Winter is orange city around here. Quantities of peel get candied. The zest adds flavor to stews, enhances the stuffing of roast fowl, perfumes custards and cheesecakes and lends its zing to pastries from pound cake to gingerbread. Result: the fridge is frequently full of naked oranges needing to be used up.
Orange and Avocado salad, one way to use up the oranges.
Last Saturday winter began in earnest: steel gray sky, cotton candy snow: very beautiful, very cold,
Then, after the mail came, very much time to be thinking about next year’s tomatoes.
Seed catalogs don’t wait for Christmas any more; they’ve been coming in for about a month. Now the pace is picking up and after last summer’s disastrous late blight, I’m looking through their offerings in a whole new way, because
In the summer of ’09, purely by accident, we had hybrid beefsteaks in the greenhouse.
They were the only tomatoes we got and although they weren’t as good as our favorite heirlooms they were better than anything we could buy locally, heirloom or hybrid.
December 1st, 6:00 PM: The candied grapefruit rind is bubbling in the syrup, almost done, so I’m sort of stuck in the kitchen when I notice it’s cold outside in the clear still night under the fat moon. So of course I get nervous about the lettuce and my pet baby radicchios.
The radicchios are still making progress toward heading up; I continue to have hope
Decide to put covers back on even though plants are already at that frozen stage where you shouldn’t touch them if you want them to thaw unharmed. Wilted tips better than wilted everything being my thinking on that.
Turn off the grapefruit (recipe follows)
Home candied citrus rind is worlds better than store-bought. Also extremely easy to make and very nearly free.
Put on the headlamp, recruit Bill, who puts on his headlamp, and down we go to cover most but not all of what’s left.
One lettuce, actually, the delicious heirloom butterhead ’Merveille des Quatre Saisons’.
lettuce 'Merveille des Quatre Saisons," popular since the 1880's
Where winter temperatures drop into the teens and below, it’s only merveille in 3 saisons, but that’s still pretty good. It’s one of the first to head up after a spring planting. It stays nicely flavorful in summer, even after it starts to bolt, and it’s really stellar in fall: tender, juicy, sweet, beautiful – and disinclined to rot, even when the autumn is unusually rainy.
It’s a ‘Chicago Hardy’, reputedly among the toughest, this year’s shot at zone denial. The goal is to have it live outdoors all winter, without dying down to the roots.
But our part of the Hudson Valley is still zone 5b, though teetering on the edge of 6, and figs are not hardy north of zone 7. So what makes me think we can pull this off? Pure hubris? My usual oversupply of sunny optimism ? Too much research into fig protection during the Times Q&A days?
Some of each, I have no doubt. But the main reason to give it a try is this house’s uniquely suitable spot, a double protected corner facing southwest.
The fig in late September, slightly taller than 5 feet, planted as close as possible to a very cosy corner.
If you count the fact that the house ( circa 1870) is not exactly a model of tightness, the protection is triple. But double is the important part; the corner has extra backup because the house sides don’t meet.
To avoid the same old same old, stock up on winter squash while you can still buy it from a farmer.
As a general rule, there’s no need to issue the annual squash warning until shortly before Thanksgiving. But tomatoes aren’t the only fruits that suffer when it’s cold and wet for weeks on end in June and July. This year has been very hard on a lot of squash growers in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.
So I figure I ought to mention it now: If you want to eat good winter squash all winter and don’t want to die of boredom, this is the time to start cruising the farmstands looking for interesting squash and stocking up on an assortment, bearing in mind that “winter squash” is really 3 different vegetables – Cucurbita pepo, C. maxima and C. moschata – each with a different season of glory.
I was all set to go on about how this is primo planting time and then discuss a few must-haves. But then I woke up: discussing Fall Planting is like discussing Volunteers, a book, not a post. Last time I tried, “volunteers” became “ shirley poppies” with everything else on the in-a-minute list.
A minute having gone by, this will be about Italian parsley, a must-have volunteer.
But first the annual reminder: time to get those bulb orders in! And that includes the garlic, if you want to try something new from the dozens of types available.
As usual, garlic is the least of it. We’ll mostly be planting tulips and alliums, including more of
tulip 'Mount Tacoma,' not generally sold in stores
for the white garden in Maine.
For New York, there’s yet more crocus, both species and giant Dutch, and of course a few more lilies – primarily trumpets.
this one is 'Golden Splendor,' rock-solid reliable
and Japanese lilies (L. speciosum) the last lilies to bloom.
Lily Speciosum rubrum. Bill just brought these up from New York; the ones in the Maine garden are fewer and later.
Mercifully, it’s not time yet to plant or move peonies (although it is time to clean them up), and …what was I just saying about too much?
Onward to the parsley! Can’t have too much of that.
Self-sown Italian parsley; the full carpet is roughly 12 square feet
As far as I’m concerned, garlic gets the blue ribbon for growing your own. It’s absurdly easy to plant and care for; it tastes great; it looks beautiful and it takes up so little ground that even those with very small gardens can raise enough to be self-sufficient in garlic for a good part of the year.
All you have to do is choose the right varieties; plant at the right time, in the right soil; then harvest when just right and store correctly.
Home grown garlic, fresh out of the ground
CHOOSING VARIETIES
If you look in a specialist catalog like the one at Gourmet Garlic Gardens, you’ll find dozens of choices. The folks at Filaree Farm, who offer a hundred, divide them into 7 groups: Rocambole, Purple Stripe, Porcelain, Artichoke, Silverskin, Asiatic Turban and Creole. Gourmet GG says it’s 10 groups because they divide Asiatic from Turban and add Marbled Purple Stripe and Glazed Purple Ptripe to the list.
You see where this is going – and you can see a lot more on either of those websites, but for general purposes the most important difference is the one between softneck and hardneck.
Did you keep cutting off the rhubarb flower buds, doing your best to extend the season by preventing
Rhubarb flowering instead of making pie material
If so, welcome to the club of “if only.”
Just about every rhubarb grower I know is convinced that removing the flower stalks will
a) keep the edible leaf stalks from growing tough and
b) encourage the plant to produce more of them,
and they are abetted in this belief by most of the published information on rhubarb growing, including that from reliable sources like universities and extension services.
Nevertheless, (a) is untrue and (b) applies mostly to the following season.
Today we have a question from Leigh Ann:
“My husband gave me a pot of tulips for Mother’s Day, “ she wrote,” how can I save the bulbs to plant next fall? “
Over my years at the Times, most questioners just wanted to know how to get the damn things to come back in the garden, but as the answers are similar and Leigh Ann was first this spring, potted tulips will be addressed in
Parrot tulip Estella Rijnveld, in Maine, in its 6th or 7th year
How to Make Your Tulips Rebloom
