Happy Holidays

Happy holidays to you. I hope you’ve been able to enjoy a little local flavor for your holiday (or winter) meals. If you have, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
We were given a bag of oranges and grapefruits from a friend’s yard. That’s one of the nicest gifts – free, local, and delicious.
Our garden has yielded a small but steady supply of lettuce, arugula, green onions, herbs, and now broccoli. Our cabbages have heads of varying size, and I have to confess that, having never grown cabbage before I’m not entirely sure when to harvest it. I may try one this week and see if it seems mature. There are some insects eating leaves, so winter is not entirely pest-free.
We’ve had a couple of hard freezes, but I haven’t lost any plants. In our location we’re usually warmer than outlying areas, and the raised beds give some additional protection too, keeping the plants just high enough to escape the frost. I’ve covered our young lettuces a couple of times, and so far they’ve been fine. What about you, have you lost anything to frost?
My husband’s and my gift to ourselves this season was a dog. We adopted a young adult dog from “ARF”:http://animalrescuemobile.org/. She is a great family dog, very calm and good with children, but she has plenty of energy and enthusiasm for walks and trips around town. It’s a learning experience, too, as she presents different challenges from our previous dog, a boxer whom we raised from puppyhood. We’ve had her for a little over a month, and we’re still working to get her on board with the idea of rewards-based training, since it seems a little foreign to her. You may be wondering what a dog has to do with local food, but it does present a problem – dog poop. Since the dog uses the same yard to potty that we do to garden edibles, poop scooping is a necessity, and even with my meticulous trips around the yard I worry about contaminating our food, particularly in the new beds I built that aren’t raised. I’ve been trying to train her (on the leash) to use a specific area of the yard that’s away from the garden, but I’m not always the one to take her out to do her business. Anyone out there got any tips for gardening and canine sanitation?
Hopefully you’ve been busy with your families and don’t give a hoot about the lack of recent postings. I’ve been busy too, and unfortunately dealing with some personal health issues. Nonetheless, with the new year coming up I’m looking forward to getting plugged in again. I think we’ll have a lot to talk about with the upcoming change in the administration, and spring planting season is really just around the corner.
That reminds me, Bill Finch says now is the time to plant your peas! Get out in your garden and get busy (and that includes me!).