Out Gardening

We had a slight warm spell for a couple of days -- getting over the freezing mark, which feels positively balmy when it's been running below zero -- so I've been out gardening the last few days. A bit of winter gardening is a wonderful thing. The burst of sunshine and fresh air woke me right up out of my usual December napping doldrums, and it also yielded quite a bounty of fresh vegetables for the table.

I dug the last of the fall carrots, leaving only the ones in my cold frames and the over-wintering varieties out in the over-wintering bed for early spring consumption. I had a large bowl-full of carrots left in the ground. I shoveled aside the snow, pushed back the thick layer of straw mulch, and found that the ground was not all that frozen. There was a thin frozen crust on top, about a half inch to an inch, but a pointed spade made short work of that. Underneath the ground was still crumbly and rich, and the carrots popped right up with no problem.

While I was there I dug up a row of turnips that were next to the carrots. There were quite a few good-sized ones. The rest were small, but we have predictions of some pretty cold and deeply snowy weather on the way over the next week, so I figured at this point they'd do as well stored in my refrigerator as left outside where they might possibly get frozen in beyond where I could reasonably dig them.

Then I dug out the snow over the brussels sprouts and pulled out the last two stalks of tender sprouts, and I also pulled out two large stalks of lacinato kale and stuck them, roots and all, in a bucket in the garage for use in soup later this week. I left kale plants out there for later in winter. The kale doesn't mind the snow, it's just the convenience of me getting to it that becomes an issue!

I pulled a couple parsnips, leaving the rest in the ground, and some onions out of my coldframes, along with a handfull of spinach and some fresh parsley. I sent the carrot tops and parsnip tops out to my bunnies and chickens, who appreciated the fresh greens to rip through. Then I cooked up roasted brussels sprouts with some big baked potatoes, a lentil pilaf, and what's likely our last fresh salad of the season the one night, and made a pan of roasted vegetables -- onions, celeriac, carrots, garlic, acorn squash, small potatoes, parsnip, turnip, all from our garden, with some beets that a friend grew -- topped with feta cheese and served with rice and red wine vinegar.

Delighted to have gotten my hands in the dirt in mid-December, I then turned to some more introspective aspects of gardening: catching up on my gardening journal for the year, doing a quick inventory of my seed stash, trying to see what worked well and what didn't, partially as a walk down the gardening memory lane and partially to prepare me for the delightful task of paging through seed catalogs through the dark of winter after the holiday season. My theory is that having a good sense of what worked and where the gaps are in my supply might reign in my seed purchasing lists. It's a good theory, anyway. Of course, I might just have to splurge on a couple little extra things.... purple carrots...red brussels sprouts...a new kind of lettuce, or three, or ten...

You Can Grow It Yourself - Even In Winter!

It's December in Vermont, and I must admit my garden pickings are starting to get a little slim. But slim is better than none, and none is the most common yields from most gardens here in New England at this time of year. I still have about a half-dozen stalks of brussels sprouts out there, each stalk enough greens for a couple meals. And another half-dozen large plants of lacinato kale, and some scattered other kales: Red Chidori, Scottish Blue Curled, Red Russian. I'm still digging carrots, though considering taking up the rest into the refrigerator now, as the ground is getting a bit hard for digging. Parsnips are supposed to wait until March but we've had a few hard frosts and I've snuck a few out for a treat. There are rutabegas under a thick bed of leaves that I have been pulling this week, and parsley still looking very green under leaf mulch, that I've added to soups in the last few days.

My small 'lettuce' cold frames are thick with winter-hardy greens, and some rogue onions that sprouted. My 4'X8' cold frame is full of spinach and kohlrahbi and more carrots and parsley -- except something is munching them pretty seriously. Heck, there isn't much tasty, young and green out there these days, so if I was a critter, I'd be munching, too. But I'm afraid I'll have to pick up some red pepper spray and give them a dousing before the critter invites a bunch of friends and does away with the cold frame crops all together. Still, I had a nice spinach salad with grated carrots and hard-boiled eggs from my chickens last week for dinner.

In the house, I still have my shelves and florescent lights going over trays of raddichio, italian dandelion, and mixed lettuces. I had meant to built a second 4'X8' cold frame this fall, and these plants were intended to do in it, but one thing led to another as life is wont to do, and here it is December and the frame was never built. But the plants are doing wonderfully under the lights, and I had a salad of the thinnings with dinner a few nights ago. I am going to transplant the plants out of their trays and into 4" pots and just keep nibbling away at them. If they make it on to January thaw, I just might get that second cold frame in and move them outside.

One of my raised beds is full of fall-planted garlic, mulched over with straw, ready for early spring growth. And a second of my raised beds is full of over-wintering varieties of carrots, the parsnips, purple sprouting broccolli, cold-hardy cauliflower, and leeks. They are heavily mulched in with leaves and straw, and will take off just as soon as the days start lengthening again in January.

Meanwhile, the fresh garden pickings will be dwindling as we eat through the last of the kale and brussels sprouts and chinese greens, but the harvest from earlier in the year fills the house. In the garage are buckets of acorn squash, red cabbage, delicata squash, pie pumpkins, potatoes, and butternut squash. The fridge has bags of dehydrated tomatoes, and the vegetable drawers full of carrots and celeriac. In the freezer, dozens of containers of soup, ratatouille, and chile. Bags of green beans, peas, cauliflower, and pesto. Rhubarb for pies and punch. A large bag of eggplant, sliced up, breaded, and fried before freezing, all set for eggplant parmesan. Another frozen container of stuffed zucchinis, awaiting some company night to just add some rice, maybe some baked sweet potato, and gravy. In the pantry, shelf upon shelf of jams and jellies, chutneys, salsas, corn relish, pickles, pickled beets. On the spice shelf, dried basil, sage, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, bay leaves, and more.

In addition to the garden produce, the larder holds wildcrafted foods, too: canned fiddleheads, applesauce and applebutter, frozen fiddleheads, wild leeks, several wild mushroom soups and gravies, bags of frozen blueberries, blackberries, elderberries for pies.

I will of course be buying food: flour, oils, butter, milk, cheese, and lots of various treats and juices and flavourings and spices. It's not that we grow everything we eat. But from the inventory of my larder, you can see that it's possible to grow a substantial amount of your family's food -- and mine was grown on on a mere 500 square feet of gardening space, plus some containers, seed-starting shelves. (Though when you add wildcrafting to that, you get one big 'garden' space-- I like to say my garden is all of Addison County.) My lot is about a half acre, but half of it is thick with trees that I am loathe to cut down, so the available formal vegetable gardening space is really quite small -- and confined to the middle of what would otherwise be my front lawn.

We eat fresh foods steadily from the garden all summer, then heartier fresh garden fare right up through the holidays. Each year, I try to expand the season and the size of my harvest a bit. Slow and steady is the way to go at it, starting small and only expanding when you acquire a comfort level sufficient to feel confident moving to the next level. Next time I'll talk about how to get started, so that you can start planning on growing some of your own food supply next summer, even if you've never done it before.