Cold Crop

I'm sitting right now at a little cafe in Petworth, drinking a cup of Polish coffee, and warming my hands from the past hour of weeding and thinning turnips. It's currently 35 degrees in Washington. Looking at the forecast for the next week, it's doubtful that temperatures will climb above 45 degrees. We are past the 60 degree, bucolic, golden leaved days of fall, and it feels we are rapidly approaching winter. I have already seen snow in the city twice. Just a few flakes really, and nothing that would stick, but it was snow. All around me I hear people predicting a long cold winter, and the conditions now seem to indicate as much. It is deeply cold, and not even December. I certainly don't want to argue with Nature and its cycles of temperature, but the current weather conditions are causing a shift in the patterns of my life.

It is dark now when I leave work which is frankly a little dejecting sometimes. The most significant outcome of this daylight rearrangement is that I find myself having very few opportunities to go out to the garden. At the same time, I think it's pretty amazing how the earth does go through cycles. If the darkness starts to get me down, just thinking about reasons for it and the tilt of the earth remind me that that it is good and right for the natural word to cycle thusly. It is the necessary counterpart to the long hot days of summer. With the weather as it is I can be a hermit, huddled inside with a cup of coffee, reading or writing, and not feel guilty about it. It is a time that I can seek a different sort of cultivation, both in my own life and in the life of my garden.

After all, the weeds are not deterred by the cold weather. I should not be either

I have been harvesting a hearty crop of lettuces for the past month and a half, and it seems as if I still have a fair bit of that to look forward too. The Oakleaf lettuce and Arugula in particular seem to withstand the cold heartily. I had my first harvest of the purple sheened kale this last week, and cooked most of it up with potatoes and olive oil in a creamy soup.  I will be sharing some of these greens with my family at Thanksgiving in a few days.  We'll see what happens with my cabbages... it may be to cold for them to fully mature.

My greatest joys come from the root vegetables: the large

 round white turnips, the radishes that come in rose or black. As much as I love cultivating these though, I'm still not an expert at using them in the kitchen. I'll eat them raw, or roasted with onions and garlic. The radish tops are usable in soups. But I definitely want to expand my root recipe lexicon.

With Daniel's help I was able to clear out the last remnants of summer's crop. The beans, eggplant, and peppers have all been uprooted, and laid back down in the plot where they will decompose back into the land. After a long summer of making homes in the dirt, these plants were pretty persistent and it took some good tugging to get some of them up out of the ground. 

It is good to have a reason to go outside, a motivation to deal with the cold.  The grey and barren city can deter from this.  I have hope that I will be able to reap some harvest until January when I leave the city.