Brown Select Satsuma is finally growing. Gold Nugget also finally doing something a whole year later. It's hard to fit the entire persian lime into frame but here's my attempt Valencia orange was covered by mango flowers. The Cara Cara became so big, and yet no fruit... Another view of the valencia that I had to prune back from the top Rio Red grapefruit also finally bushed out the way I wanted it to. Meyer lemon has over a dozen fruit on it. Pickering mango in full bloom next to the nules clementine, which didn't flower. Coconut cream mango is also in full bloom. Up close shot of puckering panicles Nules that I had to cut back There's some other stuff I plan on introducing to the greenhouse, like sapodilla, white sapote, and other dwarf varieties of trees. I also forgot to photograph the papaya, guava, and avocado. The papaya got some root rot but it's coming back, and the avocado is also finally coming back after not doing anything for an entire year. The guava is flowering and pushing new foliage. So there you go, how everything is going! I'm going to get rid of the crappy green plastic and putting on 8mil clear plastic instead before it gets cold again. I'm also considering making the greenhouse larger within a year or two, but we'll see how they grow this year.

Clumps often indicate they're some creature's buried seed cache.