Sick of Snow? Plan Your Victory Garden!

Today is Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and here in West Michigan it is also the coldest (so far). As I write this the wind is howling outside at 30-40 MPH, the temperature is 3 degrees with windchills in the below-zero double digits, and snow is blowing past the windows horizontally. We're under a winter storm warning until 10:00 AM tomorrow, the second in less than a week, with another storm expected to hit in a couple of days.

Considering the weather basically sucks today, I decided to celebrate by harvesting tomatoes. Yeah, that's right--I've got about twenty pounds of whole tomatoes that I unceremoniously threw into freezer bags mid-September just to get them off the vine and into the house before they spoiled.

Mid-October I picked another 20 pounds or so of green tomatoes, which I chopped up and made into chutney that ought to be just about ready right now. (The recipe called for 'curing' the chutney in a dark place for at least 30 days. Since I've never made chutney and have no clue how it is supposed to taste, I'll have to get back to you on how that all worked out, once I open a jar and eat some. But it smelled good cooking, and it looks pretty!)

This morning, I dumped a bag of frozen whole tomatoes into a collander, poured scalding water over it, and slipped the peels and cores off easily, then threw the pulp into a crock pot. Then I went back to the freezer and grabbed half a dozen whole peppers and chopped them too--refroze half and threw half in with the tomatoes. That was about three hours ago. Since then I've added sausage, hamburger, oregano, basil, sliced mushrooms, garlic, onion, and some nice rich tomato paste, and we are well on our way to a gallon or more of spaghetti sauce without much effort at all--and most of the ingredients were homegrown.

It doesn't get much better than that: Harvesting fresh tomatoes from your garden in the middle of a Midwest blizzard, and then making a whole bunch of something delicious out of them without very much effort at all. That alone makes planting a victory garden worthwhile, even if you've never done it before and aren't sure you can do it now.

I'm a city girl: If I can do it, you can do it.

Seriously, if I can do it, anybody can do it.

This was our first attempt at a vegetable garden, and we got a late start. Bill, my partner, has planted large vegetable gardens before, but I've never done more than a stray tomato plant and some pole beans, so for me, a formal garden was a big deal.

We used a rototiller to dig up a patch about 20 by 30 feet, more or less, and planted in rows. Bill did the tilling and I went to the garden center for plants and came home with enough tomatoes to feed the whole city. (Luckily about half of them got some kind of wilt in late summer, which kept down the yield, otherwise we would have had hundreds of pounds of tomatoes--I'm not exaggerating.)

We also grew snap peas, peppers, lima beans, green beans, radishes, lettuce, herbs, and carrots. We wanted to grow winter squash and pumpkins but we started too late--Next spring, we'll get the squash in too. Bill wants to plants some sweet corn, which, as I understand it, can be used to hold up the beans.  

Not everything was a wild success. The lima beans took up an entire row and netted half of a pint jar of dried beans. Ouch. The carrots were little round decorative beasts that were a bit short on substance but very tasty. (Next year we'll plant regular carrots.) The green beans, peppers, and tomatoes were unbelievably prolific. I'll be cooking those up for the rest of winter--which is pretty much the whole idea.

You don't have to plant a lot of different kinds of things to get some vegetables that you can actually eat when the cold weather comes, and you don't have to plant a huge area either. I planted the snap peas along a fence we put up to keep the dog in. I didn't do much besides stick seeds in the ground beside the fence, and they grew and made peas.

Ain't nature amazing?

As a bad gardener, (I have a black thumb--things die when I so much as come near them), I can say honestly that even I have been able to grow pole beans on many occasions, and very successfully too. You can hardly kill them even if you want to. Peas are not hard to grow. Tomatoes aren't hard and if you have limited space you can grow them in a container. Lettuce is easy, but snails like it, so that can be annoying. Herbs are easy: Parsley and basil can be chopped and frozen in olive oil and used with pasta or rice or noodles, so plant lots of herbs. Often, they come back on their own, even the annuals.  

Now is a good time to order seed catalogues to peruse and dream over while the wind is howling and the economy is tanking. Usually these catalogues will give you the sense that you can transform your backyard into a veritable Eden with almost no real effort at all.

That is not true.

However, it's still one of life's great pleasures to daydream over garden catalogues in the dead of winter, and even if you've killed every philodendron you've ever been given--even the artificial ones--there's no reason you shouldn't indulge yourself in daydreaming. No one has to know you are horticulture's answer to Charles Manson--You're just looking at plant pictures for Pete's sake! What's the harm in that?

Seeds of Change gives great catalogue, and what's really cool and unique about them (besides their organic growing methods) is their committment to biodiversity and Heirloom vegetable varieties. You'll find vegetable cultivars from other parts of the world, tomatoes and apples that were popular hundreds of years ago, and hard-to-locate medicinal and rare herb seeds. They also carry their own line of (expensive) food products, which are more practical to admire than purchase, but you can get some great ideas for how to economically use your own produce from browsing through their pricier ready-made selections.

Burpee Seeds has been around about a bazillion years and sells about everything you can imagine in the way of gardening materials, seeds, plant starts, and more. They'll happily send you a catalogue or you can order online. I personally like to look through catalogues, which I know is a waste of paper and ecologically incorrect, and yet, I persist in this habit because it is so relaxing and comforting in the dead of winter. When the earth's temperature rises 5 degrees and kills us all, you'll know who to blame.

Other great seed companies that will send you catalogues include Park Seeds, Stokes Seeds, Gurney's, and for pure indulgence (with precious little relevancy to vegetables) White Flower Farm.

We planted our vegetable garden the boring old way: In rows, with a different kind of vegetable in each row. But you can mix that up any way you want. There are as many ways to plant vegetables as there are people on this planet. One of these methods is sure to suit your specific situation.

Square Foot Gardening is an intensive planting method for growing lots of vegetables easily in a small space. Based on a best-selling book by Mel Bartholomew, Square Foot Gardening is labor intensive up front (before you ever plant) and then easy after you start to actually grow your own food. It's a great solution for people with small yards or other kinds of limited space concerns.

If you have a deck or patio, you can even do a raised bed version of Square Foot Gardening around the perimeter. Not only is this an attractive way to grow your own food, it's perfect for folks who like to putter about but don't necessarily relish the idea of getting out in the hot sun with a spade and pitchfork and picking hornworms off their 'maters.

If you are lazy like me, you can also just stick some vegetable seedlings in with your flowers. Cherry tomatoes are adaptable to full sun flower beds. Kale comes in lots of colorful varieties that can be planted around an annual or perennial border--pretty and edible. Peppers are pretty and easy to mix with full-sun flowers. Old standards like perennial rhubarb and horseradish can be placed in the back of a flower bed against a fence and then forgotton until it's time to harvest. One of my favorite easy veggies is rainbow chard. With its bright multicolored spines and dark green leaves it's almost too pretty to eat.  

Even if all you have is a patio, you can do more than you might think with containers. The harvest might not see you through winter, but if you've never made a sandwich with a fresh picked tomato from your own garden and lettuce from your own window box, you really are missing out on one of life's sweetest little pleasures.

So I'll leave you to your daydreaming. In the meantime, if you'd like to make a big crockpot full of spaghetti sauce, here's the recipe we like:

Bill's Crockpot Spaghetti Sauce

2 16 oz cans tomatoes (or your own)

2 cans tomato paste

2 cans tomato soup (or more tomatoes)

2 jars sliced mushrooms

2 or 3 chopped green peppers

1 large chopped onion

2 tsp chopped fresh garlic

2 tsp Italian Seasoning or 2 tblsp each fresh chopped basil & oregano

1 pound sweet Italian sausage

1 pound hamburger

Brown meats. Chop veggies. Dump it all in a crock pot and cook on high at least 6 hours or on low 12-14 hours. Ladle into quart freezer containers and freeze all but enough for dinner. Serve over hot pasta with grated Parmesan and garlic bread on the side and a side salad (if you must be nutrionally balanced).

Persons so inclined (and able) may include lots of dry red wine to wash it down. Being a former sot, I cannot.

But it's still damn good.