Home brewing of beer, wine and hard cider are a big deal these days. What most gardeners in Wyoming don’t realize is that you can grow most of what you need for brewing right in your backyard! Let’s start with grapes. Of course we can’t grow grapes from the south of France, but there are at least twenty or so grape varieties that will grow here and tolerate our cold dry conditions.
This time of year is like Christmas down at my shop. We’re busy getting all kinds of exciting garden supplies delivered, from shovels and hoes to vegetable seeds. I know these types of products are ho-hum to most of you, but not to avid gardeners who have been dreaming for months about getting outside and growing. So let’s chat about what you can grow now.
Lately we’ve been conducting a series of free classes for gardeners. Call it cabin fever, but gardeners are ready for the growing season to begin based on the response to these classes. The latest class was on amending your garden’s soil. So, for those of you who missed the class, let’s have a chat about amendments.
Down at my garden center I’m busy inputting all the products I intend to sell this gardening season into the sales computer. At times it’s dizzying inputting all the names of the plants both common and Latin. After inputting hundreds of plants one can’t help to reflect on the power of their names.
It’s not uncommon to have a ‘January Thaw’ where snow and ice melts down only to have more snow and ice again in February. Well so far this February we’re still in the January thaw mode and plants and critters are waking up. At least in central Wyoming, the ground is without frost. I say this as I’m seeing night crawler activity in my yard. Night crawlers are worms that come up to the surface of the soil at night to feed on dead vegetation and to mate. They leave behind them in the morning a mound of soil that they’ve pushed up the night before. The fact is these worms don’t tunnel through frozen ground.
Down at my garden center, we’re all getting antsy for the new growing season. We’ve ordered all of our annuals, perennial flowers, trees, shrubs and ornamental grasses. Just about everything a gardener may need this season, including herbs. I don’t consider myself an expert in herbs, so I did a little research on companion-planting herbs with veggies