dirt / By Amy Stewart

Gardening in the Rain

(Jan. 11, 2007)  So there I am, sitting at the kitchen table, looking glumly out at the rain. “What am I supposed to write about this week?” I ask my husband. “It’s raining. There’s nothing to do outside.”

“Write about the rain,” he says.

GALLERY >

That sounds rather Zen, but there’s something to it. If you live in Humboldt County, you’ve got to have some strategies for gardening in the rain. Here’s what I’m working on during the rainy season:

Look for low spots.If water is pooling in the garden, that’s a problem. A soggy garden means rotten plants. Try to address the short-term cause — a leaky drainpipe, erosion on a slope — and make plans to fix it for good when the rain stops. You can bring in some fresh soil to fill in low areas and plant directly into it to stabilize the spot, or you can embrace your inner swamp thing and plant a bog garden. A number of surprisingly beautiful plants grow in swampy areas — think iris, rudbeckia, lobelia — and you’ll make the frogs and dragonflies happy, too.

Mulch. It’s always a good time to mulch, but the middle of the winter is an especially good time. You’ll smother weeds, improve drainage and add some good organic matter to the soil at a time when roots are growing. Use well-aged compost or manure, grass clippings, dried leaves or a good bagged soil-building compost.

Feed. With the possibility of frosts still ahead of us, don’t give the garden too much nitrogen. Nitrogen encourages leafy green growth and is more appropriate for spring, after the danger of frost has passed. But acid-loving plants that are getting ready to bloom, like rhododendron, camellia and azalea, could use an organic fertilizer designed for acid-lovers, and the rest of the garden could use a light application of a low-nitrogen organic fertilizer, especially if it contains beneficial microbes that help support healthy roots.

Prune.Got wind damage? Cut off broken limbs. Frost damage? You might want to wait. Many perennials and shrubs recover more easily from frost damage if you leave them alone and let them start producing new growth. Then, after the last frost, go ahead and cut away the ugly, frost-bitten branches and leave the healthy new growth.

If you’ve left flowers and seed heads on your perennials through winter as a food source for birds (or simply because you couldn’t bear to cut the garden down to little stumps), now is the time to start cutting those back. Look for plants with healthy new green growth; once they start producing next year’s leaves, it’s time to cut off the old stuff.

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