Only yesterday I was crowing about growing the best tomatoes ever and donating 40 lbs. of cucumbers to our local food bank. That was ages ago.
Now there is nothing to brag about. There is very little to eat from my winter garden. Maybe this is normal, I don’t know. I’m relatively new to winter gardening. I just know that right now, I have cauliflower envy. My neighbor, whose raised beds I can see all day in the front of the house, got her winter crop planted in early September. Her cauliflower is gorgeous and ready to be harvested. Mine are finally the size of a quarter.
Back in early September if I had wanted to get my winter vegetables in that early, I would have had to harvest and clear out all my summer vegetables. It’s a very hard choice to make and it's a lot of work just when we have all the Jewish High Holidays. Could we please move Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot to November?
Here’s what else is going on out back:
Our raised beds were built in a bad place. In the winter, they are in the shade half the day which slows down growth. Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, beets and peas are hardly growing. I finally got the first pea pods and they are completely tasteless. The chard is half inedible because it keeps getting leaf miner. And I accidentally planted broccoli rabe instead of broccoli and not knowing anything about it or what to do with it, I let it go past its prime and now I yanked it all out.
The little seedlings I started indoors did not continue to bring me happiness. Once they were moved into outdoor soil, they either died or have remained almost the same size. I also wasn’t sure where to find room for them all, and as I transplanted them in a hurry, I stuck things here and there and in a few rogue places. Now I don’t know what’s what or where. I might find a surprise kohlrabi one day near a weed patch.
The one great success for which I cannot take credit, is the fig tree, which produced tons of great figs for the past few weeks. “We all want some figgy pudding". Little did I know that figs are ripe just before Christmas (at least in Northern California) and do make very nice desserts. They also are expensive in the shops and giving away figs is an easy way to make new friends. I have the kind that start out green and soft and not too sweet and go well in salads or with cheese. As they get riper, they turn purple and get much sweeter.
The fig tree is very lovely and kept its leaves until recently. One morning I woke up and almost all the leaves had dropped. Fig leaves are beautiful but have a weird sticky prickly texture and you don’t want to scoop them up with bare hands.
Then I couldn't resist and got caught up for 3 hours in the zen of revitalizing the strawberry patch, which has a few strawberries in December. There are June-bearing and Ever-bearing and the Evers are still producing. They look like the poison apple that the Wicked Queen prepared for Snow White - half white, half red. But they are very sweet!
The previous owners built a lovely mound and covered it with strawberries. What I’m finding is that as all the water runs downhill, the top plants dry out quickly and die while everything else erodes to the bottom and the base is a dense little forest with strawberries fighting for space with the crabgrass. After the rains, it’s all mush and slugs under the top leaves. I trimmed each one back to the mother plant. I can now recognize runners and mother plants! I plan to move the entire patch near the artichokes where it’s flat.
As I did all this work, I found little “gifts’. Walnuts! There are walnut trees in the neighborhood and in the fall, squirrels brought some nuts over and hid them all over the place. I found the first ones a few weeks ago, buried in the straw on the raised bed. I was clearing out the old straw and I worried that if I move the nuts, the squirrels won’t find their food. Greg assured me that they have very poor memories and never come back. Today I left 5 walnuts out in the open for them to find.
My lunch today was that little bit of broccoli rabe sautéed with a few chard leaves and 4 pea pods, which made a warm salad bed upon which I put a medallion of Laura Chenel’s fine-herbed goat cheese and a slice of toasted sourdough, two figs and two strawberries. And yes, using foodie language to describe my meal is showing off.
