Homegrown Foods in the Wintertime

Canned foods and bottled meads and ciders ready for action...

The path from gardening to food preservation is a short and well-traveled one. In the ongoing quest to eat from our garden year-round, I've gone further and further down that path over the past few years. It's been a sweaty journey (standing over steaming pots in August) but a satisfying one.

I loved this recent story on NPR about the home canning renaissance - it made me feel a little less odd, or at least not alone in my oddity, as I perused my shelves and cabinets full of homegrown items.

Christopher finally had to build more shelves for food storage this year, as my jars of canned goods had begun to creep across the floor and down the hallway and our clothes were being squeezed out of the closet by winter squash and sweet potatoes.

We have finally reached the point this year where we really can eat homegrown foods every day in the winter, and where a large part of our winter diet comes from foods we preserved from the garden.

A few heroic vegetables like winter squash, sweet potatoes, garlic, dry beans, and potatoes make it easy - no canning, freezing, fermenting, or packing in oil required.

Greek Sweet Red squash

Cured sweet potatoes in storage.

Of course there are also a few unbelievably hardy vegetables like this chard harvested in mid-January, thanks to floating row cover, make a nice fresh addition to all of the roots and relishes too.

One day we'll get in the rhythm of hoophouse greens in the winter -- all of our lettuces and winter greens growing under cover in the hoophouse now are too tiny to harvest, since we planted them a bit too late.

Bruchetta with local bread (made with NC-grown wheat!) topped with a bunch of preserved spreads -- frozen mole paste and frozen pesto, and canned sweet pepper hash andgreen tomato marmalade.

There is something magical about eating those precious preserved foods in the wintertime - it seems like such a special treat.

I always feel like I'm opening a little gift from myself when I pop open a jar of tomatoes or peppers or dilly beans.

Cherry tomatoes, basil, and pearl onions preserved in salt and oil (recipe and details here) - I sauteed them in olive oil and added fresh greens, garlic, and garbanzos for a hearty winter stew.

Sweet peppers roasted and packed in oil.

Homegrown dry black beans with garlic and preserved sweet peppers, pesto from last summer's basil, and homegrown German Butterball potato "bruchettas" with various homegrown/homemade toppings, including creamy sweet potatoes.

Dilly beans, pickled green cherry tomatoes, and various other preserved things.

And then there is the occasional special winter food gift - Chinese chestnuts from Ali in this case.

Creature Comforts

File under: Things we wouldn't get to do if we had a Big Farm. Rescuing woolly worms. A photo from late winter/early spring that I meant to post back then but lost track of.

They were everywhere! We tried to relocate them to alternate warm spots whenever our gardening activities exposed them.

Given the onslaught of insects we've been encountering lately that DON'T bring a smile to our faces, it seemed appropriate to remember the sweetness of discovering sleeping woolly worms in the garden.

On Fullness

Onion seedlings

Life has been incredibly full since the beginning of 2010 - and consequently my posts here at the Milkweed Diaries have become become woefully sparse.

My Real Job (working with nonprofits and political campaigns) has been at full throttle since the first week of January, a rude awakening after a relatively sleepy 2009. I'm not complaining though: income is a wonderful thing.

Adding to the fray, I worked as a cook at a Permaculture Design Course in south Georgia for two weeks last month, sharing kitchen duties with my kitchen co-conspiriator and dear friend Puma, cooking three meals a day for 30-60 people using local and regional in-season foods. Though I didn't blog about this Great Cooking Adventure, I did chronicle the experience on facebook.

And then there's Red Wing Farm, our homestead garden that has very quickly grown to market-garden proportions. We're selling at two tailgate markets this season, hosting our first farm interns this summer, teaching classes on the farm, and ramping up our production fast and furious with an eye toward both Christopher and me being able to quit our day jobs.

Lettuces, mustards, and kales growing in the unheated hoophouse

Homemade heat table for seedlings (salvaged lumber + gravel + heat tape) with tatsoi & bok choy growing in a raised bed underneath

Christopher has been in non-stop construction mode, building the first section of our duck and goat barn, a heat table for our hoophouse, and various other structures and contraptions, and I've been prepping beds, making soil blocks, and planting seeds. Thousands and thousands of seeds. And stepping up plants. Thousands and thousands of plants.

Tomato seedlings

Cardoon!

Our Starting from Seed class planting peas in the garden

Life is good. And full.

So apologies in advance, dear readers, for the less frequent posts in the next few months. I promise to post images as often as I can of what's going on on the homestead, in the garden, and in the kitchen.

You can also follow Red Wing Farm on facebook, where I'm posting more frequent albeit briefer updates.

In the meantime, here are some images of recent goings on at the farm...Happy Spring and good gardening to all!

Home

I was up early this morning, weeding the raised beds in the hoophouse. The cold-hardy greens are growing faster now, and the lengthening days are providing lots of sunlight for them to soak up and turn into green and growing plant energy.

Being away for two weeks offered me a lot of clarity, and absence definitely made my heart grow fonder of my life. I love being back to cooking on a wood cookstove, back to soaking up the sunlight and warmth in our house on winter mornings thanks to passive solar design, back to my community and my family, back to walking across the muddy fields and even back to weeding. It's good to be home.

After 12 days of cooking three meals a day for 30-60 people, it's so luscious just to make a small meal for myself and Christopher, to pull weeds, to check on the tiny spinach and carrot plants in the cold frames. These small mundane activities feel so good after being away from them. I feel powerfully, intimately connected to the land here, and glad to be back in my own homeplace, touching growing things, watching a Cooper's hawk fly low over the pastures, hearing the first Red Wing Blackbird of the season.

Dead of Winter, Promise of Spring

It's the dead of winter, and not much is growing in our gardens, but I thought I'd post some pictures of our various 4-season gardening contraptions.

Above is a simple, temporary cold frame made from straw bales and salvaged plexiglass windows; carrots and spinach are growing inside. And below are some shots from inside our hoophouse, including a close up of one of the 2000+ babies growing in there: Merveille des Quatre Saisons lettuce, a cold-hardy French heirloom.

In ancient, earth-based cultures in climates similar to ours (specifically: Northern Europe and the British Isles), this time of year was seen as a turning point. The snow is thick on the ground, but the earth underneath holds the possibility of Spring. Our bones are chilled, and we are weary with winter, but we know Spring's green shoots are coming. Pregnant farm animals literally contain new life at this time of year, the babies that will be born in the Springtime. Even when its hard to imagine Spring, we know it will come.

The ancients conceived of this time of year as the time when the goddess changed shape from her winter form --crone, hag, wizened and wise and bony old woman--to her spring form--maiden, bride, supple and fresh and pregnant with possibilities. Candlemas was the Christian appropriation of festivals honoring this transition, and Groundhog Day is the modern remnant of these ancient rites. Neopagans observe the transition as "Imbolc," but it was called by a variety of names by the peoples who celebrated the moment of turning from winter to spring. Whatever we call it, I'm grateful for this time of year -- when the bright blue sky and warm sun reminds me, even on cold winter days, that Winter won't last forever.

I'm grateful for the ways we capture the warmth and light, even in Wintertime. I mean this on a literal level: with coldframes and hoophouses and row cover and passive solar technologies. And I mean it figuratively: with the sickness and sadness in our household (see my last post on Frankie the cat), sparks of sweetness and levity are all the more precious.

In the dead of winter, there is light inside our cold frames and the hoophouse. Christopher cleaned out the ashes in our wood cookstove, and a new fire is lit. Our fridge is full of jars of seeds ready for Spring planting. Tiny carrots and kales and chards and beets and winter-hardy salad greens are growing in various contraptions throughout the garden. And we're holding on to a tiny light of hope for our beloved Frankie, for whatever may be for her.

So happy Imbolc, Candlemas, Groundhog Day, Bridget's Day, whatever you want to call it...and here's to cleaning out the ashes and lighting new fires.

Snow Melts, Revealing Food

There is still snow on the ground here in the valley, leftover from The Big Snowstorm (12+ inches fell on December 18). Last evening Christopher harvested some hardy greens from unprotected garden beds, our first harvest since the snow.

These collards (pictured above and below, photographed today) were covered with a foot of snow for more than a week, and they are definitely not as lush-looking as collards in the height of summer, but they taste so sweet from the cold! Apparently, plants convert starches to sugars with cold temperatures, so winter greens in the brassica family are often far sweeter than those harvested in summer.

A heavy straw mulch helps with the cold hardiness. We grow two heirloom collard varieties, Morris Heading and Georgia Southern, both of which have overwintered in our garden in years past with only heavy mulch for protection. With one layer of row cover in addition to the mulch, collards easily overwinter in our climate. We're taking the lazy approach with the remaining summer greens this winter, foregoing the row cover and just letting them go as long as they will with mulch.

Brassicas and chard leftover from summer are about the extent of our winter harvest these days. But in related news: the hoophouse is almost ready for our first Eliot Coleman-style attempt at starting cold-hardy greens in winter for an ultra-early spring harvest. Eventually, the goal is 4-season harvest of a wide variety of salad and cooking greens, root crops, and some of the other more cold-hardy vegetables.

In the meantime, we have collards in late December, thanks to the power of mulch, the natural fortitude of the collard plant, and farmers and gardeners long ago who selected these varieties over time for cold-hardiness.

Winter greens are such a welcome treat. My old friend Andrew was in town last night and we shared a hearty winter meal of fresh sauteed collards, black beans that we grew and last summer, and Flying Cloud Farm sweet potatoes, all seasoned with a healthy amount of Creole garlic cured last July. Yum.

Morris Heading collards, above, form a loose cabbage-like head which falls apart when harvested, offering up pale, tender, blanched inner leaves.

All Hail the Mighty Fava!

Q. The fava bean is:

A) a cover crop

B) a delicacy

C) a soil aeration tool

D) an ornamental plant

E) a fertilizer factory

F) all of the above.

If you guessed "all of the above," congratulations. Yes, the fava is all that. And more.

Like many McDonalds-eating teenagers, I had never heard of fava beans until I saw "Silence of the Lambs" in high school and heard Dr. Hannibal Lecter's now-famous "with a nice chianti" remark. I didn't taste favas until sometime in my twenties, and ever since I have eaten them every chance I get. Fresh favas are juicy, buttery, and silky; dry favas are fat, nutty, and meaty, sticking to your ribs in a deeply satisfying way.

Technically, favas are not really beans, at least botanically speaking. Favas, vicia faba, are a legume in the vetch family, and one of the most ancient cultivated plants. But from a cooking and eating point of view, they look, feel, taste, and are cooked like beans -- savored fresh in the shell stage or as "gigantes" -- giant dry beans for winter eating.

From a gardening point of view, the non-bean status is clear, though. While beans can only be planted when the soil is warm and grow fast and furious in the heat of summer, favas like a long, cool growing season. We plant them in December, and harvest them in the Spring. They fill a great niche in the garden, growing when nothing else does, in the coldest months of the year.

And all that time they're growing, favas are making nitrogen and storing it around their roots in the soil. As nitrogen fixers, they literally produce fertilizer out of thin air. And their fiberous root systems grow and spread all through the winter and early spring, breaking up hard soil and aerating the garden beds. By the time you chop up the plants (in late May or early June here), the place where the favas were planted is full of the nitrogen-rich, loose and deeply aerated soil that gardeners dream of. Perfect for planting warm-season crops as soon as the favas are done!

Favas are such a good cover crop that some large-scale farmers use them solely for that purpose, tilling them under as green manure without even harvesting the beans. That would be a tragic waste to my mind.

We're planting five pounds of fava beans this month as a winter cover crop. They'll provide one of the earliest spring harvests from our garden and we'll eat them, dry them, and sell them fresh at the tailgate market.

Favas are one of the crops that we're experimenting with in our no-till system -- we've never tilled the rich and loose soil you can see in the photo above. We have been able to put worms and plants to work for us --starting out with cardboard/straw sheetmulch and allowing worms to breaking up the soil, then aerating with a broadfork, and then planting crops that loosen and aerate the soil with their root systems.

As if the food value and soil-building value of favas were not enough, the icing on the cake is their ornamental value. To my eye, their black and white pea-like flowers are elegant and lovely. Favas are one of the earliest plants to bloom in our garden, their flowers little bright spots against the vigorous, bushy green leaves of the fava plant. All of that green is a welcome sight in early spring, too, when most of the rest of the garden still looks fairly drab.

So here's to the fava, gourmet delicacy, garden workhorse, spring garden jewel, and sustenence-provider since ancient times. Viva la fava!

Favas planted last December, growing in early March of this year.

Favas in the garden in May

Big old juicy pods on the fava plants in May

Favas ready for shelling, May 2009.

More on favas at Foodista:

Late Snow and Green Things

Woad, an ancient and hearty medicinal and ceremonial plant, holding its own in the snow

Sometime before the sun went down yesterday, the snow started falling. We stoked the fire in the hoophouse, tucked row cover over our raised beds, checked to make sure everything outside was mulched heavily, and generally battoned down the hatches.  

The snow is still coming down, in heavy wet flakes, and the thermometer is hovering around freezing.  But it's in the 60s in the greenhouse, and the young plants are looking perfectly happy in their warm black plastic homes.  And even in outside in the garden without the protection of the hoophouse, the hardy early spring stalwarts  are looking strong.  

I've been literally keeping the home fires burning today.  As the sun has gradually burned off the fog, it's turned into a beautiful snowy spring day with robins hopping around on the bright green spring grass while delighfully incongrous fat white snow flakes swirl around them.

Garlic

Valerian in the garden

Leeks and Catnip

Basil seedlings in the hoophouse

Tiny rainbow chard already showing its colors

Cucumber babies!

The first artichoke

Hoop(house) Dreams

Well, our hoophouse was was finally finished Sunday night and is now ready to house our thousands (!!) of spring starts.  

The photos above are from several weeks ago, when C. began work on building the east and west walls, wearing his stylish insulated onesie.  As the snow was coming down, it was great to imagine the warm little cocoon that the hoophouse would provide for greens through the winter months and seedlings in the spring. We'll also grow tomatoes in there this summer, rolling the sides up as it gets hotter, with the plastic above protecting the plants from rain to prevent blight.  

The hoophouse is 40 feet long by 16 feet wide.  We built its side walls with sustainably-harvested lumber -- 2 x 4's from the Warren Wilson College sawmill just across the river from us -- and salvaged plywood from several years of construction-site dumpster diving and various other salvage endeavors.  The hoops and plastic we got super-cheap from friends who had to quit farming several year ago.  Back in 2007, we had a hoophouse raising on my birthday, and friends and family helped us put up the main body of the structure.  With a free salvaged door and a soon-to-be-purchased exhaust fan, the hoophouse will be grow-ready for about $500 total.

As the hoophouse walls went up, we participated in a time-honored February tradition among gardeners: dreaming of luscious summer vegetables while slogging through cold, wet weather waiting, waiting, waiting for Spring.    Now that our first greenhouse is finally ready, we'll fill it up with flats full of seeds next week and commence to growing. After seed-starting season is over, we'll build raised beds inside that will be used for tomatoes in the summer and greens and brassicas over the winter.  

Here's to the hoops!

What's Still Growing In the Garden

Chinese Cabbage

It's been unseasonably warm this week, so we pulled back the floating row covers to reveal the toughest of the fall-planted veggies, still soldiering on even after nights in the single digits.

Here's what's still growing:

Chinese Cabbage 
Mustards
Beets
Chard
Alliums-Leeks, Onions, Garlic, and Multiplier Onions
Broccoli and Cauliflower
Carrots
Kale - Dino and Red Russian
Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
Brussels Sprouts (but still no sprouts!)
Lettuce - Winter Density, Italienischer, & Territorial Wild Garden Mix

Collards

Rhubarb Chard

I was saying to Christopher this morning that although it is satisfying to be able to go out to the garden in December and harvest produce for dinner, there's something about it that feels like fighting with the natural order.  Shutting the garden down as fall comes to an end is a ritual that has always seemed to me to be part of the cycle of the seasons.  

Lettuce: Territorial Wild Garden Mix (above) and Winter Density (below)

But it has been a valuable experiment growing a fall and winter garden, and next year we will probably do it again --on a larger scale--in the hoophouse.   

For now, I'm just grateful for some homegrown greens on my plate. It will be interesting to see how much longer everything lasts when normal winter weather returns.   

Mustards 

As the solstice approaches, this warm weather feels not quite right, but at the same time it is a welcome respite from the bitter cold. Kind of like garden-fresh veggies on your plate in December - a little unnatural, but delicious. 

All photos taken today in our garden...