Today, a cold January morning’s harvest of the garden garnished big buckets of Greyhound spinach (long, pointy leaves), French Rocket arugula, a variety of lettuces, and an additional bucket of chocolate mint. We’ll make unique chocolate desserts with the fresh mint, including mint-brownies, chocolate cake and a luscious syrup for ice cream. For friends and family, we’ve continued serving wilted greens dishes (spinach, arugula and rainbow chard) and/or fresh salads straight from the garden for dinner parties right through New Year’s Day. North Texas is usually ideal for consistent crops of greens in the winter.
This year, even as far north in North Texas as we are, the winter conditions have not yet required nightly covering of the garden crops. I have a theory that our plants suffer such devastating heat for so long that the onset of winter feels like vacation to them. In any event, I don’t usually cover raised beds until I know the nightly temps are going to 27 or below.
Home gardens don’t require elaborate hoop-houses or heated green-houses. On those most frigid of nights, row covers of any ventilated fabric will usually suffice. Don’t use heavy plastic or tarp directly on top of your plants. Unless we get several nights in a row of weather in the teens, old sheets or blankets will work quite well. If there’s snow or sleet overnight, it winds up serving as yet another layer of insulation on top of the blankets, in case the air above really takes a dive.
Uncover the beds during mid-day sun-light. Remember the discomfort you’ve experienced when being in a closed greenhouse on a sunny day? That’s how hot your plants will get under cold-cloth with a full day of sun.
Over the years, I’ve used about every available new ‘miracle-cure’ winter-cover that came on the market. Whether labeled fleece, cold-cloth, frost-cover, thermal-blanket, whatever, most do a great job, if you remember to take them off when the sun pops out. Indeed, on North Texas gardens and crops, sun plus a winter cover often equals hot oven.
On fallow beds and rows, I like to cover the soil with a layer of straw or shredded, blank newsprint. The uncolored tissue-paper used for gift-wrapping, and as cushion for fragile dishes and such, also works well for this purpose. I still don’t like to shred magazines or printed newspaper in the garden, even though some publications promise readers that only soy-based inks are used. I just don’t like the idea of ink in the soil.
January is the month for ordering seeds and planning strategy for your spring garden. My first advice to home gardeners is to plant what you want to eat. Not everybody likes mustard greens, for example. If you don’t like turnip greens or mustard greens, don’t plant them just because they are hardy and do well here. We have to be reasonable, of course. Terroir and climate still determine most of what we can produce in North Texas, as is the case in any good Tuscan or Provencal garden. The vagaries of nature keep gardeners and farmers humble. It’s a good thing.
Incidentally, I like my mustard greens with a big dash of Trappey’s Hot Peppers in Vinegar, or Louisiana Brand Tabasco Peppers in Vinegar. (Neither of these is a red sauce).
Once you’ve decided what you want to eat, plant, tend, and harvest, make sure it will grow in North Texas by consulting local, long-time seed and plant provenders, such as Rohde’s (in Garland) or Northaven Gardens, both companies with lots of experience and products most suitable for our North Texas climate and gardens.
If you’re new to gardening in these climes, I suggest you not start out with asparagus, celery or kiwi. Instead, plant carrots, radishes, lettuce, beets, Swiss chard, kale, greens, spinach, cabbage or turnips. Basically, we can plant all such vegetables in North Texas from mid-February through mid-March. Carrots will show their tops within 30 days, but most will not mature in less than 65 days. Of course baby carrots and baby radishes are delicious in salads or gently steamed for only an instant. Baby radish greens are sweet and tender. “Baby” vegetables are more commonly called “micro” these days, but it’s hard for me to break the habit. Besides, “baby” sounds a lot cuter.
For years, I’ve sold organic herbs and heirloom produce direct to the public at farmers markets and to restaurant and catering chefs across North Texas. Two recent trends (in both kitchens and gardens) that frankly bore me to death are today’s media-driven manias for high-tech methods and speed competition. I love gardening and I love cooking. I might be in a hurry to cover fragile baby Italian wild arugula or Korean Tah Tsai mustard at the onslaught of a sudden late spring freeze, but I get no joy from rushing the aromatic polenta simmering quietly on the stove.
I’ve played tennis since the age of twelve, so I greatly enjoy watching two expert players beat the hell out of each other with speed, power and cunning. To watch chefs compete that way just seems, well, bizarre to me. Listening to Lynne Rosette Kasper swoon over the perfect pie crust with a guest baker on NPR, or to watch Eric Ripert or Chris Kimball actually have an instructive dialogue with other enthusiastic chefs on PBS is fulfilling, not agitating.
Often, well-meaning customers at farmers markets will say something like “Tom, when are you going to start doing hydroponics so you can sell to us year round?” I love those opportunities to discuss seasonal cooking, terroir influence, and the turning of the earth (the planet). For myself, I don’t need fresh tomatoes year round. In the winter, I’m perfectly happy making sauces, stews and veggie chili with tomato paste and canned tomatoes. In the summer I miss ruby red grapefruit from the Valley, but am deliriously happy to snap off a cool lemon cucumber and eat it like an apple, while pulling weeds in the garden.
Letter from the Prairie
Tom Motley, Jan. 3, 2012