From Forest to Skillet: Edible and Native Plants in the Cross Timbers of Oklahoma. 837 yard species and counting!
Standing cypress seedlings look pretty wilty in the front yard but I have not checked the backyard ones yet. Lettuce, cilantro, and cabbages I’m unsure how they look (sort of like the sugar snap peas, they could go either way once it warms up).
I had a nice bag of leaves for the compost pile that I decided could be better used as mulch right now. I put it all on the strawberries as those are the big investment relative to onion sets and potatoes seed eyes.
This cold is ridiculous and last night I saw the forecast keeps getting lower and earlier. Got up to find 9°F this morning! -8°F forecast next week! That’s -22°C! That’s Winnipeg weather!!!
After thinking about what Judy and I have been texting about on snow vs ice and the extreme and unusual cold impending, I decided to cover the biggest part of every strawberry bed, even the backyard ones. I hope it will snow as forecast on Sunday before the most extreme cold for insulation.
I checked on some native flower seeds I tried stratifying in the fridge in January. A single Missouri fluttermill primrose was sprouting!!
Supposed to be really cold (with highs not above freezing) later this week, so I figured I should get my lately acquired native and wildflower seeds in the ground. These included desert globemallow, blue flax, Liatris mucronata, and mystery Aster sp. (the latter two from Mom, thanks Mom!!). The first three I also put some seeds in the fridge for manual stratification and the first two I saved a bit to try planting in the fall if the spring planting doesn’t take.
I also had a few indoor seedings to catch up on. Judy kindly sent me some Chimayo chile pepper seeds, my Jimmy Nardello peppers never sprouted, my ground cherries only had two sprouts, and the poor Tommy Toe tomatoes died of cat and damping off.
Gardening with Prairie Plants was SO BEAUTIFUL. Mom gave it to me a few weeks ago and it was just filled with magnificent pictures of prairies and prairie gardens throughout the Great Plains. I really also liked how it paid attention to the different regions (wetter and drier, north and south), so it has lots of good info on plants native to each region. It mentioned some medicinal and edible uses of native plants too though it refers to other more complete sources. Did I mention the prairie photos? Definitely added to the favorite references spreadsheet.
Grow Cook Eat by Willi Galloway had a lot of useful tidbits I hadn’t found elsewhere, such as soil temperatures for germinating (the Johnny’s seed catalog seems to have air temperature? or so I assume, as it’s not specified) and some sections on mustard greens and bok choy. I have added it to my spreadsheet of useful books.
For those interested in cooking (aka not me anymore), it also had a lot of recipes and talked about eating parts of plants that aren’t usually discussed, like radish seed pods and various flowers of vegetables.
I am on a garden-book-reading spree it seems. I just finished The Beautiful Edible Garden (got it as an ebook from Pioneer Library Systems, our local public library). It had a lot of suggestions on how to arrange edible plants into an existing decorative garden. Mostly not relevant to how we have the yard laid out, but probably helpful for others. They did recommend a three-group crop rotation of brassicas, legumes, and nightshades, and ignoring herbs, lettuce, and alliums. So that was similar to The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible which I read a few weeks ago and liked.
Some guest plants are departing, so the Salvia greggii cuttings are moving into the plant window where it’s safer from the cat.
