Dormancy

This dormant time of year can be a challenging one. There aren’t many sunny days, the rain falls for days and days, working outside can be very cold and wet, the trees and shrubs are bare, you can see all the neighbor’s trash piles and junked vehicles usually hidden by foliage, kids get cooped up and turn wild on you, and it’s hard to see much going on around a homestead. Most things are dormant. The thing about dormancy to keep in mind, is that it’s only temporary. It is a resting stage in the life cycle of plants, where growth and development are temporarily suspended. Plants sense the shortening day length and decreasing temperatures of Winter, and go into this resting state to store up energy for new growth in the Spring. Similarly, many animals go into hibernation. Modern day people like ourselves don’t really have the luxury of hibernation, life goes on, but I think we experience our own sort of dormancy to some degree. For many folks, it’s a fine line between dormancy and a winter funk. That makes this a good time, no matter how foul the weather, to go work outside and look for signs, however small, that Spring will be on the way.

The bare-root fruit trees were in at my favorite local nursery, so I picked a few up to fill out our orchard. It is a long-time dream of mine to walk out my back door and have abundant, ripe fruit hanging from the trees and lying all over the ground for me to pick and the chickens to snack on. Last Winter, we ordered two apples, an heirloom cider apple, two cherries, a plum, two pears, and a peach tree (which our dogs ate) to accompany the two mature apple trees already on the property. The growing is going very slowly, aside from the cherries, so these tall, vigorous trees I picked out should get us some fruit in two years.  I brought home an Italian plum, an Asian pear, a Seckel pear and a Frost peach. Out in the drizzling rain, my husband and son planted the plum near the back door, the peach between the garden and the corner of the house, and the two pears out in our back field beyond the clothesline. If all goes well, we should have a wonderful little orchard here in a few years. It’s quite a thing to look forward to.

Right now it might not look like much, but work is beginning for the Spring. There are plants to be moved to better spots, paths to mulch with wood chips, cardboard sheet mulching to re-do in the front yard, quail housing to build, and bigger projects like shop roofing and house painting to plan for. When I think of all that work ahead, I’m grateful for a little dormancy. Even if things look pretty bare out there right now.

There’s a busy year ahead on the homestead, folks!