Winter garden 01/06/12

01/06/12

I promised you I would talk about the winter garden: here is. Notice the difference between this picture and that, taken in Spring, on the first blog.

We live in the perfect place to grow vegetables the whole year long, warm weather veggies in spring/summer/fall and cold weather crops in winter. If you travel around the countryside some, you’ll notice a few rows of cabbages or collards green in people’s yard. These are the typical winter crops in the South.

 

To the collards green, I prefer kale; it has a sweeter taste and does very well around here. My second crop would be leeks, a major winter food in Belgium where I was born. I pretty much grow leeks the whole year long and will start my next batch in early February. You can’t make a good soup without adding a leek or two to it and steamed leeks also make a very nice side dish.

 

Next year I will try some Brussels sprouts. It is hard to beat the freshly picked taste of home grown B.S. I have tried them in the past but their taste can get spoiled by a hotter than normal fall, always a very strong possibility around here.

Herbs in winter: even though some might not consider them as herbs, I always make sure I have enough onion and shallot tops/ greens for additional taste. I never do without parsley and I also enjoy chervil, less commonly grown around here. Winter, so far, has spared my cilantro. Oregano, thyme and rosemary growing the whole year long, round up my available fresh herbs garden.

Thanks to global warming, we’re still eating lettuce, curly endive (on its way out) and escaroles. Blanched properly, escaroles have an amazing crunch and a mix of sweet/bitter taste worth acquiring.

 

I mentioned earlier that we live in the perfect place but that only is true to a point: your winter crops get started around September first and need the cool fall to develop and ready themselves for the winter cold. Just like this year, getting those cool days in fall can be unpredictable and cause some veggies to go to seed early, before you can really enjoy them or get too fibrous or never attaining the ideal taste by turning bitter. Like in most of life, nothing is guaranteed so that a good gardener may end up trying different crops for different variations of weather, knowing full well that some won’t make it due to weather vagaries. 

I am glad my livelihood does not depend on having to pick the right crops every year.