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...