Vegetable Gardening for the Winter

There are a few key techniques to make the time you can eat directly from the garden (no storage) as long as possible. Summer planting is the crucial practice for this: we plant cold-hardy greens and brassica root crops (turnips and winter radishes) in the first half of August in spaces vacated by early-harvested crops – in our case, mostly peas and small grains like wheat. Some of them, escarole and Asian greens like tat soi and leaf mustards, are really in their element after the fall equinox. We never see them happier. We keep harvesting them through the early frosts until a really hard freeze kills them, or at least stops their growth. That’s the end of fresh-from-the-garden eating on the autumn end of things.

You can push season extension even further by protecting the plants. We have a few cold frames: bottomless plywood boxes which have slanted tops made out of old windows. We place them over some of the plants from the fall greens bonanza (preferably a bit younger than our main fall-harvest crops). We leave the windows off until it gets really cold (as with the tat soi on the left), then cover them for the depths of winter. In the spring, we can begin harvesting from them substantially before spring-sown crops. Then we eventually clean all of the greens out of them and plant our peppers in the soil nicely pre-warmed by the cold frame.

But that still leaves about mid-November to April to fill.

Most of my favourites, however, like it colder and wetter than I prefer: a few degrees above freezing with high humidity. So the carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, winter radishes, kohlrabi, and parsnips live packed in boxes with dry maple leaves in a root cellar built into our basement. Potatoes also live there, but don’t need leaf protection. The root cellar is insulated and has vents opening to the outside, so we can just let in fresh winter air as needed, while keeping it out of our human living space.

Except for the potatoes, all of these root cellar crops are biennials. They stay alive in storage, expecting to resume growing in the spring, only to have us eat them (sad betrayal, I know. But they taste so good!). A cold cellar is ideal for storing them, but if you don’t have access to one, there are many other possibilities. Some people bury them in the garden in a straw-lined mound called a clamp; others use a cold porch, garage, or crawl space; some bury a garbage can to provide rodent-proof storage (insulate the lid, so the top layers don’t freeze); I have even heard of leaving a defunct fridge or freezer outdoors, though this gives you less control over the temperature and so is more risky.

A bit of sophistication is helpful with squash, however. Of the three species commonly grown here, Cucurbita pepo tends to have the shortest storage life; I wouldn’t expect them to last past January or February, depending on the variety, though some (Algonquin pumpkin) have lasted till April. Cucurbita moschata and Cucurbita maxima usually last much longer, butternuts usually winning the contest for oldest squash in our house!

Another option, for at least some foods, is drying. We mostly use two solar dehydrators (pictured on the right) in summer, and a rack with screens beside our woodstove in the winter. Dried foods are more labour-intensive up front, but also store passively. We dry large quantities of a few foods (zucchini, apples, oyster mushrooms, and lambsquarters) and smaller quantities of fancier things which are special highlights in our diet, like plums, strawberries, tomatoes, and herbs. We also occasionally dry foods as a salvage operation when a crop has been stored passively but then starts to spoil, onions and Cucurbita pepos being examples. Keeping track of what’s not doing so well in storage, and eating that first before it is ruined, is an important part of managing stored foods optimally. Split kohlrabi, bruised apples, shrivelling squash… all still offer the sharp-eyed and feckless cook a lot of food, if you are alert and good with a paring knife! More on this below…

3. Perennials, coldframes and foraging for the spring

In the spring, you can get some vegetable crops started early, but even the earliest spring-planted crops won’t really provide much to eat until sometime in June. We like turnips, carouby (giant snow) peas, and saladings like lettuce and arugula. Cold frames planted in the previous summer are useful to get earlier stuff, but for most of us they are pretty limited in area and, therefore, quantity. There are a few vegetables which can survive outdoors through the winter to provide early-spring food: some arugulas, mâche/corn salad, parsley, parsnips, salsify, and scorzonera.

But our key early-spring vegetables are perennials. Since they store energy year-to-year and don’t have to get started from seeds, they tend to be ready much sooner.

We eat a lot of Caucasian Mountain spinach (Hablitzia tamnoides, actually a vine, not spinach at all, but it tastes even better) and garden sorrel. Asparagus is nice too. Jerusalem artichoke/terrasols are a neat root crop – very easy to grow, and native to eastern North America; but my family is divided on their delectability (some would say palatability). I’ll give my perspective: they’re great! I like to describe their taste as sort of a cross between a potato and a crayon which, people tell me, inspires an enormous eagerness to sample them. Try them! You’ll love them! And ignore all those naysayers who complain about them causing severe flatulence in a small proportion of people….

Onions have their own special game with perennials. We grow Welsh onions to eat in late fall, and Egyptian onions (also called walking or tree onions) for the spring. Both get divided and planted in early fall, and then basically take care of themselves until they’re ready to eat. When you’re hungry for fresh greenery in spring, stir-fried Egyptian onions are delicious!

We also forage. Wild greens tend to be earlier than our domesticated ones, and they are more plentiful (because we don’t have to plant them!). Some are nice. We have tried various things, but at the moment our main foraged green is lambsquarters (Chenopodium album, cavorting in a corn-and-bean intercrop on the right). It is easy to identify, has a pleasant flavour when cooked, and grows in great abundance in our gardens! There are plenty of other options, but we rarely have to look farther than that one species.

I am also an enthusiastic amateur lacto-fermenter. Lacto-fermentation (think sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, etc.) involves adding salt to veggies to encourage the growth of lactic acid bacteria while inhibiting the growth of everything else that would otherwise cause spoilage. It has two main functions in my winter gardening. First, we can pretty easily grow far more greens in late summer than we can actually eat before they all freeze to death. This lets us harvest them, ferment them, and then enjoy them for several more months beyond when we would otherwise lose them. Second, in late spring/early summer when the roots in the root cellar are starting to look sort of tired and rot is setting in, we can salvage the good parts, ferment them, and enjoy them for several more months.

Lacto-fermenting has been popular and common in many cultures around the world for centuries. However, I am an amateur, so I give the recipes below as my experience, not an expert opinion. I found it mildly scary at first, because we’re doing sort of controlled spoilage here and then eating the result. But as I go along, my growing impression is that this is a relatively safe way to process and store food. The key is to remember fermented foods are not static. They’re alive. Very alive. So eat if it tastes good, chuck if not, and make sure to remove any molds you see. Just to add to the disclaimer, I’ll say, “Please consult other recipes from more expert people, because my specialty is seeds, not food safety or gourmet glory.” But here’s what I do.

I work from two recipes. Both are adapted from Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Wild Fermentation, which I recommend. But these should be understood as a starting point for your own adventure, not as a textbook to follow. The main things to remember for food safety are:

1. Wash your veggies, containers and tools thoroughly. No soil, please!
2. Maintain the proper ratio of veggies and salt.
3. Discard if it doesn’t smell or taste good.

General tips: Use non-iodized salt; I use pickling salt – Coarse salt is less dense than fine salt; use 1 1/2 x as much by volume – If you need to add brine at any stage, use 1 Tbsp. salt/ 1 c. water – Soak dried foods overnight before adding to the ferment.

A kraut stomper, pictured on the left, is the only tool needed for this which is not already in the average kitchen. It’s not so fancy: just a stick with a flat bottom.

Shred cabbage, mix in salt, and pound into a crock using a kraut stomper. Cover and push on weight until brine rises well above the vegetable. If you’re making sauerkraut in a big crock, you put a plate on top of the shredded cabbage and then add something heavy (and clean, because it will be sitting in the brine) on top. In that case, the brine has to rise over the plate so you can be sure that your veggies stay submerged. However, I usually use a wide-mouthed two-quart jar, with a water-filled 1 c. jam jar as my weight and no plate (pictured on the right). Cover the whole crock with a clean cloth to keep flies out. If the plate is not submerged after 24 hours, add more 1 Tbsp. salt/ 1 c. water brine until it’s well submerged.

You can ferment at room temperature or slightly cooler.

Note: For both recipes, the brine level tends to follow the same pattern for me. In the first 24 hours, it can drop. Then, for about a week, it rises, as the lactic acid bacteria get bubbling. In fact, it often overflows in this phase, so I set my jars into a dish to catch the overflow. Then things eventually settle down, and as the weeks go by, I sometimes need to add more brine again.

I like to think of lacto-fermentation as gardening in a jar: just as we do for our plants out in the garden, we are giving our bacterial buddies a favourable place to grow and tending them to see that they thrive, to provide us with good food when we need it. Like those plants, the culture in the jar has a life cycle: it gets started and grows until it reaches the optimal stage for “harvest,” and then, if left too long, that moment passes and it spoils. So this works better if it is understood as an extension of gardening, not as a static storage method like canning or freezing.

The numbers I’m using here don’t just come out of thin air, of course. I pay a bit of attention to what my family and I eat in an average meal and average week, and to yields coming from the garden. We keep a pretty basic notebook (the “Harvest Log”, pictured right) where we record those kinds of things. I expect each person (and place) will have slightly different numbers. So I recommend some record keeping to develop your own estimates of how much you need. We also, incidentally, keep a “Fermentation Log” (below) for fermentation projects.

The harvest log lists total yields by species and variety, but also includes some estimate of yield by area, a key bit of analysis. It can be by weight, as for roots above; or by number of fruits, as for squash; or by volume (for dry legumes and grains we use cups; for tomatoes, quarts). Whatever works for you. Expect to get better at this sort of record-keeping the longer you do it!