As the summer heat subsides and we start digging out sweaters and blankets for the evenings, it's time to start thinking about what we're going to eat this winter. Garden activities have shifted heavily toward harvesting, and while our dinner tables boast an embarrassment of riches, we're canning up a storm so we can continue to enjoy this bounty. We can look forward to a good supply of pesto, dillied string beans, peach preserves, dried herbs, sauerkraut (red and green cabbage), pickled beets, grape juice, and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Tomato sauce, tomato juice, whole blanched tomatoes, salsa, barbecue sauce, ketchup, green tomato relish, and anything else we can think of. And don't forget apples! Since we don't have an orchard of our own yet, we've collected apples from a few trees in Rutledge whose owners don't have the time to harvest them, and one day we all visited some friends who are celebrating the first harvest of their organic orchard. We helped pick, sort, and process apples, and came home with a 50-lb. sack of sweet, tart Jonafrees and a few gallons of cider. Now we're enjoying fresh eating till we can't stand it any more, and putting up apple sauce and apple butter for later.
Don't think we'll only have canned produce this winter, though. Our root cellar needs repair, so we decided to store our roots by keeping them in the ground, well mulched so they don't freeze. Many four-season-climate dwellers have had good success with this method; beets and carrots actually keep better that way and some root vegetables show improved flavor after a frost. In the roots department we expect to have radishes, potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, parsnips, salsify, celeriac and kohlrabi, as well as the aforementioned beets and carrots. Some of these are good sliced raw in salads, as well as baked, steamed or sauteed.
Not only do we expect our garden produce to keep through the winter, we intend to keep gardening. I've been inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing (Living the Good Life), Eliot Coleman (The Four Season Harvest) and scores of others who have successfully kept cool-season vegetables growing through the winter in places like Vermont and Maine, simply by protecting them from ice formation and extreme temperatures. Our neighbors at Sandhill have been enjoying winter salads consistently from their cold frames. Our cold frames are pretty simple: a bottomless wooden box with a salvaged window as a lid. Think of it as a small, passive-solar heated greenhouse. I'm using Coleman's planting guides for dates and varieties, and have lots of seedlings started to make the best use of frame space. In the leaf-falling cold of 1997 we should have a lot of the greens (and reds) which American urbanites think of as gourmet: arugula, kale, mustard, chard, radicchio, endive, escarole, miner's lettuce, frisee, cress, sorrel, parsley, cilantro and an assortment of lettuces. As the winter wears on, our table in January and February may be dominated by an extraordinarily hardy, tiny plant called cornsalad or lamb's lettuce.
So if you wondered, "What are those folks going to eat this winter, with no supermarkets or California produce?" the answer is: Plenty. Stop by for dinner sometime and enjoy it with us.
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