Port Potager

The big story of the end of the year is the weather; specifically, the frigid temperatures that we’ve been forced to endure for the past several days. It’s been a struggle to get out of the single digits this weekend, and the cold snap is expected to last well into the New Year. By the time it warms up again, we’re likely to have ridden out 12 days in which the highs didn’t crack 20 degrees. This arctic blast means that our carrots and parsnips are well and truly frozen underground, and all of our greens are probably done for. Even kale will struggle under cover with that type of deep freeze, though it will begin to put out new leaves as soon as it warms up a bit. I’m not sure about the leeks, but the underground bulb will probably be fine once we are able to dig them up again. In the meantime, we're staying inside as much as possible!

Working our way around the garden, we come to the workshop quadrant. I guess we could also call this the office quadrant, since it forms the bulk my view during the day. Here’s what I’ll be gazing out at when I’m procrastinating: In the center C are celery and parsley, zucchini, cantaloupe, and a Sungold tomato plant. The Sungold, celery, and parsley are partially shaded, which should be fine. It should help slow the ultra-prolific Sungold down to a manageable harvest level, and celery and parsley will do well with some shade in the summer anyway. Across the top, as always, are our perennial grapes and herbs. In the upper portion of the right side is a succession planting of dill. This is the shadiest section of the garden, but dill is basically a weed and will do fine here. Below that is a semi-shaded section that will lie fallow for most of the season until we plant next winter’s spinach and mache in a cold frame. Across the bottom is a long trellis of peas and a r...

March has it backwards this year. Our lamb-like weather was all at the beginning of the month, when we actually hit ~80 degrees and had to prop open the cold frames so as not to fry our early spring spinach salads: We are also pleased to have some kale to eat until we need that bed to plant something else later in the spring:   But then, if you wait a day or so, the temperatures will plummet and send you squarely back into lion territory: That’s the same kale, this time with several inches of snow on top. The snow came down so hard on Monday that the kids had a snow day: It all melted by the afternoon, but since then it has been much cooler. Seasonable, I guess, but I’m looking forward to April, when spring can begin in earnest and we can start getting some peas and more early greens going.

The final quadrant of our planning for the upcoming growing season is the one nearest to the driveway: Along the top is a long trellis of peas, which is on the northern end of the bed so as not to shade the zucchini and annual herbs grown in the rest of the area (basil, fennel, parsley, and celery). To the right is another 27-foot trellis of peas. We don't usually orient them this way, but since it's to the east, we are confident that the Roma tomatoes behind it will get enough afternoon sun. The peas will also be gone by July, well before we expect to harvest any tomatoes anyway. Along the bottom are crops that can handle a bit of shade from the house as fall comes. Here we have another zucchini plant, summer carrots, beets, mesclun lettuce for the summer, and a short trellis of snap peas. We also have a block marked out for something new: cauliflower. I have never been a big fan, though my distaste has probably always had more to do with the whiteness of the wh...

So there's no more fuss and there's no more scenes and my garden thrives! (You should see my nectarine.) But I'm telling you the same I tell Kings and Queens don't ever ever ever mess around with my greens! ~ from Into the Woods , by Stephen Sondheim We're still slogging through our kitchen renovation , and it's sucking up a lot of time that we would ordinarily be spending on preserving the last of our summer fruits — not mention cooking delicious meals using all that garden produce. An embarrassing amount of apples, pears, and tomatoes have been fed to the chickens due to our inability to eat them in a timely fashion. One thing that's doing well and can be stored in place outside  are the cool-weather greens. Though the back half of the summer was a dry one, we had a fair amount of rain early this month to get us back on track. The moisture and the cooler temperatures mean happy greens: Cilantro, because it's related to carro...

It is cold. As I sit typing away, the wind is shrieking straight out of the north. It is a mere 6 degrees in the garden right now, and it's likely that the last turnips and greens will be dead tomorrow, even if the plastic tunnels don't come undone in the wind . Many schools in the area are closed tomorrow due to -30 degree wind chills, and though mine isn't one of them, hope springs eternal. So, yeah: it's cold. Definitely a soup night. And a soup lunch tomorrow, whether I get to eat it at home or have to carry it to school (I pre-packed to appease the gods of the jinx): This is a great  soup for a cold night. Kirk riffed on a Jamie Oliver recipe (brought to our attention by a good friend), and it is delicious: a sweet and spicy soup that warms you twice over. Here's Kirk's take on it, which makes use of our winter veggies and adds some sundried tomatoes for a summery kick. He also decided against pureeing the whole thing, which was a great ...

After a week in which we were struggling to acclimate ourselves to the blustery cold, today we were granted a sunny, almost-warm day. It was actually pleasant to be outside again, so we wasted no time picking up the last of the leaves and cleaning up the last bits of herbs that finally died in the freezing temperatures of the past week. We also were able to bring in a surprisingly ample post-frost harvest. There's still plenty of food out there under the cover of glass, plastic, or straw, so we should be eating well for the next few months. It may well be the last nice day, but it's not the last harvest. Here's what we brought in today: This kale bouquet is just a small bit of what we have. A lot of the Russian kale got nipped back by the cold since we left it unprotected, but we fixed that today, and there are still a whole lot of leafy greens left for the winter. Our last three cabbages were unaffected by the freezing weather, but won't last forev...

This has been an all-around excellent growing season, especially for our cool-weather crops. Despite their slow start , we had cabbages all summer long, and we still have a couple left in the garden that weren't krauted. I am also still snipping side shoots of broccoli (just had some for dinner!), which means that we've been harvesting broccoli for three and a half months now. That's definitely a new record for us.  But most glorious of all has been our kale crop this fall: We planted the kale back in August, and it has done very well this season, thanks to our relatively wet and cool summer. The kale above is a Russian variety, although there is also some Swiss chard behind it. This was a bonus round of kale that Kirk put in by transplanting some of the thinnings from the main bed. They totally took off, and now we have almost twice as much kale as we had originally planned. Our main kale bed (above) is a four by eight foot box of 32 plants. The half ...

September is the most beautiful month here in New England, and we had a stunning day today. In addition to puttering around the garden and taking care of some basic chores, we took time to climb up to the top of the Plum Island lighthouse . It's not always open to visitors, so we were happy to take advantage of this once-in-a-while view of the Merrimac making its way to the ocean: Not only does September offer the best weather of the year, but it is also the month during which our garden is at its absolute peak of production. We still have all the fruits of high summer (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), but we also have available just about anything we want from the fall garden as well (sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, kale). From now until frost (usually mid-October for us), we can have our pick of almost everything we grow.  For example, tonight's supper is a combination of summer and fall produce on one plate: We had very summery charcoal-grilled burgers ...

As I mentioned yesterday , we were super-excited to find our winter salad greens alive and well in the cold frames this past weekend. In addition to enjoying them on burgers and sandwiches, we also had a much-awaited fresh salad with Sunday dinner: So much green on this plate! We had sautéed chicken, steamed ( formerly frozen ) green beans with toasted pecans, and our spinach salad. Since it's been such a long, salad-free winter for us, the spinach would have been delicious to us if we had just eaten it raw and plain, but Kirk dressed it up to be extra-delectable with bacon and mushrooms. The salad was mostly spinach, but also had some mache and kale thrown in for good measure. The greens are topped with sliced, sautéed mushrooms, big bits of bacon, and toasted pecans. The dressing was a vinaigrette made with bacon fat leftover from frying the bacon, plus vinegar and a bit of dijon mustard.  Very rich with all that bacony goodness, and even better with the additio...

We had a lot of melting this weekend, thanks to bright sunshine and temperatures in the 50s.  The 50s! It would appear that I have fully acclimated to life as a New Englander. When we first moved here 16 years ago, I would shiver in my car in the mornings, and end up with cramps in my legs from all the tension in my muscles trying to ward off the cold. For real. Now I find that with the right gear (fleece, ski jacket, lined hat, lined boots, insulated and waterproof gloves), I can shrug off all but the worst of the polar vortex like a native. But the real sign that I've acclimated? I didn't even glance at most of those items today. It was just shy of 40 degrees outside when I left the house yesterday morning, but the sun was out, and a fleece and sneakers  (and regular clothes, of course) were plenty to enjoy a good long hike around town today.  I ended up taking off the fleece about halfway through. I'm not the only one enjoying the sudden warm...

I know, I know. How can I be thinking about frost on a day, during a week like this ? It's so hot that the ice rink down the street can barely keep it together for skating classes. Still, our average first frost date is October 15, and that's just 90 days from today. That all seems very far away until you start reading the backs of seed packets. When some of your cabbages take 90 days to mature, and your broccoli is looking at 75 days, it's time to get fall planting plans underway. If you care about eating once it gets cold and dark, that is. Our peas have just finished for the season, and over the weekend we pulled out the trellises to make room for some fall crops. Ditto on the garlic, which is harvested and curing in the workshop. That leaves us space to get cracking on our fall plantings, most of which I sowed over the past couple of days: I realize that empty dirt isn't all that exciting to look at, but that's where the action is. In ...

We've had this dinner before, this quiche and salad combo:  But what is special about this one is that I have a plate of fresh food in front of me on a frigid January 21st. As I write this, it is snowing and down to just 24 degrees.  And yet.  The chickens are laying ( thanks to our adjustment of their light ), the greens are growing (or at least remain in edible dormancy,  thanks to our tending of the tunnels and cold frames ).  With gardens and life, this could all change with the weather. We won't see temperatures above freezing for the next week, and that could send our chickens into a dry spell. Single-digit nights could kill our mache and kale, regardless of the protection we've built. It's a harsh week ahead. But this bit of a miracle on a plate reminds me that our ant-like diligence in summer pays off in the dark stretches of winter. There's a lot that comes our way on the wind that is out of our control, but we can still build ...

Yesterday was the final Sunday of Advent, the evening of our Joy supper: This is a spinach and bacon quiche, which celebrates our joy that the chickens are all laying perfectly well again now. We also had a spinach and kale salad, with some matchstick carrots (and apple chunks from a local orchard). The kale has been snowed on a couple times now, and never is any the worse for wear in the elements. The spinach is under glass in the cold frame, and it's just as tasty. It also brings us joy that we can still head out into the garden for our dinners, even though it is now officially winter.  I also had a glass of dandelion wine with dinner. It is definitely better well-chilled (our first tasting  was at room temperature), although perhaps too dry for such a light meal.  Now that Advent is complete, we have just a day to go until Christmas. Hope your holidays are filled with all the hope, peace, love, and joy you can handle!

When we planted our peas last weekend, we had to make room for them in one of the rows that still had some winter veggies in it. Here's the last of the winter harvest: Here we have kale, spinach, and mache from the winter cold frame ( long since removed  from that row, actually). On the small plate to the right are onion sprouts, which are the tiniest baby onions pulled from our seed flats to thin them out. They are oniony and delicious on a salad, which is where most of these veggies ended up. We may also make some more kale chips , since there's a lot of kale left. Hopefully we'll have new salad ingredients from our cold frame again soon!

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day here in Newburyport: 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. In the morning we hit a local nursery to see if they had any herbs we could plant (we need to transplant some to their new locations in the back of the garden as well). To be honest, we were trying to find something to do in the garden. Alas, all they had were some flats of pansies. It really is too early to expect to put out plants yet in Massachusetts, and this probably spared us a lot of trouble protecting things when (if?) temperatures settle back into some kind of normal range.  There's just not much to do in the garden yet, so we took a hike on a local trail (which was amazing, by the way, drowned fisher cat and/or beaver and all). When we got home from our little five-mile trek, we had dinner on the patio . And not just any humdrum, mid-March dinner: burgers from the grill and salad picked fresh from the garden . Check it: That salad contains some of the kale, mac...

It's been a while since I've written, but that's because there just isn't very much going on in a Massachusetts garden in the middle of January. We've been having a pretty mild winter: Last weekend we were able to go skating on the pond , but this past week temperatures were back up into (at least) the forties, and the Winter Carnival that was supposed to take place this weekend was cancelled. I'm ambivalent about our weird winter. On one hand, it's a bummer not to have at least a little snow to sled on or a frozen pond to skate on, and I do love the gift of a snow day or two to break up the monotony of winter. On the other hand, it's been great not to have to shovel, to be getting out of school on time in June (so far, so good), and to have mild weather for our remaining garden greens. After the final January clean-up of the garden, we were left with only some kale, mache, and a tiny group of spinach seedings that sprouted too late to get very big...

Two items are still going (relatively) strong in our winter garden — and I can say that now that it is officially winter. Sure, it's super-warm today (52 degrees as I am writing this, even though the sun set about 45 minutes ago), but for me, the cold has never been the hard part of winter. The truly terrible part is the darkness . So solstice is worth celebrating — after our mere 9 hours and 4 minutes of daylight in Newburyport today, we are climbing back up from what always feels to me like the bottom of the year.  Anyway, despite the darkness and the temperatures that dropped to the teens last weekend, we've got some unprotected kale that is doing just fine: The kale is the curly, slightly bluish greenery you see here. Several weeds are also (still) thriving, too. This kale had been under the greenhouse hoop, and wasn't doing particularly well--there isn't much here. It doesn't need the heat under the plastic at all, and actually tastes sweeter when...

Remember the harvest from the cold frame this past weekend ? First, there was a basket of kale. We turned this into an appetizer of kale chips. I realize that if you haven't heard of these, it probably sounds pretty gross. But really, they are quite delicious, and might be addictive. They are also super-easy to make. Drizzle some olive oil over a cookie sheet and toss the kale leaves around on it so they get a light coating. Sprinkle with kosher salt and bake at 350 for about 15 minutes or until the edges are brown (not burnt). That's it. The flavor is kind of toasty but still green, and it's really good. Make sure the leaves are about bite-sized, though (or tear them to be so). We found out the hard way that once you bite into them, they pretty much disintegrate, so it's best as a one-bite snack. We made them plain with just salt, but I could definitely see seasoning them with chili powder or curry powder, maybe onion salt or a little garlic powder … ...