Snow and Seedlings
I’m cozied up on a sheepskin in front of the woodstove, sipping a warm glass of red wine and surrounded by over-the-top exuberant seed catalogues and the scratched notes from a year’s worth of fresh eating and experimental homestead farming. Today the sun shines warm into the windows, bounced off the blanket of snow laying protectively over our little farm here in Southwest Wisconsin on the tenth of February. Sheep lay content in pastures. Goats and geese snuggle together in the barn. Chickens are quiet and clustered on their roosts. The thermometer on the front porch reads negative four and I’m making my garden.
Root crops are easy to choose. We recently butchered four hogs and three cows, so I’ve been warming the house with pork roasts and beef stews. I can plan the fall harvest around the food I’m enjoying, or wish I was, now! The already-empty root cellar proves that last year’s planning wasn’t what I want this year’s to be. This year, I’ll plant more parsnips and carrots, loads of hard squash and lots of rutabaga and cabbage. I’ll need more parsley and delicious Paprika Supreme peppers to dry.
Early spring, though, is so hard to imagine! The catalogues certainly do their best to help us envision a garden in May, but I don’t have the taste for it. After working at an organic market farm for the past two years, I’ve come to have a seasonal palate. Jet-delivered tomatoes and greens just don’t appeal to me in the middle of winter any more, so I haven’t been eating any. This is where I put the catalogues down and turn to my favorite garden authors for inspiration.
Ruth Stout. She makes me feel panicky about not having the strawberries covered, but very optimistic about the thick quilt of sheep and goat muck tucked in over the bean beds. And Eliot Coleman. He makes me SO HUNGRY for greens and SO HAPPY that I have a horse. Or two. And the resulting manure. Reading Coleman’s description of French market fare leads me to my cookbooks, and finding too few French recipes leads me to the internet. Then suddenly I’ve ordered Ina Garten’s “Barefoot in Paris” and “Julia and Julia” by first-time author Julia Powell, whose blog chronicle of her year-long daily effort to master every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1” held a captive web audience through 2004.
Inspiration enough! This year my design has to be more deliberate and less impulsive, as we expand our large family garden to support a tiny CSA (community supported agriculture) venture. Last year we fed our 6-person family, a rotating cast of out-of-town visitors and my massage therapist (veggies for massages!). I’m somewhat daunted by the propect of planting for other people, hoping and trusting they’ll like what I like and learn as I learn. So, what do we want to eat?
