Cold Winds, Warm Food, Winter Wealth

The winter solstice has passed, but winter has just begun. It's time to start digging deep into the pantry, larder and cold frames for hot winter comfort food--starting with beets. If you were traumatized by slimy canned beets as a kid, it's time for some memory-re-adjustment. Beets are the source of much of the sugar you eat every day, which should tell you something about how sweet they are.

This year I grew six different beet varieties, some I'd grown before and some new to me. I'm forced to admit I was very impressed with the production and flavor of Kestral, and F1 hybrid -- I'm usually pretty adamant about growing open-pollination varieties but I make exceptions for F1 hybrids especially when I 'know' the seed breeder, like Vermont's own High Mowing Seeds.

But the biggest Wow in the beet patch this year was the Lutz Long Keeper, a OP Heirloom that grows quite bit. I picked a few of these through the fall for use as the other beets ran out, but I left about a dozen in the ground until the bitter end -- early December, just as the long, late warm autumn was about to crash into the single digits. I dug up the beets and the last of the turnips and rutebagas and put them in buckets in the garage with a bunch of dirt over them -- lacking a root cellar, a huge deficiency in my life.

I pulled the bucket into the kitchen today and washed and sorted the beets and turnips, putting all the golf-ball-sized ones in a bag in the bottom of the fridge for roasted mixed vegetables. The four largest beets I washed, trimmed, and put whole into a lidded casserole dish with some vegetable oil in the bottom. Set oven on 250 and left it for about four hours. Took the dish out and let it cool for a little while with the lid still on to keep the juices in there.

Then I toasted some chopped walnuts in a cast iron pan on the stove, peeled the beets and diced them, tossed them in a bowl with the walnuts and added crumbled blue cheese, the oil and beet juice from the roasting dish, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Scooped a pile of it out over some fresh-picked microgreens mixed with mache and radicchio and a couple little chard, beet, and sorrel leaves from the cold frames.... heavenly!

It dawned on me that this simple garden-dug and window-sill-raised lunch of mine would cost a princely sum in a restaurant -- which got me pondering the concept of wealth. If you have tons of money, you get the privilege of being able to purchase food that humble cottagers grow in their front yards... that's ironic. Yet our society doesn't value the food or the farmer/gardener as much as the dollars that buy it. I guess I opted to just skip the whole intervening money-making part and grow the food myself. Yet even many of my friends who remained in urban areas don't get that -- they say, why do I want to spend all that time growing a carrot and having to touch dirt when I can pay someone else to do it for me?

I suppose that if the hours you spend making the money to buy your food are intellectually, spiritually and socially rewarding, then by all means, it's a better use of your time than growing your own food. But if your work is tedious and dull, or infuriating and soul-draining...

Think about digging in the dirt. There's great wealth to be found there. Where else can you plant a seed, watch your seedling grow, harvest the fruit, then close your eyes and savor the rich, sweet rewards on a snowy winters day?

Digging In December

The eleventh of December. Must be a great day to... harvest vegetables from the garden?

Okay, maybe it's a little late, I'd usually have done this more like Thanksgiving week, but this year I was not only away during Thanksgiving week, but the autumn weather held unusually warm right into the first week of December. Even now it seems a bit unseasonable -- in the high twenties at night and high thirties to low forties during the day, ideal for my cold frame crops which are so lush they are threatening to push the lights right off the tops of the cold frames.

The ground has a light dusting of snow at my elevation, and a thin crusty frozen layer -- but under that top layer the ground remains loose and yields to a gentle tap on the shovel. Weather predictions for later in the week are looking like single digits at night though, which will push that frozen layer deeper, so now is the last window of opportunity for garden digging.

I dug up the last short row of Belgian endive root, to bring indoors in a bucket of sand to sprout for winter salads and braised greens. Up came the last of the beets, Lutz Long Keepers, about ten of these, each maybe 4 inches in diameter, sweet and luscious. The the last few Gilfeather turnips and about a half-dozen rutabagas.

I dug out one short row of carrots and may run back out to dig another; there are about six or eight 4-foot rows out there, mostly small as I've been using the bigger ones through the fall, but once that ground freezes I won't be seeing them until spring. Since they last so well in the garage or vegetable bins in the fridge I figure I may as well get quite a few in now.

I also dug up the last half-dozen leeks, not very big, this was my first year growing leeks but I'm a complete leek convert now and will start some leek seeds good and early next year -- yipes, I mean in just a couple weeks. I rinsed those and stuck them straight in the fridge for use in the next couple days.

Finally I cut down the last of the lacinato kale, stripped the leaves and stuck those in a bag in the fridge. I pondered what to do with the few big green bursts of stir-fry greens and celery which are looking rather sad in this cold weather, but I'm not sure I would be able to use them in the next couple days so I'm opting to leave them just a bit longer, knowing I run the risk of losing them.

The hardy kales out there I'm not concerned about -- Winterbor and its cousins will be just as happy under the snow, while the dwarf Scottish kale is thriving in the large cold frames along with sorrel, radicchio, mache, arugula, frizzy endive, beet greens, turnips, broccoli raab, italian dandelion, chard, and a half dozen other things I'm forgetting.

Christmas shopping -- well, I've barely begun that. But getting the food in, well, that's taken care of for the moment.

Want to learn more about growing vegetables mid-winter? Check out Eliot Coleman's two essential books, Four Season Harvest and The Winter Harvest Handbook. Great winter reads!