It's December in upstate New York, Northeast USA. We're looking at a supposedly harsh winter coming at us fast and hard. So far, that prediction has been right on the money.
I went away for almost two weeks around Thanksgiving, with the expectation that I would have another two weeks at home before a really hard frost hit us- plenty of time to harvest the last of my veggies and to get winter preparations done in my tiny garden. The day after I returned home, however, we got a brutal cold snap, so cold I was unable to work outside much at all. This is how my back yard looked for several days:
the hoop house, buried in an early and persistent snowfall
I worried that nothing would be usable under that fabric once I could get to it; the fabric claims to offer protection down to 28 degrees, and we'd hit 21 a couple of times. But when I could finally open it (the bricks and the fabric they were holding down had been impossible to pry from the frozen earth for a few days), I found that nothing was frozen!
onions, arugula, beets, carrots and kale, droopy but not frozen
My few rutabagas were nearly frozen, but not so solidly that I couldn't pull them out of this here sorry looking rutabaga "patch."
One nice salad of arugula later, I went out and harvested all this:
which, when cleaned, left me with a few pounds of veggies fresh from the garden - a bonanza of food for little ole me:
I've started in on the food I put by for the winter months. I'm excited to see how far into winter I can get eating veggies that I grew and preserved myself. So far, Thanksgiving had several of my canned items on the menu, edible kale and parsley are still out there, and I nearly always have a jar of some pickle or other open, along with several ferments, in my fridge. Potatoes, onions and one cabbage are storing nicely so far in a back closet with the heat turned off. Several items are dehydrated, although a pint of shiitake mushrooms had to be tossed as they had become moldy and infested.
Look. We hear a lot about food shortages, but that is utter rubbish. If there are food shortages, it will only be because so few of us bother to grow our own. Plant something in the ground or in a pot, or a bag or a plastic cup, whatever you can, and start learning how to grow food, if only to sprout some seeds, or to put a pot of rosemary on your windowsill. It tastes better, is more nutritious and far less toxic than food you buy in grocery stores, but there is so much more to consider here than your RDAs, your toxic loads or better tasting food.
Food you grow yourself, or was grown specifically for you, is infused with a priceless fuel, a scientifically unrecognized nutrient-
LOVE without measure or price.
be a tiny part of a vast organism. make like a sprout
This is my entry to Hive Garden Community's monthly garden challenge for December 2023.
images are all by me
I got carrot and celery tops to grow but you know WHAT NEXT: bunnies ate 'em all before they ever got close to proving they were viable.
