Winter Sowing

To winter sow, cut about midway up the container just above where your soil line will be. Don't cut the top all of the way off. Leave one side attached so that it is a flip top. Fill the bottom with moistened potting soil, plant the seeds, duck tape the top to the bottom, and use a knife to poke one hole one each side at the base for drainage. Throw the top cap away and set outside. You need to water about once a week until it starts to warm up and then twice a week or whenever they get dry. They grew just fine with regular night temperatures in the single digest to 20°F.

Instructions for winter sowing
http://wintersown.org/wseo1/Plastic_Gallon_Jug.html

What to sow when
http://www.agardenforthehouse.com/2012/01/what-to-winter-sow-and-when/

Winter sowing works great with cold weather tolerant crops like kale, collards, brussel sprouts, onions, and many flowers. Just plant them in January or February and stick them outside to sprout when they decide. I actually have had a hard time growing bulbing onions from seed until I tried winter sowing. I have my best and largest onion bulbs overwintering in the ground outside for seed. I dug some of the smaller onion bulbs out of the frozen ground/wood chip mulch and used them for cooking this last week.

Winter sowing did not work for my tomatoes, peppers, or potato seedlings. They didn't start sprouting until it was almost too late to plant and were then too small. I think I would need to bring them in at night in my climate to get them large enough to transplant on time.

Canadian Hardy Apple Trees

Most apples won't reliable fruit here with late spring frosts that we get into June and sometimes July. Apples are said to need only about 10% of their blossoms to get pollinated and not get frozen, so if the tree blooms really late or over a long period it has a greater chance of having some blossoms pass through their most critical time without freezing.

There are a number of super hardy apple varieties that will produce fruit in the most inhospitable climates. Here are a few interesting apple links if you have late spring frosts that typically kill your apple blossoms. Some of the trees are hardy even down to zone 2 in case you get those brutally cold winters.

Hardy Canadian Apple trees:
Hardy Fruit Trees
DNA Gardens
Morden 360 story

Hardy Apple Trees in Alaska:
Clair's Cultivations - great list of good producers in Fairbanks, Alaska at the end of the page

Most of the Canadian trees are only available as scionwood from a few companies or the USDA Germplasm Unit.

One tree that always produced in Southeastern Idaho in zone 3b was Wealthy. Wealthy is a great tree that is available in the U.S. Honeycrisp is also supposedly a good producer in cold harsh climates, but I haven't tried growing that one yet.
Wealthy
Red Wealthy

I'm growing Goodland, Northern Spy, Morden 360, Tolman Sweet, Norda (possibly the same as Norkent), Ginger Gold, Red Wealthy, Spitzenberg, and Cortland. I am guessing that the last two will not fruit every year due to frosts, although they still need a few more years to start fruiting before I find out for sure.

Painted Mountain Corn and Corn Bread

I grew painted mountain corn here at about 7000' in elevation. I planted it in March or April. It grew and froze back over and over again so many times that I wasn't sure if it would make it and planted some more just in case. I transplanted a few plants as well that I started inside, which really wasn't necessary. We had our last killing spring frost on June 10th. Throughout all of the frosts it just kept regrowing. I was hoping that it would be more tolerant to the 12F we got about the first week in June, but alas it had to regrow from the roots once again. It continued to try and grow and eventually did grow once it stopped freezing every night.

 Here are some of my Painted Mountain cobs.

 Seeds to plant in the spring from the longest skinny cobs.

All of the so so cobs had their kernels removed and put into jars. I finally got around to milling them to make cornbread.

Corn for corn bread.

 Those two and a half quart jars of Painted Mountain seed turned into this nice bag of corn flour.

It looks like it will make a couple batches of corn bread.

I also grew some glass gem corn that I got from Joseph Lofthouse as well as some from Native Seed/SEARCH. I had to transplant this to get it to make it in my climate as it takes a little bit too long for my climate. Last year my glass gem didn't even tassel before the fall frosts. This year it did great. I only had a few plants, but had 5-7 full cobs on the plants.

 Best cobs from about five plants. Notice the similar cobs that all came from the same plants. The smaller cobs were turned into corn flour with the extra Painted Mountain corn. The red cobs turned out to be popcorn and actually popped.

 It seems to grind just fine like the Painted Mountain. We'll see how the corn bread turns out.

Cornbread Recipe (Gluten Free):

2 cups cornmeal (or corn flour)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup coconut oil (or shortening)
1 1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup plain yogurt
2 eggs

Mix, bake (preferably in a greased cast iron pan) at 350°F for approximately 30 minutes. If it is too crumbly add 1 tsp xantham gum next time.

Wood Chips, Dynamic Accumulators, and Gardening

It has been a long time since I have posted. Busy with life I guess. I had to learn how to garden this last growing season without a water source, which was a pretty tough issue to overcome. I still had a successful garden. Plenty of kale, collards, some tomatoes, squash of all sorts, etc. I learned a lot in the process and now realize how nice it is to have access to a reliable water supply.

The only way I was able to make my garden succeed was with lots of free wood chips (hay mulch alone was not enough to keep the soil from drying out in windy weather after three months without a drop of rain). I did use some grey water to get them started, but other than that they were on their own for water. Luckily the wood chips saved the garden.

About a year or two ago I watch a film called Back To Eden that demonstrated how to grow a garden without watering it. It relied on a ~6 inch application of wood chips and composted manure mixed into the mulch. Wood chips really do maintain constant soil moisture without the drying you eventually get with a mulch. The plants appreciate a good source of fertilizer too. I watched the Eden film probably three times I liked it so much. I would recommend it to anyone that likes gardening.

I also read a lot about permaculture and regreening desert spaces. I read about the idea of growing mulberry trees like the Illinois everbearing mulberry next to a chicken run to feed the chickens with the berries and about feeding mulberry leaves to milk cows to replace their grain ration. I also read about using mulberry leaves to replace 50% of a rabbits diet, and replacing 15% of a pigs diet with the leaves. I found out about many permanent crops that you can harvest year after year and continue to feed them to your animals, i.e. leaves and branches from honey locust, willow, apple, pear, linden, and poplar trees.

I read about coppicing black locust trees for a renewable source of firewood as well as coppicing many other trees like willows for wood or making baskets. I read about dynamic accumulators and started one, a comfrey plant, in the house during the winter. Comfrey seed is a bit hard to find. I bought this seed from Thompson & Morgan. I reused my old potting soil from my winter sowing experiments, so you can see that I have a tomato seedling popping up next to the comfrey plant. It was a little bit late germinating for the tomato.