Winter Gardening 101

Welcome to The Fortress. This is truly my sanctuary. Our garden never sleeps. And anyone who maintains that you can't garden all year long in a place like Oklahoma, is poorly mistaken. Our seasons are marked by extreme temperatures and incredible fluctuations. When choosing crops and plant material here, it is always wise to consult a local gardener or farmer for advice. The tags that come with plants in greenhouses reflect a generalized spectrum of hardiness, zones and tolerance. Something that says full sun doesn't always mean full sun in an Oklahoma summer. The best gardeners are the ones who learn by trial and error the varieties that grow well and can really stand up to extreme cold and heat. This comes from failure. In any undertaking, you must be willing to fail in order to be good. The same principle applies in the kitchen when trying new recipes and learning your way around the knife. All of this said, I've put together this post with lots of delicious photos of my winter garden and methods for you.

This bed was all started from seed in September. It contains from front to back, green leaf lettuce, speckled green leaf lettuce, mesclun mix lettuces, radishes, spinach, mache, endive, carrots, kale, mustard greens, fennel and leeks.

This is a standard blue kale that you can keep miniaturized as baby kale if you pinch the leaves back every week. The young leaves are also more tender and mild. They work perfectly in salads but you can also wilt it or saute it. The mature leaves can be a little bitter to eat raw but they make great kale chips and can stand up to a soup or a quiche.

I love the radishes as they fatten up and turn red. The tops peek out of the soil to let you know they are ready to pull. These were pretty spicy even for radishes. The tap root is the spiciest part of the entire plant. The sprouts are delicious when they are about an inch or two tall. As the tops mature, they develop little prickly spines on the under side and aren't as enjoyable.

This is giant oxford purple mustard greens. The flavor is intense and has quite a bite to it. These are traditionally sauteed and wilted down with garlic or you can chop them up and add to a hearty soup with beans or sausage.

The tender and delicate flavor of mache makes any salad less ordinary. I'm not sure what I love more than a giant salad with tons of mixed greens. This is my favorite way to get my greens in. I don't juice very often because it doesn't always agree with me. I prefer all of the fiber and I really love the crunch. I have a big raw salad with every meal so a variety of greens are essential in my winter garden.

These bushy radish tops are so pretty. You can look down between the rows and see little pops of red when they are ready to be picked.

This was about the equivalent of two packs of seeds. Lettuces have good germination rates and you can find good organic seed at health food stores. You can also order online if you can't find any locally. I recommend Botanical Interests and Seeds of Change.

How beautiful are these carrots? They're lacy and feminine and the most fun to pick. Louise Riotte called carrots the glamour girls of the root group. She was an incredible organic gardener from Ardmore, Oklahoma. Her books Carrots Love Tomatoes and Astrological Gardening are my two sources for everything. She is my source for companion planting and following the cycles of the moon as they correspond to each ritual of the garden. Sewing, planting, watering, feeding, picking and pulling. We definitely speak the same language.

These radishes are so beautiful! I picked these on December first. I'll be able to do this every couple of weeks all the way through February. It keeps the rows thinned out and productive and gives me fresh, crunchy vegetables for salad, coleslaw, sandwiches and hummus!

I served these at my Kombucha Home Brewing Workshop the day I picked them. I paired this bundle with a garlicky hummus for a real treat for my clients. Everyone loved them. What a simple and satisfying thing it was to serve them to others. Small accomplishments with big rewards.

I eat this every day. A huge pile of beautiful mixed greens, at a minimum of twice a day. Sweet, spicy, crunchy, green, alive. Totally organic and grown from my organic compost. Want to know more about starting a compost pile? Check out my post here. It's a really conscious practice that not only gives you incredible garden amendments, but it reduces methane in the environment. The first step to reducing your kitchen carbon print is by separating your trash. When you remove the organic, compostable waste and the recyclables, there is little left to throw away. Our family only creates a bag of kitchen trash every two weeks! Composting is a win-win-win. There is no other way around that.

Kale is my favorite green of the garden. Brassica oleracea, the most nutritious and versatile of this family of plants. I can't think of another green that has more super status than this one. Eaten raw, it contains loads of calcium, beta carotene, vitamin C, cancer - preventative compounds, and sulfur which has antibiotic and antiviral properties. Check out my post from last spring here to read about the health benefits of a variety of greens I grew and some beautiful photos.

Leafy radishes almost ready to pick and baby spinach that is a couple of weeks behind. The spinach is tougher than the radishes when it comes to cold tolerance. They almost enjoy a gentle thaw when there is a light winter frost. But during hard freezes, snow and ice, we cover these beds to keep them perfectly green and damage free. It extends the life of them all the way until March. They will bolt when the weather changes and remains warm for a period of time.

Okay, so here's my secret to our homemade cold frame. We take our tomato cages and lay them on their sides, big ends together. This creates a hoop effect so that when we stretch the greenhouse plastic over the beds, it doesn't touch the plants. When ice or snow accumulates, it can actually still cause freeze damage if the plastic is laying on the leaves. This elevates it and creates a little heat pocket. We put these between the rows and on the walk ways. We secure the sides with bricks or heavy pots or wood. It has to be sealed up all the way around in order to really work good. Everything we use is repurposed or simply a found object from the yard. It's easy to roll back on warmer days and allows the exchange of fresh air so that mold and mildew don't start to form. 

This is exactly what happened to us a few weeks ago. The beds were covered up for almost two weeks with frigid temperatures that plummeted to 6 degrees one night! A thick layer of snow like this almost behaves like an insulator. It was much colder outside of the greenhouse, probably 10 - 15 degree difference. After everything thawed and the temps were above 40, I uncovered it, not sure how everything managed since I couldn't see in. 

This is what I found as I peeled the greenhouse back. A warm, glowing earthy garden alive and well. The lettuces are the most tender of all the winter plants, and as you can see, they survived immaculately! Proof that this method works. It's simple, inexpensive and ecologically sound. I encourage you to try your hand at winter gardening. Start with a small version of this and experiment with different varieties of cool loving plants. Eating fresh, green home grown vegetables through the winter is wonderful as a mood lifter and gives you a fun outdoor project to work on. Most of all, it's pretty awesome going to a dinner or holiday party with an armload of beautiful things that you grew. Talk about wowing your friends and family! Everything tastes better when shared.