Frost Dancing: Tips from a Northern Gardener
By Sue Robishaw
3.5/5
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About this ebook
“Frost Dancing” is a pithy, fun garden book packed with more than 240 useful and usable tips and ideas particularly for short season gardeners. But no matter where your garden is located you’ll find something of interest here. The information is firmly grounded in decades of experience growing food on a northwoods homestead; no fluff, just good old down-to-earth advise, well mulched and healthy. Sue gardens where 90 frost free days is a very good year and frost every month not unheard of yet there is never a year that her garden hasn't put food on their table and surplus to store. She shares from her own thirty plus years of gardening notes to help readers do the same, with a sustainable and organic philosophy that is easy and natural. Divided into five seasonal chapters there are tips for every garden and gardener. Whether you are new to gardening or have been at it a while you are sure to discover ideas to help you grow your own food in your own garden and have fun doing so. This book is short, sweet, useful -- and green!
Sue Robishaw
Sue Robishaw has thirty five years of magazine articles and six books to her credit, mostly from the forty years she and her husband, Steve Schmeck, have spent building and living on their off-grid Upper Peninsula Michigan homestead. Her life is full of variety and interest. A large organic garden and orchard provides most of their food and unending topics for her writing. All of the pieces of her world are woven together in a way that suits her belief in the joy of life -- gardening, homesteading, hiking, writing, watercolor, music, dance, community, and designing and knitting colorful wool socks for warmth and fun!
Read more from Sue Robishaw
Growing Berries for Food and Fun: Notes from the Northwoods Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHomesteading Adventures: A Guide for Doers and Dreamers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Moving with the Music Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Book preview
Frost Dancing - Sue Robishaw
Frost Dancing
Tips from a
Northern Gardener
Sue Robishaw
Copyright 2014 Susan J. Robishaw
Published by ManyTracks Publishing
at Smashwords
Illustrations by Steve Schmeck and Sue Robishaw
Thank you for downloading this eBook. The content of this book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.
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Published digitally using 100% solar power.
Table of Contents
Greetings
Late Winter–Early Spring
Spring
Summer
Fall
Early Winter
About Sue Robishaw
Other Books Published by ManyTracks
Connect with Sue Robishaw
Appendix I: Recommended Reading
Appendix II: Seed Sources
Greetings
There is something innately satisfying about growing one’s own food – providing for yourself, family, friends, neighbors. Working in our gardens can bring a special peace and quiet hard to find elsewhere. Growing food can be a great hobby, an important job, or both – it can also be quite a challenge.
Each garden and gardener is unique, which is one reason sharing ideas and experiences is so much fun. We find an idea here, a hint there, an inspiration from who knows where, and we combine them all in a creative collaboration with nature to put food on our tables, and beauty in our souls.
This small manual is not a structured How To Garden
book. It is simply a sharing of ideas, tips, experiences – to be rearranged, reinvented, reused in your own gardening endeavors, in your own way, in your own garden.
Gardening and growing food has been in my life for more than thirty-five years, and every time I walk in the garden I learn something new. This is an area where one is never a master. Nature keeps us from arrogance, and reminds us often that growing anything is a cooperative effort, one in which we are but a part.
I’ve decided there is no such thing as a ‘normal’ year in the garden; and to reliably grow food requires as much the skills of flexibility, adaptability, and tolerance as how to garden. But it is fun and interesting, always changing, usually challenging, and hardly ever boring.
I hope these tips help you in your garden, and I wish you good food and good growing always.
Sue R.
"The spring was longingly awaited as the time to commence work on the gardens which furnished much of the pleasure of the summer season; and the harvest time, though a season of rejoicing, yet was also a time of regret for the pleasant summer passed."
—Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri, by Will and Hyde, 1917
Late Winter – Early Spring
"I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to Covetous-ness, as that one which I have had always, that I