[December meme] winter in the garden
thistleingrey prompted: Something about your garden. I'm mildly curious about overwintering vegetables... but really, anything would be fine. :)
I don't have much to say about overwintering, I'm afraid; it's really too cold to do much of that here unless we get a good heavy snow early in the season, which... sometimes we do and sometimes we don't.
But I suppose I do overwinter a few things. The garlic and shallots go into the ground after the second or third hard frost -- mid-October, ideally. Late in the summer I planted a special variety of carrots for overwintering; I won't know until spring how those turn out. I left a couple of parsnips in the ground this fall as an experiment; they get sweeter after frost, but after a whole winter I don't know whether they'll be extra-sweet or simply inedible. The leeks I overwintered last year came through okay, but this year I wanted them for soup and pulled them all up before frost.
Around here, winter in the garden means root cellars and seed catalogues.
In the evenings, I work my way through the squash and potatoes: pumpkins first, then the harder blue-shelled squashes; fingerling potatoes first, then the purple viking potatoes that I like best mashed, and finally the german butterballs that are perfect for soups or for roasting but that really can be used just about any way you can think of. Short thick carrots are packed in sand in a burlap-lined crate; shallots and garlic rest on slatted shelves covered with newspaper to keep out the light.
On weekend afternoons, I pore over seed catalogues and consult my notes: which varieties did best? Which aren't worth repeating? What new varieties do I want to try (and what will have to be cut to make room)? I make wish lists, then bring up the box of seeds from the basement: the peas and beans saved from this year's crop, the melons and squash and tomatoes held over from last year. I gauge number of seeds against my memories of the harvest: too much lettuce this year, not enough spinach; plenty of corn, but it all ripened at once; cranberry beans are pretty, but good mother stallards are better in soup.
New Year's Day: ordering seeds is one of my rituals. List made and double-checked, sources noted and crossed off as the orders go in. Afterwards, I sit in the living room, in the afternoon light, planning -- or maybe dreaming is a better word. I don't have to look out the back window to know what I'd see: the soft lift of raised beds under snow, cold soil waiting for seeds and sun.
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