Snow
Erases all the messy bits of the city.
The broken sidewalks, the litter, the dirty piles of last week’s snow.
And it’s quiet.
Few cars on the street, shops closed early and
You wonder why more families aren’t out dancing in the snowy twilight.
Shabbat–
Shmita–
Focusing on rest and reconnection prepared you to take advantage of this moment.
You gear up and head out.
What could be more important than living this one beautiful moment.
Yesterday the sun came out and melted the dumping of snow we got last Friday, which followed a multi-day Polar Vortex that brought temperatures down to 0 degrees with windchills around -25.
As I ventured out back to see what survived, I was reminded of a story Eliot Coleman tells in Four-Season Harvest. I’m quoting it at length because a) I love it, and b) because it remains an inspiration for the season extension work we do at Over the Fence, and the seasonal eating we do in our home.
During [our] January trip across France, we had an experience that emphasized the point. We were visiting the Jardin des Plantes in Montpelier, one of the oldest botanical gardens in France. Like many such venerable institutions, it was showing its age. Some of the walls were beginning to crumble and panes were missing in unused glasshouses. But we were not there for the architecture. We had come to see the “non-existent” vegetables. When we had called ahead to learn the winter hours and had inquired about the vegetable garden, the nice Frenchman on duty told us not to waste our time because the vegetable garden was “non-existent” in the winter. Ah, well, we had heard that song before. “There is nothing in the garden” is usually synonymous with “it doesn’t look nice like it did last summer.”
The vegetable garden at the Jardin des Plants occupies one quarter of a parterre in front of the orangerie. Admittedly it probably did look nicer during the summer, but it was just what we wanted to find in January. Despite the disclaimers of the garden staff, this abandoned Zone 9 garden, which had probably seen no care since October, still contained ready-to-pick crops of chard, salsify and scorzonera, six different types of lettuces, radicchio, sorrel, mustard greens, turnips and turnip greens, kale, cabbages, winter radish, red and green scallion, leeks, and spinach. If that garden were in our backyard, we would have considered it a source of fresh main course and salad vegetables for the rest of the winter. It was a cornucopian example of a garden truth we have long notes–if you just look around in a post-season garden, you will almost always find something to eat.
After you read this post, head out to your winter garden and see if you can score some greens for your next meal. Here’s what I found yesterday, when the high got up to 55.
Not too surprisingly, Tatsoi did great.
Lacinato Kale is also tough and super cold hardy.
The few heads of Napa Cabbage still hanging around lived to see another day.
And even these tiny heads of Romaine (which I left as a test) were insulated enough to survive.
The Arugula I didn’t chop down in January still tastes amazing. Hoping for a small bounce back crop from these plants as temperatures return to the 30 and 40s.
The Swiss Chard was glowing.
A few heads of Raddichio are waiting for their turn at the table.
This Pac Choi was in the high tunnel, under a second cover, but managed to get burned. Need to investigate that.
Another cold weather winner, Giant Red Mustard, is ready for a growth spurt to welcome back Persephone.
As are these baby Red Russian Kale. Though they look like they could use a drink of water. The high tunnel can get a little dry this time of year. Might try to catch some of the rain coming this week and move it in before the overnight temperatures dip down again.
Our cold frame-within the high tunnel started seedlings are patiently awaiting transplant. In this box, Pac Choi, Red Russian Kale, and Tatsoi…
…and here, spinach….
…which looks amazing up close, and tastes like good health.
The biggest Polar Vortex surprise by far is that one of the chickens started laying! I suspect Hermione or Ginny since their combs and waddles are the most fully formed. Won’t be much longer until we’re (happily) drowning in eggs again!
As a reward, the girls got to come under one of the low tunnels for a snack and dust bath.
And the humans all enjoyed post-Vortex salads with dinner!
Yesterday was overcast and the high temperature only reached 33 degrees, but somehow it didn’t feel as cold as it had the few days before. I spent a solid hour and a half out back harvesting greens and playing with the chickens who ventured into the yard for the first time in days. The weather is supposed to get nasty again the next few days and through the weekend, so I pulled up my snowpants and made the best of it.
Here are a few scenes from the field.
A solid blanket of snow covered everything and made accessing the tunnels a chore. I did a little maintenance, but have more to do to support the ends of our low tunnels when this melts…
While the world outside the tunnels was white, a bounty of greens lay beneath. This short tunnel (covered in Agribon and plastic) contains tatsoi, pac choi cilantro, romaine, and arugula. I’ve noticed growth increasing already since the winter solstice. I harvested most of the lettuces and left a little to see how they would hold up to the sub-zero temperatures coming early next week. I wondered if plants packed closer together would fair better than those hanging out alone, which I’m noting here to remind myself to check.
A bowl of arugula, some of which was buried under the row covers, which collapsed on the ends, from the weight of the snow.
Swiss chard, tatsoi, and pac choi under a low tunnel.
Same low tunnel – Lacinato and Red Russian kale in front, spinach in the back.
Close-up of arugula in a second short tunnel.
The high tunnel continues to enchant us. The pac choi on the left was hit hard by cold two nights before but completely bounced back (see below). I plan to add some low covers inside the tunnel in advance of the super cold temperatures coming next week.
Did you know cilantro embraces the cold?
Spinach starts in a cold frame, inside the tunnel. Surprising to me (but perhaps not to someone with more scientific understanding), these frames are not holding temperature as well as the tunnel itself (see chart below). These will be transplanted into a bed the next warm spell we see. (Note: This experiment was introduced in an earlier post, referencing the MidOhio Food Bank that made it possible.)
In the basket, chard, kale, and mustard for our harvest. On the ground, the chickens’ fodder.
After school, Cora helped me document temperatures in various locations.
And the hens came out to play.
This fall I watched from afar as my students in Texas and Florida prepared for hurricanes Harvey and Irma. I felt powerless to help them, and guilty that my house was standing tall, dry, and coursing with electricity. But as autumn settles into central Ohio, I’m preparing for the coming of another powerful force of nature: the Persephone Days.
From The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus by Aliki.
I first learned about Persephone Days from Eliot Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook (you can read an excerpt here). Put simply, folks who grow food in areas with sub-freezing winter temperatures must think as much about hours of sunlight in planning crop rotations as the cold. The Persephone Days are those with fewer than 10 hours daylight. (See a timetable for your zip code here.) Here in Columbus that means mid-November through late January.
If you plan right -Coleman has lots of recommendations – you can harvest greens and some root vegetables (including the most amazingly sweet winter carrots) grown in the fall and stored in your garden throughout that dark period. Just don’t count on your plants doing much new growing. Coleman suggests things be at least 3/4 of the way to maturity before the coming of Persephone.
I started paying more serious attention to these dates last fall as we began using our high tunnel and did some winter-sowing for early spring harvest. This year I feel behind. I didn’t get a full crop of fall greens out early enough for our family’s winter harvest, let alone a fall or winter CSA, which has been a goal for the past few years. Looking back on this field report, however, I realize I am ahead of where I was last year so… I’m learning.
This year I am homeschooling our daughter, Cora, 2 days a week. We have spent the past two months studying ancient history with a strong emphasis on the stories of the Greek gods and goddesses. Through the process I spent more time with Persephone. I got a refresher on her mother Demeter (goddess of the harvest and fertility) and Hades (god of the underworld) who, with permission from her his brother, the all-powerful Zeus, abducted Persephone to keep him company in the underworld. In her loneliness and suffering, Demeter caused a famine. Eventually Persephone was returned to her mother, but because she had eaten four pomegranate seeds while in the underworld, she had to return to the land of the dead for four months each year to keep Hades company. We experience these months as winter, the time when nothing grows. (Click here for an extended version of the story told from a contemporary and feminist perspective.)
Unlike the ancient Greeks, I don’t need a story to help me understand why the days are shorter and the nights are colder this time of year. I don’t need one, but it certainly makes things more interesting.
The sun was shining bright in Columbus, Ohio today. The temperature only got to about 38°F, but it I had a purpose to be outside, down on the ground, with my hands in the soil. And I was glad for that.
I transplanted onions I started inside and moved around field sown spinach seedlings so they were more evenly distributed.
This is the last night forecasted to go below freezing for the foreseeable future. While it seems awfully weird, we’re going to take advantage of it. Hope this inspires you to do the same.
Inside the high tunnel.
Spinach sown in high tunnel November 5.
Winter density lettuce transplanted in January, Radicchio transplanted 2.15, Mizuna sown in November, Sassy salad mix sown in January.
Tatsoi, Kale, Chard transplanted in October. Pac Choi transplanted early February.
New Year’s is all about fresh starts. For lots of people this means cleaning up what they eat. Following that tradition, Over the Fence held our first winter harvest salad party today.
After a short, finger-numbing time in the field, we shared a quick bite to eat with some of our most intrepid CSA members. We even sent them home with some goodie bags to keep them on the path to a healthy new year. Hope you find ways to be clean and green in twenty-sixteen!
(This post is dedicated to our friends Tim Chavez and Suzanne Csejtey, local masters of solar power.)
I guess I didn’t really check the forecast all that well yesterday morning because I decided to leave our cold frame closed to benefit some seeds I had set to germinate. I wasn’t thinking at all about the sprouts and greens already growing in there. When the temperatures approached 80 degrees, everything baked.
From the overwintered mustard:
To the new sweet pea seedlings.
At first I was really pissed at myself for making such an amateur mistake. But then I sat back and looked at what was in the soil and thought about what could be.
Using the cold frame as a seedbed, not just a tool for growing plants when it’s cold, is a concept I picked up from Eliot Coleman and it works. It’s so much easier to keep a 2 x 4′ bed damp for germination than a 27 foot row. And the seedlings are able to stretch out form the start in the ground as opposed to in a plastic cell. (The space under our grow lights is presently overrun with tomato plants so that’s not an option anyway!)
So, I ripped out everything that was left growing – the aforementioned mustards and some lettuces that had been growing in the basement this winter which I moved out to the frame a month ago but were so root-bound they would never amount to much more than they already were, and made a giant harvest salad.
I added some of the potting soil mix I picked up at the Columbus Agrarian Society and am now using instead of the totally unsustainable coir I was using for seedlings (turns out it is made in Holland from coconut husks grown in Singapore!) and now we’re’m ready to start over again. Spring is all about new beginnings, afterall!
Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch write a lot about winter carrots. Before last year I NEVER had any luck growing carrots so when I first read his descriptions, I was just plain jealous. And hopeless. Would I have to drive to his farm in Maine for the experience of eating a winter carrot harvest?
This summer we grew a good crop of carrots. They weren’t all perfect (see our post on Fruita Feia), but we kept on trying. Planting carrot seed late into the summer and early fall as summer beds died off. And I’m so glad we did! After a few hard frosts, I can honestly say I have eaten the BEST carrots of my life. Extra sweet and super crispy. Like NOTHING you’ll find in the store.
Next year I hope to have a continuous supply.
We haven’t been posting much lately, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. While there isn’t much to do outside, these cold dark days beckon us to the kitchen to bake cookies and simmer soups.
Here are a few of our favorite things.
Baked sweet potato fries with bulgar salad featuring our mustard greens and delicata squash. (12/23)
Cream of butternut squash soup with roasted radicchio. (12/14)
Foundation for a salad we brought to a holiday potluck – spinach, radicchio, and kale. (12/6)
When we harvested the garlic scapes in July, we made a few pounds of compound butter, some of which we froze with the holidays in mind. (I don’t know how to take a great picture of butter, but these biscuits from Christmas dinner made a great vehicle for eating ours.)
Hoping to continue eating from our own backyard and basement as much as possible in 2015!
Officially, it’s only been winter for 8 days, but it’s felt like winter around here for at least a month.
We last reported from the field November 11th, seven weeks ago, which is a pretty long time in the life of a plant. Especially at this time of year with overnight highs as low as 10 and as high as 50.
So, what does it look like out there now?
Pretty brown from a distance. But up close, and under that plastic caterpillar, also known as a “low tunnel”. . .
It’s wet, warm, and things are still growing. This must be what it feels like inside a terrarium. We haven’t watered since September.
The arugula and chard have died back, the spinach has slowed to nearly nothing, the kale, mustard, scallions are slow and small but still producing. The tatsoi is still remarkably happy and wins, hands down, the prize for best cold climate producer.
The carrots are sweet, crisp, and beautiful. Cora and I dug some up for Christmas dinner. (I used the most crooked fruta feia we found to make a soufflé – saving the long slender roots for raw snacking – and it was delicious.)
One really incredible surprise has been the herbs. Oregano and parsley are still doing well, and cilantro is still standing if looking a bit puckered.
It’s about time to get planning for the 2015 season in earnest. These experimental beds will certainly play a role.
Over the Fence Urban Farm 