Finding Spring

Most years, I wait impatiently for spring to come to me. This year, I went and found spring instead. In North Carolina. Richard’s parents are here, and his youngest sister and her family. Southern North Carolina in late February has temperatures in the 50s, more or less. Some days in the 40s; others in the 60s. We saw a few flakes from the storm that dumped a foot of snow on Ithaca this week. But mostly, it's sunny here.

Last Sunday was one of those sunny days in the 60s. Ellen had been talking about wanting a small vegetable garden. I was eager to get my hands into soil. So I pulled out a spade and began to dig. She joined me. Very soon, we had a garden bed.

For gardeners from central New York, with our heavy clay soils and glacial-deposited rocks, digging in North Carolina is an unexpected treat. The soil here is mostly sand. We found two stones. In the entire plot.

One of the two stones

Monday, it rained. Tuesday, we drove around to Clicks Nursery to pick up 4 bags of composted cow manure and a bag of limestone, and dug that into the bed.

Wherever I am, I love visiting locally owned enterprises. You get to share stories, like laughing with the nursery owner about the differences between digging in North Carolina's sandy soil and the rocky, clay soils in our home in Ithaca, his hometown in southern Illinois, and his wife's hometown in Glen Falls, N.Y. (several hours east of us). You get helpful advice, like his recommendation to add limestone to counter the acidity of NC's sandy soils. And you're likely to find locally made products from other local businesses. In this case, that was Daddy Pete's Organic Cow Manure. They come with their own stories: Daddy Pete's, in Stony Point, N.C., is a family-owned farm and organic compost product business named for the Smith family's great-granddad, who began the farm over a 100 years ago. It is has been in continuous operation by the Smith family ever since. But buying local is about more than stories and human connections. It's about community security -- in this case, of part of our food system, and of our economy overall. Here's how: Earlier this week, we went into downtown Fayetteville to find a shoemaker. (That's another story: we found a small shop owned by a Vietnamese couple who left Saigon in the 1970s when the U.S. pulled out. They came to Fayetteville because of their relationship with an Army officer whose family lived here. Their son, now grown, repairs the shoes; his mother writes up the orders. We spent more time talking with her about families than about shoes.) On the way back to the car, we stumbled upon another locally-owned business, a lovely little coffee shop with the wonderful name, "Rude Awakenings." We got a cup of Fair Trade coffee (for Richard) and fresh blueberry muffins (for Ellen and me), and picked up a card describing the 3/50 Project.

Founded by Cinda Baxter, the project is simple: Pick three independently owned business you would miss if they disappeared. Stop in. Say hello. Buy something. It's implications, however, are profound: According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, every $100 spent in locally owned, independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll and other expenditures. When that same $100 is spent in national chains, only $43 returns to the community. When it is spent online, nothing returns. If half the employed people in this country spent $50/month in locally-owned independent businesses, it would generate more than $42.6 billion dollars in revenue. Hence 3/50. Pick three stores. Spend $50/month among them.

The choices we make -- whether to turn some (or all!) of our lawns into productive landscapes or to support the businesses owned and operated by our neighbors -- affect the futures we will have, individually and communally.

Today, Richard and Ellen are erecting a fence to keep the rabbits out of the garden. Planting cool weather seeds -- mustards, mesclun, arugula, radishes, and peas -- comes next.

In N.C., spring has arrived. Back home, I'll dig the hoop houses from under the snow, experiment with planting some cold hardy, day-light sensitive greens if the soil is workable, and wait for spring to arrive again.

February contradictions

Grapevines

February is a month of contradictions. The world is turning toward spring: the days have lengthened noticeably. The sun, when it appears, is climbing higher in the sky. It is time to prune the fruit trees and vines this weekend, before they break dormancy. Under the plastic hoops, once again under snow, the daylight-sensitive hardy greens are readying to re-grow.

Inside, my seed order is almost complete. Last week, I spent a pleasant hour rummaging through the “seed exchange” drawers at the county cooperative extension office, then returning again with my friend, Jemila, who is just beginning to grow food. I was especially excited by the number of less common varieties of heirloom seeds and those from the Seed Savers Exchange. The names are wonderful: Winged Pea (a low-growing legume, not related to peas, that most likely originated in northwest Africa), Purple Vienna kohlrabi, whitloof chicory, Black Beauty summer squash, Wong Bok (Chinese cabbage), , Ruby Red swiss chard, Rapini broccoli raab, Sandwich Island salsify, Green Curled Ruffed endive.

February morning (Buckthorns outside living room windows)

And yet, when you look out the window, the most immediate appearance is still deep winter. Temperatures remain in the 20s during the day, and the low teens, or lower, at night. The freezer has gaping spaces between the remaining jars of zucchini and pumpkin soups and tubs of berries. Kat still prefers to spend most of her time in the mud room, venturing outside only when required, the rest of the time positioning herself by the inner door to the house so as to make a rapid dash past unsuspecting feet into the warm, forbidden territory.

Kat (photo by Beth Bannister)

This morning, I woke to the sound of the snow plow and a new dusting of powdery white.

Embrace (Buckthorns II)

Buckthorns are a weedy tree, but their relatively small size makes them useful at the wood's edge bordering the southern end of our gardens. These two are outside our living room windows. I love the way the two trunks have grown up around each other.

Waiting

View from the living room couch.

Under the snow

The question: What's left under the hoops, under the snow, after two weeks of early January temperatures that barely made it out of the teens?

The answer:

Ta-da ...

Harvesting turnips (left row). The soil, unfrozen under the covered hoops, acted as an excellent "cool storage." More on the chard (right row) to come.

"Golden globe" turnips.

The carrots stored well too -- cold, crisp, and winter-sweetened. Without the snow cover, we would have had to mulch with straw to keep the ground from freezing during the frigid weeks, but Nature was on our side. Now that the evidence for year-round harvests is in, I'll make sure to plant a lot more next year.

The snow, which insulated the crops from the freezing temperatures, also collapsed our wire-held hoops. (PVC pipe would have been a more stable choice, but our last-minute laziness left us grabbing the wire already on hand.) So some of the chard leaves got a bit frozen. Still usable, though.

And some of the chard was nearly picture-perfect, as was the garden snail (top left) who presumably has been appreciating our efforts at altered climes.

These salad leaves (under another hoop) are even hardier than the chard: Asian savoy, mache, claytonia, "bull's blood" beets.

And yes, yet another salad picture. Greens, winter radishes, carrots, and kitchen-grown mung bean sprouts.

Thanks to Richard for grabbing the camera to document. All photos: Jan. 17.

"Never treat life casually"

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually.”
– Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972)

Most days during the past two weeks brought at least a coating – and often several inches – of the kind of light, powdery snow that falls when temperatures barely climb above teens. So each morning, the world outside looked newly draped. The pine trees along the new driveway (above) especially caught my eye on one of the few days that the sun appeared, the green needles and clean whiteness of the snow set against the bright blue sky. The plum and peach trees (below left and right, respectively) made nice silhouettes against the snow, but offered no hint of their summer grandeur, until a closer inspection showed the patient buds.

Along with the snow, the new year began with the company of good friends and an appreciation of human creativity. New Year’s Eve, we had dinner with our friends Jeff, Stephanie, Connor and Asa. We brought salad (greens and winter radishes) and a bag of cooking greens that I had picked a few days earlier, just before the snows began. They offered garlic bread, a beet salad, spaghetti with tomato sauce and pesto from their garden, and mead from a nearby farm.

Baby mustard greens grown under plastic covered "low tunnel" (Dec. 27)

After dinner and some urging, Jeff took us to see the cold storage he had dug some years back – a hobbit-size crawl space off one corner of the basement fronted by a beautiful thick wooden door. Originally built many decades ago for a walk-in freezer at Purity, an Ithaca-based ice-cream company, the door provided wonderful insulation from the warmer temperatures of the wood stove heated basement. The crawl space itself, lined with cinder blocks open to the cool, moist climate of the surrounding soil, was filled with potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips and other root vegetables from their garden. When we went home at 10 pm, having all agreed that it was midnight somewhere, we left behind the uneaten bag of cooking greens and took with us a bag of Stephanie’s beets.

Stephanie's beets, roasted and ready for eating

Saturday morning, we were soon on our way to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks before dawn, to visit Matt and Maria, friends of Richard’s from college, their children, Max and Morgan, and Matt’s parents’ Mark and Mary. There, while most enjoyed the creativity of a variety of new board games, Mark showed me his lovely wood carvings, including a collection of “wood spirits” that appeared to more be found than created. When he said he could teach me to carve one in less than an hour, I jumped at the chance.

We worked with the bark of the cottonwood tree, an extremely thick, deeply ridged, and soft medium. Cottonwood trees, I learned, grow rings of outer bark each year, just as they do the rings of inner wood.

In reality, carving the wood spirit took three hours. But Mark is a patient teacher, and I, an eager student. He sent me home with a tool catalog and two more pieces of cottonwood bark.

My first wood spirit carving (Jan. 1, 2010)

Two cottonwood trees grow at the entrance to our new driveway. When I’m more confident and practiced, I may experiment with coaxing wood spirits to show themselves in the standing trees. For now, I’ll look for fallen branches and downed trees.

At mid-month, those new year celebrations seem some time ago. The days are now noticeably longer. Stephanie's beets were roasted and eaten, their natural winter sweetness requiring no additional effort. A mid-January thaw is imminent, with temperatures suddenly climbing to the nearly 40, and expected to remain there through the middle of next week. I will dig around the hoop tunnels this weekend to see what remains of our greens. I intentionally left them buried for the past two weeks so that the snow would act as additional insulation against the frigid temperatures. Who, but the hardiest of the garden snails, knows what lies below.

Catching On

Winter growing is catching on in central New York. The Ithaca Journal recently ran a story about several local farms that have begun offering winter "shares" of root vegetables and hardy greens grown in unheated "hoop houses" (or "high tunnels"). And the Greenstar Cooperative Market newsletter noted that they will be carrying the first-ever crop of winter braising greens from the newly established Good life Farm in nearby Interlaken (just north of Ithaca).

In the mid-west, Driftless Farm and Forest reports on their "Log Blog" that they are experimenting with a winter "Greens Share" for the first time, using a passive solar greenhouse. And in Maine, the pioneering farmers at the Four Season Farm have been bringing vegetables to market year-round for years.

The growing experimentation with cold weather growing -- commercially and on the home scale -- makes me happy. So does a freshly picked salad (above) and the tubful of Jerusalem artichokes that I dug from beneath the snow last week.

Simple Pleasures

This has been a difficult month for many people I love dearly. So I find myself taking comfort in simple things -- small kindnesses; the sun shining through the southern windows, warm on my shoulders as I type; the glistening of last night's ice as it melts, like thousands of crystals strung on the trees and plants outside; and the greens that continue to grow in the midst of winter. In the freezing cold, they become ever-more tender and sweet. It's good to remember that.

Here are some photos taken Christmas Day when I peaked under the plastic hoops to see how things were doing. From top to bottom: mache, claytonia (miner's lettuce), baby bok choi, turnips, a row of chard (right) and turnips, Asian savoy, and braised mixed greens.

Winter Solstice

The small flames dance

at the edge of the dark night

coaxing the season's turn

the sun's return

miracle repeated. 

May the new year bring warmth, light and joy. 

Photo: Richard Lansdowne, 2007.