Growing Greens in Winter

As a kid I didn’t like vegetables.  Few kids do but I think it was worse for my generation.  We came up in a time when food was aggressively being corporatized.  The memory of the quaint grocery store on the corner of my Dad’s childhood neighborhood is nearly overshadowed by the emergence of the modern grocery store, quite literally “super” markets.  In order to fill the rows and rows of shelves most everything in these supermarkets had to be processed and in those days, that meant canning.  

It’s better today but in those earlier times when they were ramping up production, little subtleties like quality, taste and aesthetics were casualties.  One taste of canned asparagus was enough to put me off of the odd little veggie for decades and don’t even get me talking about canned peas.  When you you can describe a food item as looking “like fat gangrenous ticks” there’s no amount of culinary artistry going to make them palatable.

Lettuce was about the only veggie I actually liked.  In contrast to canned vegetable mush, it was crisp, cool and refreshing.  Perhaps because I liked lettuce, early on I started looking to other types of greens as veggies I might like.  It took time but over the years I did find varieties and ways of preparing them that I liked.

The really cool thing about all the kales, turnips, chards, cresses is that with a little accommodation, many of them can be grown during the winter.  If I’ve learned anything in the last three years it’s that winter gardening with greens is where it’s at!  In terms of adding variety and nutrition to your diet with minimal effort, these plants make the enterprise a no brainer.

Winter accommodation of greens is a three pronged approach.  First you have to select types and varieties that will do well in your area.  Collards though winter hardy are less so than Kale which explains the regional preferences for them.  Second you have to start them early enough in good amended soils so that they’ll have good root systems and be well established before the cooler weather slows their growth.  Lastly you need to be prepared to protect them from extremes.  In my area, that mostly means having some loose mulch available to put over your plants if really cold weather threatens, I use wheat straw.  When cold weather threatens I simply throw some straw over the plants.  After the threat has passed you just pull the straw back off the plants and it serves as additional mulch.  In other areas you might need to throw an additional cover over them.  Floating row covers do maintain a few extra degrees under them.  A good strategy is to take them off during the day so that the sun can warm the soils and place the rows over them at sun set to minimize over night heat loss.  Plastic sheeting can be used the same way in more extreme conditions. 

To this I would add that you can also grow more tender greens like lettuce in the winter using cold frames.  Even a small frame can yield large returns.  We made ours with a few bales of straw laid out in a “U” shape that was open to the south to allow maximum exposure to the winter sun and protection against cold northerly winds.  If we expected freezing temps we simply pulled some plastic sheeting over the top.  Our small patch (~2’ X 6’) yielded several large salads a week without ever looking picked over.

This year I decided to do a test to see exactly how cold hardy the greens I was growing were by allowing them to remain fully exposed during a cold spell where we had temps dip to the low teens for several nights in a row.  Basically, I go these results:

• The curly kale acted like nothing ever happened.  We’ve eaten it since, both raw and cooked and it’s as good as ever.
• Collards initially wilted but came right back and look no worse for the wear.  I’ve yet to cook any to see if flavor was affected but generally speaking, people say cold weather improves their taste
• The Tuscan kale took a bit of a hit but largely came through unscathed.  I haven’t tried to cook any since but did pick and eat a raw piece and it seemed unaffected.
• Broccoli was a near total loss and showed some damage after the first night.  Ordinarily, this would be upsetting but a late season warm spell sent the plant I’d planted for a spring harvest into early production and we’d already harvested the largest part of the crop.
• Turnip greens were a complete loss.  Initially they looked like they were going to come through the cold snap but after a few warmer days they withered and died.

Though I did experience some losses during this experiment I did at least learn where to concentrate my efforts next winter.  All in all growing winter greens has proven very rewarding and provides a good nutritional return on the amount of time invested.

While greens are thought of as simple fair, they can be dressed up pretty easily.  Let some pepper flake, onion and pancetta sing in a bit of olive oil, add some roughly chopped fresh collards and use a little white wine as a brazing liquid and you’ve got something special.  Garnish them with a few pine nuts or golden raisins (or both) and you’ve got something extraordinary and if you’ve got a nice bottle of home made pepper vinegar to go on them, well that’s heaven.