Going to Ground: Winter in the Garden

Now is the time for coddling your soil: mulching garden beds and composting, if you didn’t do this in the autumn. Come late spring, when the flurry of planting that entices you to add just one (or two!) more of everything, you’ll be ever so grateful for some forward thinking to make compost now.

Forward thinking is one thing, but the abundance of the compost heap warms me on a whole different level. Dealing with decaying matter may not at first glance seem alluring—but give it a little consideration and it can take on a new lustre. Aside from its incomparable ability to make a garden flourish, tending your scraps on a brisk winter’s day is terribly invigorating, and is infinitely more rewarding than hearing them be picked up and trucked to landfill to become anaerobic rot and methane. A dash out to the compost and a dose of climate relief in exchange for your kitchen scraps? I’ll take it! Furthermore, the ability to conjure black gold into being feels nothing short of miraculous.

And so it is with gardening in general. To garden is to participate in, and witness first-hand the world at rights, and the kingdom in action. For many of us, some of the first kingdom principles we grasped as children were drawn from garden parables: the pruned branches that bear more fruit (John 15:2); the rocky and thorny vs the good soil (Matthew 13: 1-9); the single seed that dies to produce many seeds (John 12:24). Here are profound themes of transformation and revitalisation through loss, pain, death and dormancy. Indeed, in an everyday way, the garden brings to life these foundational truths. “If a healthy soil is full of death,” writes Wendell Berry, “it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds […]. Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long”. There is something inherently redemptive in seeing the spent, damaged and diseased remains of last season being transformed underground into a tangible treasure and source of new life. And all this is never more true than in winter.

Symbolically, winter often represents darkness, dormancy, loneliness, despair and death. In biblical terms, perhaps the desolation of winter is akin to the wilderness. The Wilderness. To my mind, this is when life’s experiences, traumas and disappointments come head-to-head with our previously held perceptions of who God is and how life should be. These experiences strike us in such a way that they disorient us, leave us desolate and send us underground. Like the writer of Psalm 88, we’re confronted with life’s dark thoughts and lonely moments of despair.

For me, 5 years of infertility turned into a long dark wintery wilderness. When I reflect back on this season, Sue Stuart Smith’s words come to mind:

When we suffer a major loss in life we recoil in an almost involuntary way. We don’t want to—can’t—accept the all too painful reality. Mourning and lament can be the hardest emotional work we ever have to do and we need a sympathetic presence, some source of comfort, a thing, a place, a person that we can hold onto in our distress.

Sue Stuart Smith, The Well Gardened Mind.

Aside from close family, the garden became that place for me. In the garden, Smith explains, “the cycle of life can help us because in the depths of winter, a belief in the return of spring draws us ever forward and gives us something to hold on to.” This drive to look forward when everything else in us wants to wallow in wintery despair is most keenly experienced when the first signs of new life emerge. Whether it be a sown seed or the first spear of a daffodil breaking ground, I can feel how new life creates an attachment. I find myself coming back almost compulsively to check on how my seeds and seedlings are doing, going out to the greenhouse and holding my breath as I enter, not wanting to disrupt the stillness of life just coming into being. And so, as Sue Stuart Smith puts it, “When we sow a seed we plant a narrative of future possibility. It is an action of Hope.”

In the midst of winter, we can tend to want to wish it away. But we know it serves its purpose. As Mark Sayers reminds us, the bible shows us that the wilderness is the place where we encounter God’s reorienting presence. It is the place where we are formed, where we learn to become adaptive and creative in God’s strength. It is precisely in the wilderness that God transforms the valley of trouble into a gateway of hope (Hosea 2:15).

Much like the alchemy of that black gold—that compost—we’re making, I can’t tell you precisely what formation took place during my winter wilderness. But I can tell you that I am a different person on the other side, one who is more familiar with grief, who knows the value of lament, and who thrills at hope’s first signs—the harbingers of the good that is still to come.

And so, back to that to-do list. Here are a few winter tasks to get on with while we await the first signs of spring and the return of the flourishing garden.

Mulch
Whether you’ve things growing in it or not, always keep your soil covered. Think of your soil as a living, breathing creature (which it is – billions of them). To leave it uncovered is to expose it to the harshness of the elements—wet and sodden in winter, dry and thirsty in summer. Green manures, which are quick turn-around crops dug back in to feed the soil, are a great option for dormant beds over winter. Failing that, and if you don’t have a ready supply of compost to mulch with, fallen leaves will do just as well.

Plant Fruit Trees
Now is the time to plant fruit trees. This is an investment in the future, because the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, and the second-best time is this winter.

Order seeds
Winter is when to make sense of what seeds you have left over and to make a list of what you might need to order. While it is too tempting to order seed by going on a lovely website and ordering one of everything that takes your fancy, it is normally wasteful and unhelpful. Make a list and stick to it, and then add just a couple of things on impulse. Why order seeds? Because seeds are hope and hope is too good not to enjoy!

Winter sowing and planting (if your patch gets at least 4-6 hours of sun)
Sow: sweet peas, peas.
Plant: tulips, strawberries, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, rainbow chard, spinach, pak choi, potatoes and garlic, asparagus (note: it’ll take 3 years until harvest—think of asparagus as being a bit like a fruit tree!)

Winter Harvest
Now’s the time to harvest citrus, beetroot, leeks, lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, carrots, cabbage, and spring onions.

Images provided by Phoebe Atkinson