Bleak Midwinter

by Linda Jordan

We’re having a cold spell here. For the Puget Sound region that means temps in the teens at night. And it might get to the 30’s during the daytime. Maybe.

13F is as low as our zone 8b, will go hopefully. Otherwise I’ll be losing a lot of plants out in the garden. It’s crisp and bright out there and I don’t even want to go outside.

Luckily I’m sitting by the wood stove staying cozy. Most of the cats are inside too. Midwinter is a good time to dream.

I made decisions back in December about what I wanted to do for this year. Now, I’m getting more details down about what that means.

For writing, it means the novel I’m working on is gradually coming together. I’m getting to understand the characters and their interactions more. There are still lots of surprises (for me and hopefully my readers, too) that will pop up as everything weaves together.

For the garden, I’m sitting down with seed and plant catalogs and websites. Dreaming about what new fun things I want to grow this year. I don’t start a lot of plants by seed—we have no greenhouse and there’s no space in the house to rig up shelves with grow-lights. Any seeds started need to be able to go outside as soon as they germinate or I need to be able to start them in the soil outside.

I always grow poppies, nasturtiums and some sort of cosmos. I used to grow a lot of multi-stemmed sunflowers and I’ll be doing those again this year. And I’m going to try out an amaranth called Love Lies Bleeding. And some zinnias, which I’ve never grown from seed.

There are food experiments too. My vegetable garden consists of two 2’ tall x 2’ wide x 4’ long stock tanks with holes drilled in the bottom. I normally grow two tomato plants, two basils and a whole lot of salad greens: arugula, mustards, kale, snow peas and lettuce. Oh, and cilantro because I’m one of those people who adore it. This year I’m going to try some dragon’s tongue bush beans. The pods are streaked white, scarlet and green. Gaudy just the way I like my garden!

As the days get slowly longer in the northern half of the world and Imbolc approaches, I’m dreaming my year into existence. And taking small steps forward.

What are you dreaming to life in your part of the world?