My goal with the garden has been to eat out of the garden a little longer each year. This year, I kept a record of the dinners and ingredients from the garden, starting with April 30. On that date we had a spinach salad with radishes and store-bought olives, feta, and vinaigrette. We also had rhubarb cake for dessert. It was an early garden dinner made possible because of the warm winter and the spinach that wintered over.
For the first two weeks in May, we had spinach or tennis ball lettuce with mizuna and radish salad every night. We ate steadily from the garden until this past week.
Today I made the first batch of Christmas cookies, my favorite gingerbread trees. I also baked a pumpkin and made a pumpkin cake. With the leftover pumpkin, I made ravioli stuffed with pumpkin, asagio, sage and parmesan. In my opinion, the pumpkin is more flavorful and smoother than butternut squash filling. I only wish I’d kept some aside to color the dough.
Digging in the fridge for something to put on top of the pasta, I cleared out the last of a bag of garden spinach and the very last garden onion. I had some conventional mushrooms, but also garden garlic and managed to pull off about 2 tsp more leaves off the sage plant. I thought about putting in a few canned tomatoes, but it didn’t seem necessary, and it wasn’t.
April 30 to December 1 is a very respectable season in Zone 3/4. It’s possible I could cook some of the kale that perks up whenever there’s a thaw. I still have a few pounds of potatoes, some carrots, beets, delicata and butternut squash and pumpkin in the basement. I’ve got a container of dry beans, frozen green beansm corn from the cob and pesto. There are pickles, salsa, and canned tomatoes in the pantry. I’ve got huckleberry and blueberry/rhubarb jam. Those are real things that will make real meals I can record on my chart.
But the last onion and spinach was an official turning point. Combined with the way the zero-degree days flattened the greens in the cold frame over Thanksgiving, it marks the end of the garden.
Now I look over the chart in wonder: those weeks of spinach, radishes and lettuce followed by the beets, chard and (market) asparagus followed by the first cherry tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and snow peas, followed by the zuccini, carrots, onions, peppers, garlic, more tomatoes, and finally potatoes, green beans, leeks and all the squash…then back to kale and lettuce and spinach again.
We ate well, very well. I went to the produce aisle in the grocery store only for local mushrooms and for fruit and, early on, for onions and potatoes. We will for the first time have somethingfrom the garden a couple times a week until the next crop of spinach, radishes and even our own asparagus, is ready. And the seed catalogues are already coming in for 2013.