I don't remember gardening in winter from my childhood, so I was not sure what to expect. We used to have large fields and when we finished the harvest, my uncle ploughed the land, covered it with manure and it was resting over winter to be ready for spring. We also didn't have any trees, bushes or flowers that you need to maintain over winter.
Now, we have a garden full of various plants that survive the winter months, so we need to take care of them even when it's cold. We also opted for ground cover instead of manure which gave us a bit of work too.
Let's see how our garden looks these days! But as usually, first the view from our window 😊
After a heavy snowfall, we went to the garden to see if anything was damaged and also to do some chores that we kept postponing. Once we entered the area we found ourselves in winter wonderland. The snow in the city melts quickly as there is salt on the streets, but in the garden we enjoyed walking in the snow. I love hearing the squeaking sound of the fresh snow underneath my boots!
There was only one person in the garden before us 😊
And this is how we found our plot. First thing that we noticed was the thick layer of snow on our greenhouse and raised bed. I managed to open the cover of the raised bed a bit and I was surprised to see that the lettuce there was thriving. However, I couldn't harvest it as the plastic was frozen and I didn't want to break it by opening it completely. I will harvest it in a couple of days when it will be warm again.
These are our raspberries and red currants. The snow looked heavy on those thin branches, so we removed it as we didn't want them to break under that weight.
And my onions - well, at least we can see the rows. These sorts should survive the snow, and I can't wait for it to melt to check it out.
Neither of us is Swiss, but the previous owners had a Swiss flag that we liked and kept it. It must have been very windy as it fell down. We will assess the damage once it's a bit warmer.
My beautiful roses seemed to be struggling with the weight too, and we cleaned them up as well. Don't worry, I didn't forget to prune them. I will do it in spring with an expert, so that they are even more beautiful than last year.
Underneath the white stretch on the right is my ground cover. Or maybe I should say that there was my ground cover. I will see if it survived once the snow melts. I have read that some sorts of mustards survive snow and very low temperatures, so I pray that I got one of those.
I keep saying that WE cleaned this or that. Truth to be told, the hard work was done by my husband. Here he is cleaning our sea buckthorn that we planted last year. It looks rather sad, and we will see in spring if it will start producing some flowers as last year we had none.
There are still some old corn plants because he refuses to remove them. He claims that this is the only thing that he could actually decide in the garden 😊, so I keep them there for his benefit. Don't try to understand why he wants to keep them there. He simply likes them.
There is another world inside of the greenhouse...
We will start eating the lamb's lettuce soon.
And the ground cover loves it inside!
Unfortunately, a mice family was cold outside and decided to make their home inside of our greenhouse. As if this was not enough of a favour from our side they started to feast on our carrots and leaks. They liked them so much that they didn't leave anything for us! It seems that they're not big fans of lamb's lettuce or mustard, so those they left for us.
Some of the herbs are very hardy, such as this sage or rosemary that covers almost half of our cabin. I didn't know what to do with so much rosemary, but recently I learned about rosemary water or oil that you can make at home and use it for the hair growth. Let's see how long will our rosemary last now 😊
The back of our garden was even prettier than the front side. There were no steps in the snow - people prefer to stay at home rather than go to the garden when it's about -10 degrees Celsius.
We thought it would be an easy task to clean the snow from the greenhouse. Well, it wasn't. The part that was stuck on the windows became ice, so it was impossible to remove. I went inside of the greenhouse and pushed each window up several times until the ice broke and fell off. At first, the window were bended and it looked like there were small cracks in each one of them, but within a few minutes the material warmed up and smoothened itself (somehow). We were happy to see that as we were already scared that the greenhouse was damaged before we even used it properly.
I ended up soaked because lots of snow fell on me through the holes when I was pushing the windows up.
Since I was wet and getting cold we couldn't do much more and decided to go home. We will return in a few days as it should be much warmer from next Monday.
Thank you for reading and see you next time!
