Spending lots of time on garden blogs really gives one a sense of what needs to happen when. Time to plant bulbs? Friendly reminders come in every day for a month, complete with last spring’s crocus, tulip, and daffodil pictures. Does your tree need a bit of a prune?  Do you need to divide your perennials? The experience and recommendations of dozens of gardeners are a Google (or a Bing, or a Yahoo, or a Lycos) away. Time to clean up the garden for the winter?

Well … surely that can wait several months, right?

I finally did a little bit of garden cleanup over the weekend. I pulled up shriveled cucumber vines and my shivering tomato plants, which have done a spot-on impression of not growing an inch since September. The green tomatoes still on the bush have pouted and split open in the rain, and the slugs have rejoiced. Or maybe something else has rejoiced. I haven’t actually caught slugs on my tomatoes, but they do have nibble marks on them.

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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.

David has been talking about storing summer bulbs, and it got me thinking about all the things we who live in cold climates do to prepare for winter.

As gardeners we store bulbs, corms, tubers, and tuberous roots. These plant structures store the net photosynthate that the plant produced during the growing season. Which means: plants store food to survive the winter and grow again in spring.

Somewhere in our pre-history we learned a lesson from plants and started storing these same plant parts for our own food. We “lift” tubers like potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) from the ground, shake dirt free and, in former times, placed them in root cellars. Today we might store them in cardboard boxes or burlap sacks in our garages. We also gather tuberous roots like sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) and bulbs like onions and garlic, and store them through the long months of cold when we cannot grow food outside.
As November proceeds in the northern hemisphere, we prepare for festivals at which we gather and share our stored bounty from the garden. Storing food is all about coziness, feelings of safety, belonging, and abundance. Despite the hardships of the season – driving rain, cold, and, snow – we enjoy our winter feasts.
David’s family cherishes traditional winter feasts. Mashed potatoes are a must. Close relatives of tomatoes, eggplants, chili, and bell peppers, potatoes come from high in the Andes of Peru, and have been grown for over 6,000 years. Breeders have mixed the gene pool to create the multitude of varieties we have now.

We all have favorite potatoes, but I particularly love the ones with tender skins and flavorful flesh, such as Yukon golds. I also like to mix it up with the newest – or oldest, depending on how you look at it – Peruvian blue and purple potatoes. But tradition often dictates the good old russet. No matter which potato we choose, I use a recipe I learned long ago:

Simple Mashed Potatoes (serves 4)
Potatoes: 2 lbs
Milk: enough to barely cover potatoes
Salt, pepper, butter to taste
Scrub the potatoes and leave skins on. Cut them in half inch cubes.  Boil them in milk until tender. As you mash, add butter, salt and pepper to taste.

Sweet potatoes come from lowlands throughout the Caribbean and South America, and people have been mixing genes from these gems of the earth for a long time to create many tasty cultivars. Some of these cultivars are also called yams by grocers in many areas of the U.S.

Still, our favorite bounty from the root cellar through the winter is:

Root Cellar Bounty:
Bulbs: Onions, Garlic
Tubers:  Potatoes
Roots: Sweet potatoes, Beets, Carrots, Parsnips
Olive oil: enough to drizzle the vegetables in a thin coating
Favorite herbs:  such as thyme, rosemary, and sage.
Cut all the vegetables into bite-sized pieces. Lay them in a single layer in a 9 x 13 baking dish. Drizzle them with the olive oil until thinly coated. Roast them in a 350 degree (F) oven until fork tender.
Yum. Oh, you should probably let them cool for a bit before you bite them.

With thanks (and apologies) to Robert Frost.

Whose leaves these are I think I know,
But neighbors can’t control the wind, and so
The leaves all gather on my lawn
In piles when it starts to blow.

My husband groans and droops his head
As I send him to the shed
To fetch a rake and clear the lawn.
But he doesn’t groan much – he’s too well bred.

Up and down we drag a rake.
We brace against the wind, and take
A rest to look up at the sky,
Admire the view and prevent backache.

The sky is dark and huge and deep,
But wind starts to disturb our heap,
We’ve leaves to rake before we sleep,
We’ve leaves to rake before we sleep.

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.

David has already addressed the ins and outs of spring-blooming bulbs – those harbingers of bounty from the earth – and given us some great tips about selecting and planting them, but right now it’s fall, and autumn always has funereal overtones for me. The weather gets cranky. Clouds hide the sun and darken my days. The temperatures drop, and I shiver all too often.  I am a lover of the sun, of beaches, of slouching around in T-shirt and shorts. When leaves begin to turn and drop to the ground, revealing the skeletal structure of trees; and when bright annual flowers have disappeared; and perennial plants wilt and die back – I feel a sense of loss.

To cheer myself up, I look to the promise of what lies ahead.

Bulbs that we plant in autumn embody that promise. They are full of life. Hibernating like bears, they wait for that first hint of renewal, a slight rise in the temperature, and a few more moments of light from the sun.

Most of the bulbs we plant in North America for their spring show come from far away – the sunny shores of the Mediterranean – Turkey, Italy, Spain, and North Africa. I know these places are cold in winter. (I lived in Spain for a time). In fact, this is why bulbs need at least six weeks of cold – to mimic the conditions of their homelands. But all these places are drenched by the sun – in other words, my native habitat (despite the cold).

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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.

It’s November and we’re heading into the dead zone. Winter is a’comin’ in and your garden is going to sleep. To get you through the winter doldrums, think about spring bulbs. Imagine cheery, colorful crocus brightening your dreary days in late winter and very early spring, as they pop through the snow. Picture bright tulips, golden daffodils, and other spring flowering bulbs following

behind the crocuses in a symphony of color through March, April, and May. You can make it so by planting spring blooming bulbs now.

Go to your local garden center and check out the bulb display. Every autumn, garden centers, nurseries, grocery stores, and catalogs tempt us with gorgeous color photos of bulbs in full bloom. Like brightly colored candies they lure and seduce, beckoning us to purchase a bag full of hope, the promise of spring. Bins, baskets, and bags are filled with plump bulbs just waiting for you.

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A few weeks ago, with the help of my mum (who happened to be in town) I planted my first-ever batch of bulbs. It’s one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do, but  until now I never got around to doing it. Gardening blogs and Twitter feeds are all a-buzz about bulb planting season, so I had plenty of reminders that now was the time! I was also inspired by the Doonesbury comic strip — gardening that makes me laugh is gardening that I can get behind.

We started small, which (I am told) is not the best way to start with bulbs — but I often learn best by failing, and I decided that 35 bulbs was enough. I bought two kinds of crocuses, some wee daffodils, and some Fritillaria meleagris, which I love because they look like tiny checkerboards.

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Fall is a contradictory season. On the one hand, leaves are dying off and falling, the summer sunshine and warmth are retreating, daylight hours are dwindling. My neighbors’ yards do not look particularly handsome these days; rather, they have a droopy and soggy quality about them, and most of the colorful blooms have gone away. But on the other hand, it seems that the world has never felt so beautiful. The air is sharp and fresh, and the rain has rarely smelled so comforting.

I’m realizing that autumn brings with it a paradigm shift from “individual” to “corporate” beauty. Color is found not in what we tend delicately with our hands, but in larger, wilder things: trees, wind, furious flurries of dead leaves, sunsets, and paint-by-number hillsides rising behind the city. My neighborhood as a whole screams, “Fall is here,” as it is collectively covered in a frosting of orange and yellow and red. The season is like a Monet painting: we have to let go and step back to see how all the small pieces of apparent chaos are actually vibrant paint smears on the glorious canvas of fall.

On a personal level, this season seems to be mirroring my life in a state of transition. I’ve just completed the process of moving from one side of the Willamette River to the other. Last week, boxes were scattered across the house, countless amounts of telephone calls were made to utility companies, maintenance people, rental agents, and house painters.  But in spite of all the bedlam, that transition carried with it a wonderful promise of things to come. Now, as my life is settling down slightly, nothing seems more perfect than curling up in our rocking chair on our new front porch with a mug of hot apple cider, watching the season complete its own untidy shift into a new phase of life.

And who doesn’t love hot chocolate or spiced apple cider? Finding an orange leaf that somehow managed to sneak into the hood of my coat? Or the sight of cats lounging on top of cars, absorbing the last remnants of engine heat.

The transition from one way of life to another, however fleeting it might be, deserves a round of applause. Congratulations, world! You’ve done it again!  And this time, more beautifully than ever.