Winter Gardening back in print, just in time for spring planting

Binda just gave me a cabbage as beautiful as this.

 My friend Binda Colebrook and I spent a couple of months this summer researching and editing the revisions to her classic book, Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest. In the 1970s when I returned to Western Washington following my collegiate sojourn in California, this is the book that taught me how to retool my gardening for Pacific Northwest realities. When I moved to Whatcom County in 1980, she was one of the first people I met. I edited the 2nd edition of Winter Gardening and it has been a treat to revisit our collaboration nearly 30 years later. Over that timespan seed companies have come and gone, genetically modified plants have become a battleground, and organic agriculture has gone mainstream, as have the kales and endives and leeks that were exotic to many readers when Binda first began to explain them.

This is the 5th edition of Winter Gardening. It covers--among other things--winter hardy varieties and their freeze-out temperatures, cold frames and other do-it-yourself weather protection, making the most of your specific site and soil, an invaluable introduction to integrated pest management, crop-rotation for smaller spaces, a well-annotated resource list for quality seed companies and organic farming activism, and poetry. One of Binda's gifts, honed through decades of work and thought, is to combine the specificity and the spirituality of life in the garden in a way that does justice to both.

Winter Gardening will be available in April. You can pre-order it now from the publisher, New Society, or through your favorite online bookseller. It's none too soon to start planning and planting for fresh produce next January.

http://www.newsociety.com/Books/W/Winter-Gardening-in-the-Maritime-Northwest

New growth in the garden, holdovers in the kitchen

On Sunday, once the temperature reached the low 30s F, instead of the 11 degrees of a few days before, we got busy with the new potato barrels. Andrew cut 55-gallon food grade barrels from the fish processing plant in half and drilled holes in the bottom. Now I have four planters ready  for the fingerlings I'll be planting soon and the sweet potato slips that I intend to try one more time, come June. 

 Another happy sight, maybe not beautiful but a pleasure to see, is the garlic sprouting. Both the fall-planted cloves and the more recent plantings are charging forward. Thanks to my friend Bill Bowes, I have several new varieties to try although as usual I have faltered in my plans to keep close track of which type is which. Fortunately he also gave me a cheat sheet illustrating the subtle differences in leaf shape and growing habit, so all may not be lost.

Snowdrops and marsh marigolds are unfazed by the weather. So were the collards and kale, but they are not quite as photogenic.

 In the kitchen, I was looking at the final little kabocha squash from last year's garden. I also have some cabbage in the refrigerator and collards in the garden, plus a couple links of  frozen chicken sausage. So we'll have soup. The base recipe is in Winter Harvest, reprinted below. This version is going to get some potatoes too, since I have some that won't last much longer.

Basque Soup

Heat lard or olive oil in a large, heavy saucepan or soup pot. Add onion and brown. Add pumpkin, cabbage, beans, and garlic and cook briefly, stirring to coat the vegetables with oil. Add stock or water, salt, and pepper, and bring to a boil. Lower heat to simmer and cook gently, covered, until beans are tender, about 2 hours. Adjust seasoning before serving.

1/4 cup lard or olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

1/2 pound pumpkin, peeled and cubed

1 medium cabbage, sliced

1/2 pound dried haricot beans or navy

beans, soaked overnight and drained

2 cloves garlic, sliced

2 quarts stock or water

salt and pepper

This is adapted from Elizabeth David’s book of Mediterranean food, a great sourcebook of traditional recipes (with traditionally vague measurements). You may substitute olive oil for the lard; it won’t taste the same, but it will be good. This soup has a robust flavor, as you’d expect, and with good bread and a salad, it makes a complete meal. Serves 6.

The Coolness of Cauliflower, the Charm of Chard

photos are from Growing Whatcom's winter produce list

When my mom took Home Ec in the Great Depression, Lincoln High School couldn’t afford much in the way of ingredients for cooking classes. She remembered making shirred eggs, over and over.  A little margarine to line the custard cup, an egg, a splash of milk, salt and pepper---bake and done. However she learned to be a cook legendary among our friends, that wasn’t it. 

Thinking back to my own Home Ec classes in the 1960s, it’s probably telling that I cannot recall a single thing we cooked, although I’m pretty sure Jello was involved. I can remember meals going back to early childhood, but that class at Sumner High with Mrs. Boushay, who was very nice, is a culinary blank spot. (Recalling the madras miniskirt suit I made in the sewing unit is another matter. I was not born to match seams in plaid.)

I’m pretty sure that the students taking Lois Rienstra’s cooking classes at the high school where I teach will remember what they ate. The other day Bobbi Sue came to my English class bubbling about the dish she and her cooking partner had made that was “pure awesomeness.”  When I asked her about it, she zipped back down the hall and brought me some, and she was right. Bobbi Sue is not one of your teenage vegan greenie types, nor does she think a whole lot of things in life are awesome, but the recipe that made us both happy featured cauliflower, chard and potatoes, fresh from the Growing Whatcom CSA. 

Obviously, things are changing in high school kitchens. Lois has put a portion of her program’s buying power into local food this year, which is particularly appropriate at our rural school since many of the students are from farming and farm-working families. Some of her young cooks spend summers and vacations growing the very vegetables that they are learning to cook with imagination and respect. It’s good to see those transformations—fieldworkers into chefs, a kid’s response to Swiss chard going from “gross!” to “awesomeness!”   Lois’s catering class takes the local food message back out into the community by including CSA produce in their monthly Lions Club dinners and other commercial jobs. 

Growing Washington has recently added a Winter CSA, extending the season another 8 weeks into late December. This is good news for me, because the catering class has agreed to make food from Winter Harvest for our Literature Live night at Village Books, Dec. 8. I hope that any local readers will stop by to say hi, have a snack,  and see what good work they do. 

I am also excited to start getting my own winter CSA box from Osprey Hill Farm in Acme, starting next weekend.

Both programs have information online:

http://www.growingwashington.org/foodbox/csadetail_winter.php

http://www.ospreyhillfarm.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/CSA_info__sign_up.pdf

And here’s the recipe for Bobbi Sue’s “pure awesomeness,” courtesy of Growing Whatcom CSA:

Cauliflower, Chard and Leek Gratin

1 medium head of cauliflower, florets only

1 bunch of chard, cleaned, stem removed and chopped

1 leek, white and light green parts only, washed well and chopped

¼ cup chopped shallot

1 T olive oil

2T butter

2T flour

¼ cup cream

1¾ cup 2 percent milk

1 cup grated Grana Padano cheese (optional)

 ½ cup grated Parmesan

salt and pepper to taste

Steam the cauliflower until tender crisp, about 10 minutes. Set aside. Heat the olive oil in a large pan, sauté the leek and shallot for a few minutes until just starting to turn golden. Add the chard and sauté until just wilted. Mix with the cauliflower in a roasting pan.

Make the béchamel. Start by melting the butter in a sauce pan. Add the flour and whisk until it begins to turn golden and smells “nutty” and no longer like raw flour. Add the cream and milk slowly, whisking as you go to keep it smooth. Add the nutmeg. Whisk over low heat until it thickens. Add the Grana Padano cheese and whisk until melted and smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour the sauce evenly over the cauliflower mixture. Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 F for about 15-20 minutes until the top turns golden and is heated through.

Sweet Potato Report

Probably I couldn’t have picked a less promising summer for my first try at Pacific Northwest sweet potatoes.  

I bought five slips from Territorial Seeds, rooted them in water, waited in vain for that burst of June warm weather to get them started in dirt, and finally had to put them in their container ready or not, because I was about to leave for Romania. When I got back in mid-July, three of the babies had given up the ghost, presumably discouraged by the endless chilly rain. The last two hung on, and I wheeled them around the deck like invalids on a cruise ship, following the fickle sun. 

They sat, and sat, and sat, neither growing nor dying, until August when they finally perked up during our brief heat wave and put on a little growth. Then they sat some more. A week ago I upended the pot and harvest about a dozen hairy little roots. Little is the operative word. The entire “crop” probably came in at under a pound. 

I roasted them along with some romano beans that weren’t going to make it to the shell stage but were getting too stringy to sauté. The flavor was excellent, actually--not as sweet as the garnet yams I get at the Co-op, but rich and fresh. I realized I’ve never knowingly eaten fresh sweet potatoes. Unless our forecast is for another non-summer, I’ll try them again next year.

Another semi-casualty of a cool summer in my shady yard was my kabocha squash. It actually produced four fruits on the one vine, which impressed me, but each one was the size of a medium cantaloupe, about half the usual girth. 

Oh well.  In a couple of weeks my winter CSA will start from Osprey Hill Farm, and while I doubt it will include sweet potatoes, I’ll bet I will have all the squash I could want.

Freshening up

February 7--Chard, strawberries and Dutch Iris; Kale revving up with new growth


Cookbook research means that I've been focusing on one vegetable at a time--eight different ways to cook rutabagas; four takes on roasted parsnips; winter squash with polenta, in risotto, in soup, in muffins.

I always learn more about the properties and affinities of vegetables I've been enjoying for years. I'm also, I admit, getting a bit tired of the root and squash vine. I know I should have another go at Kashmiri potato/turnip curry; it could be terrific instead of pretty good, but I'm not going to today.

So instead of checking ingredients, I went out to photograph my plants. It looks as though kale is on the menu tonight, and that fresh growth is a cheery sight.

Seeds in the Ground!

...not only in the ground, but the first little arugulas (arugulae?) are up. Probably you could plant them on a block of ice and and they would still sprout in a week.

It worked last year, so this year again I planted spinach, arugula and lettuce as soon as the February sun broke through. It's been freezing pretty much every night since, but they don't seem to care. Today I upped the ante and planted some garlic, shallots, and leeks (cloves, clove, seed). I'm hoping that the sandy, mostly storebought soil in my alley planter will give me the garlic success I've always aspired to and never achieved. The box is bristling with pointy sticks to counter the alley cats' natural assumption that I have created this fabulous giant litterbox for their personal convenience. It looks like a bed of nails.

I'm still taking inventory of winter damage. Most of the perennials seem to be battered but not dead, though I probably lost a little box honeysuckle I was hoping would provide some winter green outside the living room window. Maybe it will revive. Raspberries and artichokes look fine

Apple Tree Flowers

I was walking home from a neighbor's yesterday, preoccupied with making it to the bus in time to ride out to school for free (yea for Free Fare Week in Whatcom County!) when I was hailed by my lovely young neighbor Amelia. I think she's 4.

"You can eat the apple tree flowers," she told me. That confused me, since it's August. "They taste hot," she added. Then I got it. Her folks have put two young columnar apple trees in pots by the front gate. Each pot is spilling over with an exuberance of nasturtiums. Therefore: apple tree flowers. I munched a peppery blossom and thought, not for the first time, how lucky I am in my neighbors.

When I got back I saw a another piece of luck. The recent rains have gotten my new sowing of salad greens off to a strong start. Kale, leeks, and chard are all in the ground for spring. When I go back to work next week, I'll be overwhelmed as usual by the start of school, but I won't be kicking myself for not have gotten started on the overwintered veggies.

And I made the bus with a minute to spare.

Grown in Columbia (Neighborhood)

Romenesco broccoli, aka Pyramidenblumenkohl, among many other names. It tastes like a cross between broccoli and cauliflower. It looks like something Harry Potter would study in herbology.

I've learned from cookalmostanything.blogspot.com, whose author also took this picture, that it is a mathematician's dream, being both a demonstration of the Fibonacci number sequence and a fractal, made up of ever-smaller repeating copies of the same shape.

We had a Grown in Columbia table at the neighborhood association potluck this week. Although our egg and honey crops were not represented, gardeners rose to the challenge. We had rhubarb crumble, Mennonite plum “platz” pastries, several takes on potato salad, a beautiful and delicious roasted beet salad on a bed of arugula, and a combination of Romanesco broccoli, chard, and other greens that was tantalizing both to see and to eat.
The dishes incorporated edible pod peas, wax beans, nasturtiums, shallots, and purple carrots.

Our cool spring and early summer was represented in the lack of tomatoes and summer squash. Usually by August, a call for food bank donations would be met by piles of zukes, and gardeners would be eager to show off the first cherry and plum tomatoes of the season. We got just one small bag of golden zucchini. I did eat my own first ripe tomato yesterday; it was about the size of a garbanzo bean and it tasted just wonderful. It was the outlier that often shows up weeks ahead of anything else on a tomato plant, so I won’t be making a Caprese salad anytime soon.

The bush wax beans are in full swing, but I can’t say I’m loving the taste enough to grow them again. Usually I grow romanos, and maybe that rich flavor is spoiling me for the subtleties of the wax variety. They are surely pretty though. Tomatillos and cucumbers are flowering, the poor stunted little zucchini plants are starting to produce, and my artichokes are abundant enough for kitchen experiments (to be reported later).

The latest garden project is to find the patches where I can plant seed for fall and winter greens. Last year I waited too long, and the days were too short too soon to give those salads a decent start. This year I hope time things better. If we up the ante and have a Grown in Columbia table at the February meeting, I want to be ready.

For a good basic primer on winter and early spring harvesting, which means planting right now, check out http://www.seedsofchange.com/enewsletter/issue_51/extend_season.asp

For the full local picture and a chance to thank Binda Colebrook for the decades she has spent making Whatcom County more fruitful and beautiful, get yourself a copy of Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest.