Chickweeds and Old Leaves

                Here it is, Ash Wednesday in February; a late-season light snow is falling outside.  Here I am, trying to live the good retirement life… the simple, frugal life on a few acres in the country. Starting in February I knew it would be time to spend more time outside …I needed the fresh air, the sunshine, and I needed some exercise to gradually tone up after a couple months of holiday feasting and lounging in the living room next to the fire, reading  seed catalogues and gardening how-to books.

                I began the month by dragging tree limbs downed by heavy January winds and snows up onto a burn pile. Once burned, I will spread the ashes onto those garden areas which will require potash and lime, especially where I’ll plant cantaloupe, Crenshaw, corn, winter squash, cabbage and other sweet- soil loving plants.

                I felt that if I could start some compost piles in the beginning of February, maybe I could have partially finished compost to mulch with by late June.  There were lots of leaves that I had stored from last autumn, so I had plenty of “brown” or carbon-rich material, but what could I use for the “green” or nitrogen –rich material needed to make compost? There was some daily garbage (peels, rinds, coffee grounds, etc.) but that would not be nearly enough. There was also the cover crop of rye grass growing on the ground where I would plant my early vegetables. I could skim off the ryegrass along with a little topsoil for incubator microbes and layer that on top of the six-inch layers of well-wetted brown leaves. Still that was not enough green material to reach the 50-50 ratio I needed between brown and green materials to make compost.

                Chickweed is nature’s winter cover crop, at least in our area of southern Indiana. It grows an inch to three inches deep and is an indication of good soil. Chickweed doesn’t grow out in our cultivated field but is rampant in the woods where the soil has been enriched by falling leaves.  Chickweed is really cold hardy; it is a neat sight in January to see all that green ground cover back in the woods. Some people consider chickweed a winter wild salad green but based on my reading, I do not think it is quite safe for that use. Apparently though, as its name implies, chickens love it for winter fare and it is healthy for them. With a sharp hoe, chickweed peels off the soil like wool being sheared off a sheep. So to make a long-winded story shorter, I covered my six-inch layers of leaves with six-inch layers of chickweeds.  I like the idea that this process is all integrated and self-sustainable since all the material comes from right here on my property. Only time will tell if it makes a good batch of compost by summer.

                In our locale, Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day are the traditional planting times for garden salad greens and peas. I have lettuce and spinach seed planted and will add radishes soon, but I’m not a pea fan, preferring the green beans in my freezer instead.  I’ve raked the leaf mulch off the asparagus so maybe we will have sprouts in a month. As far as the February garden calendar goes, I need to start leeks, seeded-onions, and cabbage plants in trays on the front porch so I can transplant outdoors in March.  Mostly I’m out digging a little in the garden each good-weather day, making beds for the early crops which will be planted in March, (early potatoes, carrots, beets, chard, onions etc.)  Anyway I’m getting a few hours of exercise and sun most days, no gym or tanning spa required.

Winter Roots, Tubers and Bulbs

                Succession planting is one of the most consequential concepts in increasing the output of a small garden and in achieving some degree of food self-sufficiency. Equally important is “succession eating” which would include both eating what is in season and planning for storage crops to eat when the weather is cold and the garden is less productive. My first attempt at practicing this year-round succession eating was growing white potatoes, (any fool can grow a spud) to provide a healthy carbohydrate from July through Thanksgiving and then growing sweet potatoes (one of the few vegetables easier to grow than a spud) to provide a healthy carbohydrate from Thanksgiving until early potatoes came in again. I planted my white potatoes really early…around St. Patty’s Day in mid March. That is mainly because my soil is sandy and I knew the mid-summer drought would play havoc with my garden in July and August. Mostly I tried to have two succession gardens, a pre-drought crop and a post-drought crop. That idea served me really well with last summer’s extreme drought. Sweet potatoes are drought hardy; they grew all summer long and still produced a very respectable crop just before frost. In the end, we had both enough white and sweet potatoes for ourselves and still some extra to give quite a bit away; that always makes an old retiree feel good.

                In addition to these basic two year-round eating crops, I considered growing other storage “roots, tubers and bulbs.” Not being a botanist, I think of all three of these as being roots. First my wife informed me that she wanted some onions to go with those Yukon Gold potatoes. So we planted several pounds of onion sets very early in the spring...in early March when I planted the lettuce and spinach. Through spring and early summer as I weeded and thinned the onions to four inches apart, we used the thinnings as scallions to eat until the onion tops finally dried and fell over just as the summer drought hit and then we had cured onions the rest of the summer. I did a poor job of curing the onions, so none kept into the fall. I planted a row of beets; and they also matured and did very well before the drought. Some Borsht soup went into the freezer. Borsht is basically a stew where potatoes are replaced with beets.

                Towards the end of August (and toward the end of the normal drought season), I planted turnips and carrots and began experimenting with fall gardening. I should have put in some beets for winter storage, but I just didn’t get around to it. Besides, I think my cook does not appreciate the “bloodiness” of red beets so in the future I will need to switch to golden beets. I have often read how productive and easy to care for fall gardens are, so I wanted to move up to this next level of gardening and give it a try.  What I found was that once cool and wetter weather came about mid-September, there was a drop off of weed growth and insect attacks. But when I first planted the seed and the new plants sprouted in August, there was a necessity to frequently water and cultivate and hand pick pests. That first month was tough going. The turnips were very fast maturing and ready to pull in October. Raw turnips have that strong “cabbage” or Cole taste which people either hate or love. Fortunately, most of that flavor cooks or fries out of it so that in a soup or hash browns you barely taste it. In a stew it is difficult to tell a cooked turnip from a potato. Rutabagas are even more indistinguishable. Because of the white cabbage butterflies which outnumber all other moths and butterflies by a billion to one, I have to date had no luck growing cabbages. These pests also sometimes lay their cabbage looper eggs on turnips leaves, but they don’t bother the root. By peeling and grating turnips and then adding mayo and sweet vinegar, I can have Cole slaw all winter long. Actually it doesn’t have to be mayonnaise; any salad dressing will give its own distinctive slaw. I usually also grate a carrot into the slaw.

                I find it amazing that a thousand-dollar refrigerator doesn’t keep root crops nearly as well as a five gallon bucket of damp sand in an unheated garage or a cool back room. Carrots (and parsnips which I have not yet grown but will next year) don’t even need a bucket of sand.  This year I allowed my fall carrots to grow undisturbed until nighttime temps fell into the teens in mid December and then I took black bags full of leaves and set them on top the carrot rows. Today is January 23rd and we are suffering through the tail end of an arctic blast, but I can still go out to the garden, move a leaf bag and pick carrots from unfrozen sandy soil.

                The carrots are very sweet and along with the Yukon Gold potatoes are my wife’s favorites. I have had some spectacular failures to this point trying to grow carrots in the springtime. Carrots are slow to germinate while weeds are quick, so a carrot row ends up being a weed patch. I planted just a few radishes in the carrot row to show me where the rows were so that I could hoe-cultivate the weed sprouts between rows. That still leaves weeds in the row and I am not a down-on-my-knees weeder-gardener. I have a bad back and bad knees so weeding and thinning are my least favorite part of gardening. My solutions to these problems are a lawn chair and a scissors. As I sit in the lawn chair, a row of carrots runs right between my legs and between the four chair legs. My body weight forces the chair into the sand so that the seat is right at carrot top. I can lean forward in the chair to use the scissors to snip out weeds and unwanted carrots. After doing about 3 feet of row, I stand up and move the chair back down the row. This works for me for weeding and thinning carrots, turnips, beets, lettuce, spinach, chard etc.

                Most people do not like doing easy crossword puzzles; most people prefer the “challenging” crossword puzzles.  Similarly I enjoy “pushing the envelope” in my small garden because doing so is both a challenge and a learning opportunity. So I will probably fool with a “soup and salad” fall garden next year too. I think a winter garden may even be possible here in zone 6 in a wind-protected, sandy garden. I hope to plant leeks this year so I can harvest them in winter. (And not have to mess with curing onions). Rutabagas, carrots, and parsnips all stand a chance of making it through the winter if mulched in the garden. Numerous salad greens are winter hardy although my preference would be spinach and Swiss chard. I think it would be really cool to harvest garden produce in the dead of winter. Cool?...Downright FRIGID!