Winter greens for the winter blues

Have you ever wondered why the winter holidays celebrated by Northern cultures involve evergreens? When deciduous trees and shrubs drop their leaves and flowers are long gone, when daylight disappears and nights grow long, when the soil itself freezes and snow mantles the ground, we need a reminder that life will indeed continue. Hence the evergreen Christmas trees, wreaths of fragrant fir and pine, ivy garlands, and holly centerpieces with shiny leaves and bright red berries.

Those are things I love about Christmas--especially the resinous smell of pine and fir sap, a fragrance that reminds me of sun-warmed summer days even as icy winds blow down the valley and snow dusts the peaks.

But when I find myself feeling the winter blues, I need more than the fragrance of evergreens or the shine of holly berries. I need fresh greens to eat. There's something about ingesting crisp leaves full of chorophyll, the green pigment that plants use to capture the sun's energy, that lifts my winter mood. We live less than a block from the local grocery store, so it's easy to go buy a box of those organic greens from California. But I'd rather eat greens I've grown with my own hands here in my own soil. And although we plant spinach and market greens in fall, and manage to keep some of them alive over the winter, they grow so slowly once the day length drops below 10 hours and the night's lows drop below 10 degrees that the harvest is occasional and tiny.

So this year Richard and I decided to experiment with growing fresh greens inside. Our house is designed to capture the winter sunlight for heat, which means it's got lots of windows facing south and thus can function as a decent greenhouse. In mid-November, long after our last real garden harvest, I planted one flat of spinach seeds (Catalina, my favorite variety from Rene Shepherd) and another flat of Rene's Paris Market salad mix. The Paris Market mix started sprouting in less than a week; the spinach took a bit longer. They're putting out their first real leaves, and looking a bit leggy, so I've taken to moving the two flats from our bedroom where they get sun for less than eight hours a day through the 8-foot-wide sliding glass door, to the living room, where a 16-foot-wide bank of windows occupies one whole wall. If my experiment works, we'll be eating fresh salads in the New Year.

And that--along with a spicy-smelling piñon pine tree cut to thin our overgrown local forests--takes care of my winter blues.

(Thanks to local artist Rod Porco, maker of extraordinary sculptural baskets and talented woodsworker, for the wreath above and for our firewood and Christmas trees!)

Spring spinach for localvores

It didn't snow today here at 7,000 feet in the southern Rockies, so after last night's silvery coat of frost burned off in the morning sun, we took the row covers off the spinach in our kitchen garden. The crinkly green leaves are just starting to lift off the warm surface of the soil, but they're not quite big enough to pick yet. After an unusually long and cold winter, I'm eager to get back to eating food grown from my own soil.

I planted the spinach last fall just in time for them to sprout and grow a few tiny leaves before the weather got too cold and the days too short for them to do more than hang on under the insulation of the row covers. But now that the equinox is almost here, and the days are lengthening relatively fast, my spinach plants are perking up. I'll thin them this weekend, and by next week, I'll pick a few leaves for our lunch time salads. The localvore in me is getting impatient to taste my terroir again!

It's time to plant the sugar snap peas too, plus some other spring greens. Last year we discovered chervil with its lacy leaves and delicate licorice flavor - it's a wonderful addition to sandwiches and salads. This year I'm going to plant tat soi (also called bok choi), turnips (I'll pick them tiny to steam greens and all), and I'm trying gala mache, also called corn salad or lamb's lettuce as well.

As always, I rely on plantswoman and cook Renee Shepherd of Renee's Seeds for my gourmet kitchen garden seeds. She knows gardening, and she knows flavor and cooking, and the combination makes for unbeatable seed varieties and prodigious and yummy harvests. Thanks for satisfying this localvore's hunger, Renee!

Spring in the Rockies

This morning dawned with rain shushing softly on the metal roof of our house; now the showers have turned to snow: big clumpy flakes falling straight down like a steady rain of wet, pure-white feathers. The snow is melting, not accumulating, which is a mixed blessing here in March. Snow lasts longer than liquid water, seeping into the soil instead of running off the surface. But any moisture is welcome after four weeks of hot, dry winds that have dried the soil surface to dust and evaporated the snowpack on the peaks - our summer water - like a blow torch.


The green and crinkly leaves of spinach in my kitchen garden are now dotted with white clumps of snow. The new leaves on the golden currant shrubs along Ditch Creek just below our yard, the first trace of spring green in the wild except for big sagebrush, which keeps its gray-green and pungent leaves all winter long, stand out brilliantly against the rain-darkened stems. I haven't been outside to look, but I bet that the mosses and lichens that dot the surface of the soil in our restored bunchgrass and wildflower grassland are plumping up and turning green. They respond within minutes to even the smallest amounts of water, "waking up" from dormancy to make food and go about their lives in the brief periods of moisture that infrequently grace this arid environment.

It's spring in the house too. The seed trays that I planted last weekend with six kinds of tomatoes, four kinds of basil, oriental eggplants, and baby butterhead lettuces (thank you Rene Shepherd of Rene's Garden Seeds!) are dotted with tiny green sprouts. The flat with the tomato and eggplant seeds sits on a heat mat, and that extra bit of gentle warmth 24/7 means that the seeds began sprouting just four days after I planted them, and will grow larger, sturdier root systems, a distinct advantage when I put them out in the garden and they have to deal with spring weather here at 7,000 feet elevation in the south-central Rockies: hot days, nights below freezing until at least mid-May, and those blow-torch-like chinook winds. Spring here is not the least-lamb-like, but it's always interesting!