Winter Gardening?

Last Thursday was the start of the meteorologic winter in the mountains and it came in with a roar, a literal roar of Arctic blast air and high wind gusts.  I should have harvested my cabbages last Wednesday, but I didn’t.  They were under a row cover, so I smugly felt they would be okay until I could get gallon plastic bags to store them in the basement fridge.  That was an error on my part, a colossal error.  The past two nights have dropped to between 11 and 16f.  Yesterday’s high was only 26f.   Today we finally bought the bags and as soon as the outdoor thermometer rose above the freezing mark, today’s high of 34f, I grabbed a big canvas sack, garden clippers, gloves, barn boots and jacket and set out to see what the damage was.  It was not pretty.  Fifteen small to medium cabbages frozen on the outside at least.  Debate with self, do I harvest them accepting the damage that has been done or put a layer of straw and the insulated cover over them to ward off tonight’s anticipated ice storm and see if they will “recover” on the next mild stretch (assuming there will be one).  Harvest now won and they were brought inside to assess the damage.  After cutting one of the medium sized ones in half, I realized that they were pretty much frozen through, so instead of throwing in the towel and accepting my error and the waste it wrought, each cabbage was cut in quarters, still frozen, packed in a plastic bag and loaded into the basement freezer.  Most of the cabbage we eat is cooked anyway, so they should not go to waste.

Error number 2 was leaving the large pumpkin on the front porch for the past two nights.  The chickens are now enjoying the stalks and lower leaves of the cabbage, the seeds from the frozen pumpkin that I tossed into their run and split with a hatchet.  If it ever thaws outside, they will eat the pumpkin down to the stem and the added bonus is that pumpkin seeds are a natural safe dewormer if any of the flock is infected.

In spite of the cold, even though egg laying has significantly dropped off, they are still producing enough for the pups and me to have one each morning and enough to put aside for the holiday baking.

Life is good on our mountain farm, just cold right now.  Guess I should bundle back up and go bring in some firewood for the wood stove and fireplace, just in case the ice storm takes out the electricity.