Officially spring is a mere three days away yet the weather folks are saying winter may yet have another another blast at us on Saturday. While we're all so weary of cold and gray, maybe this winter is Mother Nature's way of reminding us that even on our best days human beings really are not in charge.
Having no control over the weather, rather than grumbling about it, which I often do, I'm trying to focus instead on the blessings of winter -- and one of those is winter greens. A couple of years ago I learned of a book, "Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long," by Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch that dramatically altered my perspective on gardening and winter.
Coleman and Damrosch are small farmers in Harborside, Maine, where they own and operate Four Season Farm, which produces vegetables year round. It's become a nationally recognized model of small-scale, sustainable agriculture. They produce crops, even in winter, in customized unheated, or in some cases minimally heated, movable, plastic greenhouses. Coleman's techniques are easily implemented and scalable to the smallest backyard or even patio gardener.
To grow winter crops, the concept is embodied in a few key points:
- Select cold weather crops. Coleman provides a long list. We started with a couple of small plots a couple of years ago and focus on winter greens such as lettuce, kale, chard, arugula.
- Plant them in the late summer or early fall when the ground is still warm and insulate the soil via cold frames and deep mulch. We find deep straw and leaf mulch work very well.
- Cold frames can be easily constructed with minimal cost a variety of ways -- using straw bales, or with planters or raised beds you may already have in place -- just remember the goal is to provide insulation for the soil to keep it from freezing.
- Then cover the cold frames with heavy plastic or old storm doors or windows. We've used both methods -- they work!
Coleman writes about shoveling aside three feet of snow in Maine to harvest salad greens from a cold frame. Although we didn't have three feet of snow here in Oklahoma, we did have a lot more snow and ice this winter, and yet our greens grew all winter long. Growth does slow to snail's pace in the winter so it's best to have robust growth going by winter's onset or you won't have much to harvest during deep winter. Once the weather begins to warm a bit though -- in Oklahoma that's around mid- February, early March -- the growth takes off again. We're cutting our greens now every few days and eating salads that wow the taste buds.
This year we spent about $4 on seeds for our winter greens cold frame and we used cut-and-come again varieties, meaning we can harvest from the plant again and again, and they are all totally organic. Everything else -- wooden stakes to elevate the plastic, leaf mulch, straw and straw bales and so on -- we already had on hand. Due to space and time constraints, we do supplement our harvests with greens from the farmers market, Oklahoma Food Cooperative and in deep winter, the grocery store, but in the future we hope to increase the amount of winter produce we grow ourselves, which in turn increases our household food security and resiliency. We may eventually be able totally eliminate grocery store greens since under our current food system, most travel from very long distances and are hence not only nutritionally inferior but dependent on fossil fuels for shipping.
A five-ounce container of organic salad greens at the grocery store can cost anywhere from $4 to $6 depending on the store and season -- enough for maybe two salads in our family. I've lost track of the number of salads we've harvested and eaten from our winter garden, but before it bolts (probably sometime in May or June) I'm estimating we'll have consumed at least 40+ salads at a cost of only about $4. If we'd purchased the greens from the grocery store, we'd have spent about $240. So our little winter garden plot is saving us about $236, and the taste of fresh cut salad greens in the middle of winter -- ladies and gents -- that's just priceless. A table to illustrate all this is below. Any other insights to share on winter gardening?
| Garden | Store bought | |
| Initial investment | about $4 for seeds | about $6 per five ounces (organic) |
| Est # of salads for family of four | 40+ | 2 |
| Total cost of 40 salads | $4 | $240 |
| Estimated savings | $236 | |
| Household food security | Increases | Nope! |
| Taste | Priceless | Bleh! |
Note: After I posted this entry, I was contacted by Nathan Lau in Malaysia. He and his wife Annie are self-described foodies and write the popular blog, "House of Annie." From their blog, "Annie is mistress of the kitchen while Nate is the master of the grill and smoker. We cook the homestyle Asian and Hawaiian foods of our younger days while also exploring the wider worlds of Western foods." They also place a strong emphasis on home-grown foods and offer a "Grow Your Own" roundup each month. They invited me to submit my post for possible inclusion in their April roundup, which I did. You can read more about this great opportunity here and enter a post in the roundup as well if you're blogging about raising, eating and using home-grown foods in recipes, etc.
