Spring?

We finally had a sunny dry day today with the temperature around 60. I double-dug one of the beds and transplanted the cabbage seedlings. In an attempt to reduce the insect damage to the seedlings, I've covered them with Agribon insect barrier, which is a very light fabric that allows sunlight in but keeps insects out.

I also transplanted the lettuce and planted both the new potatoes and storage potatoes. This is the second year we've planted Sangre new potatoes and the fifth year for the Kennebec storage potatoes. We still have several Kennebecs in the root cellar from last fall, which keep very well over the winter.

It looks like we may have some sunny dry weather next week, so hopefully we can get a lot more planting done.

Winter survivor

The weather has been very cool and wet the last week with a couple inches of snow last Wednesday. We planted kohlrabi last weekend, but other than that, nothing has been seeded or transplanted. This next week looks more promising, with temperatures in the 60's and mostly dry.

The greens in our cold frame have been thriving in the cool weather, though, and we've been enjoying big salads with most meals. Even without a cold frame, anyone can have early green salads by planting spinach in the fall and then covering it with a layer of straw, hay or some other insulating material before the really cold weather sets in. The spinach below was planted last fall in our garden and not given any protection other than a blanket of snow on top of it all winter. The spinach goes dormant during the winter and reawakens once the snow melts and the weather warms. A row of arugula that was planted next to the spinach last fall did not survive. Quite a testament to the hardiness of the spinach plant.

Oktoberfest

Last night we bottled our Oktoberfest beer, which was our third batch since we started brewing last fall, but our first lager. A lager is different than most beers made by home brewers, which are ales. An ale can be fermented at room temperature, whereas a lager needs colder temperatures to ferment properly, in the 34-40 degree range.
Since we have a root cellar that we keep at between 32 and 40 degrees all winter, we figured that would be a perfect place to ferment our Oktoberfest lager.

Traditionally, Oktoberfest beers are brewed in March and left to lager for a few months until they are ready for the celebrations in October. Since we don't have the ability to maintain cold enough temperatures in our root cellar much past March, we started it in February.

The bottling process consists of siphoning the wort from a carboy (fermenting vessel) into a bottling bucket, and then filling and capping each sanitized bottle. You can see Katherine in the picture capping the Oktoberfest bottles with our spiffy new orange caps.

Early salads

The snow has finally melted in the back yard and the soil is still a little to wet to work, but we are already enjoying lots of green salads, courtesy of our cold frame. We use a method in which we plant seedlings in a 4' x 8' wooden cold frame in the fall, and then put a hoop house over the cold frame. This extra layer of insulation allows the plants to survive the winter and thrive once the days get longer and the sun rises higher in the sky. You can read about this method of winter gardening in Eliot Coleman's "Four Season Harvest".

The plants you see in the left side were seeded on Sept. 29 last fall and the ones on the right side were seeded in mid-February of this year. Not any plant can be overwintered like this in a cold frame. The plants we're currently using for our winter greens are spinach, arugula, cress, mizuna and mache, which are all cold-hardy and can withstand temperatures as low as 10 degrees.

A cold frame like this can supply two people with small salads throughout the winter and big salads once the weather warms up in March and April and the plants take off. It may seem like a lot of work to go through to get salad greens that you could buy in the store in the winter, but even the organic greens available are tasteless compared to what you'll harvest out of your own back yard cold frame.

Signs of spring

The snow in the back yard is finally starting to recede and one of the first sure signs of spring has appeared: the first emerging garlic shoots. Garlic is one of our favorite crops to grow, and we grow several varieties. It is planted in mid-October here in St. Paul just after the first frost. We cover it with marsh hay to protect it from the sub-zero winter temperatures. We'll leave the hay in place as the garlic grows in order to reduce the competition from weeds. This year we have two separate garlic plantings in different areas of the garden, and hope it will serve to repel some insect pests.