Neglect. Total neglect. This is the short story of what I've done through late fall in our outdoor gardens plus inside the solar greenhouse.
However, that doesn't mean that nothing is happening there. Until the blizzard, I was able to pick winter hardy greens outdoors (haven't gotten any outdoor gardens under cover of fabric or plastic yet! grrrr...). We had lovely kale and the chickens had chicory and a variety of hardy weeds growing outside without any protection up until last week. Inside the greenhouse, it's pretty sad in terms of upkeep. But green nonetheless! I've also not gotten any floating row cover/fabric on the rows yet inside the greenhouse. I should have by early November!! But life keeps intervening.
There are still hundreds if not thousands of self-seeded claytonia and mache plants growing well, however. Some arugula, too, but not enough to please my arugula-greedy needs. The claytonia had the furthest seeded range: it's growing everywhere! I am thinning as we eat both, as the individual plants are growing too close together for their eventual health.
During the week between Christmas and New Years, we harvested (and happily ate):
turnips (bulbs and greens), carrots, scallions, leeks, arugula (2 varieties), lettuce (2 varieties), claytonia, mache, chicory (3 varieties), d'taglio celery.
I could have also harvested
sage, salad burnet, Tuscan kale, chard and a bit here and there of a other brassicas like collards. And still on hand fresh: the last 3 tomatoes picked green this fall and allowed to ripen inside! Pitiful, yes, but a household record lasting this long.
That's all for the fresh garden produce. In addition, items we used many items we grew or gathered in the wild during 2010 that were in cool storage in the root cellar, dried, or frozen. These included:
potatoes, garlic, basil, d'taglio celery, parsley, sage, tomatoes, tomato sauce, spiced tomato jam, dried ground cherries, roasted tomatoes, chicken mushrooms, pumpkin, hot peppers, sweet potatoes, mustard greens, sweet peppers, dried beans, cornmeal. In terms of quality and flavor, we have eaten like royalty! And we still
have a well-stocked larder of homegrown foods to enjoy in the next
months.
We eat meat and dairy in our household, but not much or often -- unprocessed or minimally-processed, homecooked plant foods and our girls' eggs are becoming more and more central to our diets. A neighbor asked me how much plant-based food we have to buy these days. This was easy to track as we order groceries via delivery which I set up online; all the records of my purchases are readily available -- they are usually right around $100 each. My last two grocery orders were November 21 and December 12 (I will probably order again this week). In terms of plant foods delivered, November brought in a couple of fresh lemons, some canned beans, bread, tortillas, crackers and coconut milk. With December's delivery, I took on some fresh apples, bread, cracker, lemon juice and whole grain pasta. Except for one box of potato-onion perogies, no frozen plant-based foods were purchased. Before that, the previous two grocery deliveries were November 6 and September 26.
We stopped by the Chinese grocery store in Chelmsford this week to pick up some specialty supplies, and bought some scallions -- we would have bought fresh water chestnuts, but they didn't have any. We have not bought any produce at farmstands or farmer's markets since early October when I got some winter squash for storage. I brought in cases of honey and curry paste from online sources (let's not talk about what happens when two bottles of curry paste break in shipment, ok... the trauma still lingers). I stopped by
Debra's Natural Gourmet last month to pick up dried beans and grains to cook up for the chickens' daily rations; for humans there was only a little dried oatstraw for tea. I am about to purchase some more supplies for chickens at Debra's, perhaps even today. Otherwise, we keep a good general larder with dried, bottled, packaged and canned foods -- mostly minimally processed or unprocessed. We also keep a standing freezer fairly full. We use this stored food as a part of our daily diet.
This Valentines Day, give something unique and memorable! Send a Singing Valentine from Sounds of Concord, the one of the top Barbershop Harmony choruses in New England. It's a lovely way to do something special for your special someone(s), and it's a fundraiser for our choral group. Last year, we delivered Singing Valentines to unsuspecting women and men in conference rooms, class rooms, homes, restaurants, and even to someone in a dentist chair!
