People everywhere are starting seeds these days, and over the course of the next few weeks, I’m going to be starting some seeds too. Hooray for seed starting season! Over the weekend I sorted through my seed collection to asses what I need to buy, what I should toss, and what I can keep.

You know how you’re supposed to throw away your spices every once in a while, because they don’t last forever? (Yeah, I don’t know anybody who does that either.) Seeds are the same way — they don’t last forever, and it’s really, really hard for me to accept that and move on.

Here are my seeds (do not be distracted by the butter dish, pineapple, and cake in the background.)

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Fern over at Life on the Balcony wrote a post in December about her gardening resolutions for 2010. Seemed like a good idea to me, so I’m going to follow suit. Yes, I am a bit late, but what’s wrong with a few late resolutions? I can’t really get much planting done for another month anyway. Now’s the time to set impossibly high standards for myself.

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At the beginning of the year, I finally took the time to do some much-needed garden cleanup. It felt good to get out of the house and futz around with plants.

Portland went through a few spells of cold weather in December, and most of my vegetables froze and then thawed into mush. Since then, the mush had rotten into Uck. Some nice colors, though.

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While doing a little fact-checking for our forthcoming book on West Coast Artisan cheese, I came upon this succinct entry on Wikipedia:

“Brevibacterium linens is ubiquitously present on the human skin, where it causes foot odor. The same bacterium is also employed to ferment several cheeses such as Limburger and Port-du-Salut.”

Though I found the entry’s bluntness to be rather unappetizing, I also found it quite intriguing that those stinky feet/cheese comparisons really do have scientific backing (at least according to Wikipedia).

Even more intriguing, though, was my recent sampling of Cowgirl Creamery’s Red Hawk (a luscious, triple cream cheese washed with Brevibacterium linens) which was delicious in every way that foot odor is not.

This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

New 2010 seed catalogs arrive in the mail filled with gorgeous color photos of the latest and greatest new vegetables. They’re so tempting. The seduction begins with color, continues with persuasive and evocative text, and caps it off with price reductions to seal the deal. I want them all, but of course, I can’t have them all. There’s not enough room or time to have everything that looks good. So, how does one choose? I have several criteria that I apply to winnow the field of choices down to a select few.

First, choose varieties which do well for you in your climate and put the right plant in the right place. That may sound simple-minded, but many people don’t realize what a difference it makes. Read the catalog descriptions and the package labels carefully and pay attention to the number of days to maturity and the sunlight, temperature, and water requirements. For example, climate has a huge influence on productivity and flavor of tomatoes, the number one crop, nationwide, grown by home gardeners. If you live in a place that has hot, humid summer nights and a nice long growing season then you have numerous choices of tomatoes you can grow successfully that will actually taste good. Any of the ‘Beefsteak’ type tomato cultivars, for example, do well in the eastern half of the USA. They do not do well in the western half because the west is dry and nights are cool. If you live in a place that has cool, dry summer nights and a short growing season the number of tomato cultivars you can grow is quite limited, and some of them have no flavor at all. Learn what your growing conditions are in your area, and go online or on the phone to check with the Master Gardeners for their recommendations of varieties that do well in your climate. You can also check with your neighbors or your local garden clubs to learn which cultivars are successful in your area and which are not.

Tomato cultivar 'Santiam' is a reliable producer under short season, cool conditions and it also is quite tasty

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A few weeks ago I was looking at the garden and thinking that there was a lot of color in it for December.  The chard was blazing away in the brilliant way that chard does, complimented nicely by the bright green parsley. The carrots were beautifully feathery. The leeks were perky.

Wasn’t everything supposed to be gray and mostly colorless? I remember last winter as being very un-green (expect for the moss).

Then we had a week of freezing temperatures, and when it thawed, the garden turned to mush. This picture was taken right after the mush began.

For a little while I thought that some of my more tender vegetables, like the chard, were going to make it through the deep freeze, but I was just being overly optimistic. As soon as they lost their support network of hard frosts they flopped down and gave up. (My husband was OK with this. We’ve been eating a lot of chard lately.)

Things I Learned:

1) “Recent mush” quickly turns to “rotting mush”. Be careful what you ask for. I was looking for gray, and I got gray, by golly.

2) It turns out that carrots that have been frozen solid do not, in fact, taste as good as carrots that have NOT been frozen solid. Ditto daikon radishes. Radishes DO, however, look really cool when they have been frozen and then thawed — they were almost translucent. I tried to eat them, but they tasted a bit too much like rotten vegetables for me.

3) When you hear of a frost coming your way, pick what is left in your garden! You may think it’s going to make it through the frost, but any number of gardeners in colder climates are silently shaking their heads at you. Pay attention to the silent, head-shaking, cold climate gardeners in your mind.

4) Look into banning freezing temperatures in the Portland area.

This guest post was written by Dave DeWitt, author of The Complete Chile Pepper Book.

Because I was in the radio business for twelve years (mostly working my way through college and graduate school), it’s only natural that I should turn to radio to promote my new Timber Press book.  This past September I was in Houston selling The Complete Chile Pepper Book at the Houston Hot Sauce Festival and my buddy James Beck arranged for me to be on Randy Lemmon’s GardenLine show on KTRH, the radio talk mega-station.  Randy, who grew up in El Paso, is a chilehead with a degree in horticultural science, so we got along great.  The call-in questions were much better than average on such a show, proving that his audience is mainly educated and devoted gardeners.

Yesterday, I made a radio appearance with my friend of twenty years, T.J. Trout on 94-Rock in Albuquerque.  T.J., a “shock jock,” is a devoted gardener who grows his own grapes and makes an excellent wine from them.  He also has the top-rated morning show in New Mexico, and since 94-Rock is one of the sponsors of my National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show, I make regular appearances on the Morning Show.  My personality completely changes on the show and I revert to my old radio persona and make outrageous comments and puns, and T.J. is always threatening to throw me bodily out of the studio.  In this case we were broadcasting from Jim White’s Cafe as a benefit for The Storehouse, which provides clothes and food to the needy.  Last year, I persuaded another show sponsor, Pace Foods, to donate 2,000 jars of their new salsas to The Storehouse.  I still love doing radio — it’s almost as much fun as gardening!

This blog post was contributed by Dave DeWitt, author of The Complete Chile Pepper Book.

On November 20, Paul Bosland and I hosted a multimedia presentation and book signing for our latest Timber Press book, The Complete Chile Pepper Book, at Zuhl Library at New Mexico State University.  Since Paul is a Regent’s Professor there and a recent winner of Governor Richardson’s Public Service Award, and I’m an associate professor on the adjunct faculty and chair of the governing board of the nearby New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces, we expected good attendance and were not disappointed.  The event drew 75 chilehead fans, we sold all of the 50 books that the library had available, and the profits went to the library’s drive to raise their collection to 2 million volumes by the end of 2010.  I have endowed the library over a five year period to build the Dave DeWitt-Chile Pepper Institute Archive, which is a multimedia collection of all my donated papers, clippings, manuscripts, my 37 books on chiles, hundreds of related books from my library, plus photographs and multimedia materials.  After that, my continued endowment will launch Chilepedia.org, an enormous Wiki devoted to my favorite subject.

For the presentation, we showed clips from Heat Up Your Life, the 3-part, 2 hour and 40 minute documentary I co-produced, wrote, and hosted with NMSU’s University Communications department.  I don’t like to do boring bookstore signings, so events like this are much more conducive to selling books, as we proved.  More events such as this one are in the future and one is planned at the Rio Grande Botanical Gardens in Albuquerque next year and the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show in March, 2010.

I was recently hired to do the photography for an exciting new book in the Timber pipeline—a book on heirloom beans by the incomparable Steve Sando. Many of you may have already heard of Steve Sando and his company Rancho Gordo. He has made big splashes in the media this past year, appearing in everything from The New York Times to Bon Appetit. Thomas Keller swears by his products, and you can find his beans, corn and grains in gourmet markets nationwide. I must take a moment to say kudos to Editor Juree Sondker for scoring this exceptional new author for Timber!

Steve is an advocate for growing and cooking new world foods (foods that were first discovered in the ancient Americas). He grows heritage, hard to find varieties that are above and beyond the average pinto-type we are accustomed to. Not only are these varieties visually stunning and jewel-like, they are also incredibly flavorful, possess interesting textures, and truly taste of quality. Steve’s mission is to reintroduce these foods into everyone’s kitchen and diet; after tasting quite a few beans in a short period of time, I must say I’m a believer. His new book will share all of the growing and preparing information one needs, accompanied by detailed images for identification.

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I’ve bought a house. A small bungalow built in 1926 that is the perfect size for me, my husband, and our future English Bulldog, Rondo (who does not yet exist, but is to be named after the point guard of the Celtics). And now that I am an official homeowner, I no longer have any reason not to garden. Especially considering the yard I’ve inherited.

One or both of the prior owners clearly enjoyed a little digging in soil. The front yard is a great mix of a tiny patch of grass, a few tufts of native ornamental grasses, several colorful perennials (roses, bleeding hearts, dahlias, and stuff I don’t know the name of), succulents, and herbs. I think I’m going to maintain much of what is already there, through I’d like to pull up a few of the grasses to make room for more succulents and I’d like to replace one side of the grass with a raised bed.

The backyard is where I plan to change the most. Though it is beautiful, I think it’s a little overplanted. I’d like to remove several things to make room for a new raised bed. I’m also planning on taking out the water feature—I am never relaxed or peaceful enough to appreciate a calming flow of water. And, I think the rain in Portland is more than enough. There is already a wonderful area full of peppers, tomatoes, beans, corn, and more veggies that I am going to leave alone (and hopefully not kill). We also have a cold box that is currently occupied by weeds. I don’t know what we’ll put in it yet, but I was thinking lettuces or maybe a few herbs.

I’m going to do my best to document the trials of my first garden. I promise to share the good and the bad and everything that happens in between. Lucky for me, I have access to the full Timber Press library to gather information from along the way…

P.S. These pictures were obviously not taken this month. If they were taken this month they would much more barren, much less green, and — thanks to a little Holiday weekend yard work — much more cut back.