How does your garden grow?

As snow begins to descend on the Mission Mountains and the air grows chill, those who love plants are saying good-bye ‘till next year or getting ready to keep them alive through the cold months. It doesn’t take a huge business operation to keep plants and vegetables alive all winter. It just takes some ingenuity and hard work.

Bill and Bonnie Lamon don’t keep too many vegetables in the winter, maybe a tomato plant or two and definitely some herbs. What they do keep is mostly flowers — namely petunias and geraniums, easy plants for those who enjoy beautiful flowers in the summertime that can survive a harsh winter.

“It is pretty much year round,” Bill said. “You have to plan to put them in the cold weather and be prepared to take care of them in the winter. To really flourish, just keep them alive until spring, then start feeding them and getting them ready to show.”

The first necessity for a good winter plant set up is a greenhouse — or three. The Lamons have three structures that can be used for housing plants, complete with electric heaters and grow lights. But these aren’t just any greenhouses. Bill recommends having a dual purpose for your structures. One of the buildings is the property’s pumphouse, replete with a 1,000 gallon tank of water. A second is a hottub/spa that, with a few minor changes, turns into a greenhouse. Both structures have skylights and plenty of windows, making them the perfect addition to the third building, which acts as a greenhouse year round.

“The pumphouse and spa create good humidity,” Bonnie said. “The humidity allows the soil to become wet, and you don’t have to water as much. We also make sure there’s a fan in there to circulate the air so the plants don’t mold.”

The winter dormancy of most plants makes taking care of them during cold weather a breeze, the Lamons say. Once late spring hits, they create and place hundreds of hanging flower baskets around the property, turning the area into “Sunset Gardens.”

“One thing we did, which saves lots of money, is planting seeds in February and March,” Bill said, noting he keeps the greenhouses around 50 or 60 degrees. “We were spending $1,000 to buy plants and now it’s 3 to $400 in seeds. It’s like having little babies.”

For those who see gardening as a more practical application, that is for growing food, Polson’s Kelly Ware has the answers.

According to Ware, “permaculture” is a new, sustainable way to meet local agriculture needs, especially in the winter when traditional gardens suffer, or shut down all together.

You can grow salad greens all winter long in a stand-alone, non-heated greenhouse. Layer cardboard, straw, leaves and different soils, seed it just under the top layer of straw, and in the spring, that’s the first thing that comes up, not the weeds, which are suffocated by the heavy layers of grass and straw.

“Even if you just have greens, you’ll be so much happier,” she said. “But, you have to pick your greens. If you plant them and ignore them, they’re not going to do well.”

Piling straw bails along the sides of her house and leaning sheets of glass along the walls, Ware has easily created greenhouses that will not only help insulate the her plants, but also the floor inside her home. Planning your garden and putting in the work this time of year will help the transition into springtime go by smoothly. While labor intensive in the beginning, a permaculture garden is low maintenance from then on. Ware said her garden beds started out as straw beds, but by now, all that straw has decomposed, creating a healthy soil base for this year’s crop.

It’s all about turning waste into resources. Like right now, people could be capturing the leaves around the town and donating them to the community garden. That’s great nitrogen, carbon — worm food, Ware said.

“Every community has enough waste streams to create compost, even gasoline,” Ware said. “There’s always a place to put your waste.”

Even slash and burn piles can be utilized in ways that won’t affect air quality in the valley.

“Hugelkultur” is a form of raised-bed gardening that puts all those fallen trees and collected branches to work.

“It’s all about building up with mulches and not about shoveling,” Ware said. “If you can get a garden bed two-feet higher than the ground around it, you’re slightly above the frost level and you can grow 10 months out of the year. Slash piles are resources being lost because that wood is perfect for creating the new soil for that area. By lining it with manure and soil, it will decompose faster. We can turn that waste into a resource, but it’s so hard to change the mentality.”

In addition, rainwater can be captured and used to water crops, preventing storm water from going into the city’s septic systems. Capturing rainwater runoff into beds isn’t a difficult set up and it maintains itself.

“There is nothing coming off my building that goes into the city’s supply,” Ware said of her rainwater beds. “I never water them. I don’t need to.”

Also, permaculture teaches you to design and set up your system so there isn’t a need to kill anything, even weeds.

“The goal is to end toxic pesticides,” she said. “If you set it up right, you don’t need them.”

There are many creative ways to conserve energy and space in a garden. For example, you can reduce the hot summer heating on a building by growing trellising plants like grapes and hops on the south and west facing walls.

“You don’t need a green thumb, you just need to want to get involved,” permaculturalist Bud Papin said. “How can we as a community start opening the dialogue and supporting each other? There’s just no limit to what you can do.”