Monthly Archives: December 2008

Christmas brought some sun for us, which, quite frankly, was all I really wanted.  (N.b.:  anyone who says she doesn’t want anything for the holidays will not be satisfied with nothing.)  Sun here of course means salad.

Young arugula.  The wider-leaved varieties are the ones that do well in the greenhouse.  Avoid the yellow-flowered, skinny-leaved sylvetta forms, which don’t do as well (and also self-seed like mad).

I was able to have a harvest of lettuces!  Lettuces and a few other things, like onion greens, sorrel, radicchio and carrots.  The one rockstar in the greenhouses is arugula.  It will always grow, and still be edible.  The pimpled, bubbly surface of the tops of the arugula and (below) lettuce leaves is their defense to the cold.  This has something to do with extending surface area and spreading out the cell walls, but in plain English to me it means “you can eat your lettuces in the winter.”

Baby Grand Rapids and Red Sails lettuces, ready for a bit of a trim

Greenhouse shallots, chilly but fine.

I am so glad this is not my first year with a greenhouse.  This fall/winter season has been uniformly horrible as far as the greenhouses are concerned:  cold, sunless, and did I mention cold and sunless?  And the lack of sun? And the cold?

Had this been the first year, I would be terribly disappointed.  The root crops are fine, and the hardier chickories and escaroles and kales are all limping along, but those poor fleshy lettuces could use some loving sunshine.  The sun will eventually come out again, however, and our own household discussions about what constitutes a blizzard will cease.  I looked at my gardening calendar and realized that December ’07 was sunnily out of the norm, whereas January was spot-on as far as expected temperature and solar radiation (which is of course a fancy way of saying how much sun had shone).  The greenhouses’ very long January last year has merely moved up a month this year.  February was stellar, and March even more brilliant.

Here’s hoping we see the sun again.  I for one am glad we’ve made it through the darkest hours of the year.

Peace and warmth to all of you.

Somebody mostly wise once said there are two kinds of people in the world:  people who wake up wondering what’s for dinner, and people who do not.

I certainly wake up wondering.  Tuesday I worried we wouldn’t be able to have our usual salads:  this cold weather, these cloudy days, conspire to keep our green leafies too chilled to eat.  (This is one of the sad truths of greenhouse gardening in someplace chilly like Michigan.  Give us a sunny day, even if it’s really cold outside, and the leaves will be fine.)  Sure enough, it was really cold and snowy.  Ugh:  what to do about dinner’s raw food component (i.e., salad)?

Carrots.  We are quite rich in carrots, both in the garden under straw and dirt, and in the greenhouse itself.  It’s so dark by the time I harvest that the flash went off on my camera.  The leaves, like I thought, were cold, too cold to harvest, but the ground is not (and probably won’t get) frozen.   Pulling these big babies then was quite easy.

So this year I have leaned a bit away from the root cellar and toward the idea of using the greenhouse and burying certain root crops under dirt and straw in the garden itself.   So far, this method of storage has worked fairly well, and our early snowcover has certainly helped.   I still have lots of cabbage in the root cellar and, on cloudy days like today, a nice slaw made with apples and walnuts and some of our apple cider vinegar is a quite-fine substitution for our greenhouse’s lettuces.  But a girl needs to mix it up every once in a while:  I wake up thinking about dinner, after all.