Guest Article: Winter Sowing by Trudi Davidoff (Introduction)

My family and friends realize that when I am not busy with everyday life, Sprouting Seed. Image licensed through ©iStockphoto.com/Stefan Klein, photographer my studies, or gardening, I am usually busy on the keyboard or at the computer. I spend a lot of time tweaking the web site or writing new articles for the site, writing freelance gardening articles, and working on the gardening book that I hope will someday be published. Often while working on these projects, I will take a break and visit other websites and especially message boards, many of which are gardening communities.

Now, I like to pop over to Garden Web's forums. Theirs is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive listing of gardening forums on the Internet today, a virtual gardener's mall of message boards! There is a forum over there called Winter Sowing that has literally knocked me off of my feet!

As I wrote in my e-mail to the guest author, Trudi Davidoff, I had always realized that Nature does this quite a bit on her own. After all, the mighty oak was once a lowly acorn that overwintered before sprouting. Every year, I have volunteers of Four O' Clocks, Cleome, and Nicotiana. I just never made the quantum leap required to go about deliberately sowing seeds in flats in the fall and throughout the winter for sprouting the next growing season, and then leaving them outdoors until they germinated.

I asked Trudi if she would let me reproduce her article. Not only did she respond very enthusiastically, she also provided a wealth of FAQ's to help answer any questions that the reader of her fine article might have.

This is a first for this website, and I am very honored to present: Winter Sowing, by Trudi Davidoff. There is a ton of information here, so sit down and plan to read for a while. It is well worth your time!