the fire is crackling and the rain has turned our first substantial snow into a slushy grey mess. the garden sits quietly, its neat little rows identified by mild rises and falls in the snow. in the summertime, i could not imagine time enough to be sitting here, inside, in broad daylight, wasting away my day with small cups of coffee and mindless thoughts. but it is a day before solstice, and the ground is frozen. i have drooled over seed catalogues enough already this week.

now is the season of eating.

i have been having a glorious time preparing the various winter-stored vegetables that we produced this year. i am slowly but surely testing every kind of squash for the best "pumpkin" pie. so far, i think butternut has been my favorite, with the long island cheese and orange-smoothie pumpkins coming in second and third. Though i hear many chefs say buttercup is the best pie squash, I found it too dry and mealy....perhaps it was the individual squash, too. The squashes are storing well, though each week we find one or two with soft tops, which we move to the front of the line for consumption. I wish we had labeled which ones we had cured in the cabin verses the ones we cured in the pepper house, so that we could see how much of a difference it makes. Our squash have taken my appreciation of curcubita to a level far beyond what I previously thought to be a most sincere affection. The delicatas are like candy for hippies; dare I say better than fresh tomatoes? In the summer I keep a shaker of salt in the garden to enhance my heirloom tomato fetish, but my delicatas need no augmentation. no french finish salt, freshly ground cinnamon, sweet cream butter, or first run maple syrup can better the flavor of a simple roasted delicata. lucky me.

deborah madison's "onion galette with mustard cream" was absolutely gorgeous and fun to make, not to mention delectable. the cortland onions cured and are storing quite nicely. even the thicker-necked ones that we put aside to eat first seem to have finished curing in the bags, and show no sign of rot. they and the squash are together living in the bathroom in the barn, set to stay at a steady forty degrees. I have noticed that their skins are far thinner than commercial onions. perhaps the big guys have to make them last for SO long that they cure them far beyond our needs. We have only two thin layers of pale brown skin to peel. The red onions that we cured also doing fairly well, though seem a tad bit softer than the cortlands.

perhaps the most sensory culinary experience I have had with my produce has yet to be completed. just yesterday I ground a few cups of corn flour from my painted mountain corn. the smell was absolutely divine. sweet and earthy, and full of mood. i kept going outside to "cleanse my nasal palette", then returning to my jar of flour, stuffing my nose inside, and inhaling deeply. perhaps it invoked something from a past life in the Americas, the scent of survival, of the comfort of sustained existence. I do not know what to bake with it that will reveal its depth enough to merit transforming it from such a lovely state of being.

potatoes are great, but have not struck my fancy like my other produce. thanksgiving garlic mashed potatoes were lovely, and latkes have been good too. they are storing well, no complaints, in burlap and plastic mesh sacks in the root cellar across town. i did make a delightful potato leek soup the other night, the leftovers of which brought out the flavor of the leeks superbly. I always have a hard time with the color of potato leek soup- no garnish can hide its dull grey slop look. but the little bites of leeks, still holding their sweet round layers tightly, overcame the lack of aesthetics. I am looking forward to growing better leeks this year; i never really read about them, and planted them like onions, only a few inches deep. now I hear to grow them inside to a great height (10 or more inches), and then drop them into 8-inch dibble holes, and leave only a small bit sticking out. it makes sense, because that greater depth with lengthen their blanched white base. also i will pull them when i pull my onions this year, so they do not begin to rot in the ground.

i'm still eating kale out of the garden. it has survived some extremely low temperatures (down in the low single digits) unprotected and still tastes great. i guess the "winterbor" lives up to its name. the row i covered with agribon is now inaccessible due to snow, while the uncovered batch has shed the snow enough so I can harvest all I like. plus i think the snow has collapsed the wire we used to lift the agribon....won't do that next year.

while the turnips lasted in the ground until thanksgiving (under cover), they have now frozen solid and will not, i don't think, recover. oh well. they were good with the turkey.
i'm hoping the parsnips are ok. i didn't mulch them, but am looking forward to roasted parsnips come spring if frost or moles haven't beat me to it.

i just today got around to starting to clean out the tomato house. it is partially frozen, so i covered the sections i could not pull with row cover to try to warm them up. i feel extremely guilty about our october road trip, as the garden feels incomplete and untidy in its sleep-mode. there are weeds gone to seed sticking up through the snow, and only i know about all the plant matter under the winter blanket. i didn't have a chance to cover crop, mulch, or even till many beds at all this fall, and i'm sure we'll pay for it this spring with extra preparation work.

for future reference, we stashed for winter approximately:
60 pounds onions?
80 pounds potatoes?
80 pounds squash?
35 pounds carrots?