It isn’t technically winter until next week, but we have had frost for two weeks now.  This has slowed the garden down appropriately.

Leon raked up the leaves on the lawn just in time for me to stuff leaves around the pots of forcing bulbs in the coldframe.  Hopefully, it was enough insulation so their new white roots didn’t freeze.

Since the fruit trees in the orchard garden fruited so poorly this year (the cherry, apples and plum), I wonder if chill hours were the culprit.  I am not clear on chill hour science, so I’ll explore it now/here.

Here is what Raintree Nursery (where most of my fruit trees came from) has to say:

“Chill hours are roughly the number of hours between the temperatures of 32-45 degrees fahrenheit. Winter hours above 60 degrees are subtracted from the totals.

The idea is that a deciduous plant goes dormant in the cold winter to protect itself from the cold. The plant needs to stay dormant while the weather is freezing and then know how soon after it gets above freezing it can safely start growing. It must do it late enough so it doesn’t get frozen back by a late frost but early enough so it can get a full season of growth and fruiting in before it must go dormant for the next year. The plant has a process, refined over millennia of evolution that tells it when to start growing in the spring and that process accounts for the amount of above freezing temperature (chilling hours) it needs.

Of course when we play with mother nature and grow plants in climates where they are not native, we run into lots of problems and this is one of them.”

And here is a list they provide of approximate chill hour requirements:

“CHILL REQUIREMENTS
TYPE OF FRUIT CHILL HOURS
Almond 500-600
Apple 400-1000 (Low chill varieties are less)
Apricot 500-600
Japanese Pear 400-500
Blackberry 200-500
Blueberry (Northern) 800
Chestnut 400-500
Cherry 700-800
Citrus 0
Currant 800-1000
European Pear 600-800
European plum 800-900
Fig 100-200
Filbert 800
Gooseberry 800-1000
Grape 100+
Japanese Plum 300-500
Kiwi 600-800
Mulberry 400
Peach 600-800
Persimmon 200-400
Plum Cot 400
Pomegranate 100-200
Quince 300-500
Strawberry 200-300
Raspberries 700-800
Walnut 600-700″

One site I found says that Seattle averages 3,000 chill hours, so no reason that the fruit trees, given the numbers above, would have been ill-chill affected.  I guess it must have been something else.

Brother Tim and I took a late November trek through the Washington Park Arboretum.  A few hundred seeds found their way into the house soon after.  I put them in plastic bags with moist soil and popped them in the fridge to stratify.  Normally, I plant them in pots right outside, but I thought I’d give this method a try for once and see how it works.

Seed catalogs have landed and I’ve done some shopping and organizing.   My goal for this weekend is to clear out all the Phalaenopsis orchids in the guest room and replace them with a seed tray.  I plan to try a lot of older seeds that I have left over of various bulbs, succulents and cacti.  I don’t expect much success, but need to get them started soon so they can transfer to the greenhouse when the weather warms.

I bought seeds from Seeds ‘n Such and some unusual vegetable seeds from Baker Creek.

One goal for next year is to really focus on producing some vegetables.  I struggle every year with this and I know it shouldn’t be this hard!