3 ~ Snow carrots & winter cress
A challenge of living off what’s on hand at this time of year is fresh produce. Thawed raspberries, as brilliantly red as the day I froze them, aren’t too far removed from the taste of summer. Nor in fact is frozen broccoli revived in steam. But not quite the same.
Yet I found I still have options pn this cusp of late winter. Last spring, the germination of my carrot seed was so poor that I tried a second planting in July (this time in loose, rich soil where a compost bin once stood). The second round did better, and in late November I was still digging carrots to season the stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey. I then covered the rest of the carrot patch with a bit of straw and hay, in anticipation of the deepening cold. And promptly forgot about it.
A few weeks ago, an approaching blast of frigid air roused me from my carrot neglect. I took a pitchfork and trowel out to see what I might still find. Within ten minutes I unearthed about two dozen healthy carrots, suspended in cold storage in the cool but unfrozen soil. Granted, some were no bigger than my thumb, but good food nonetheless. I found it deeply satisfying, while surrounded by the snow and skies of February, to work my fingers through loose, dark soil, harvesting food. A metaphor of hope.
I’m aware that some experienced gardeners plan and plant for late, cold harvest carrots, and I simply blundered into what they already know. And as I dug I wondered, ‘how low can this go?’ With the cold in the next day’s forecast, I left some of the carrot patch undisturbed, except to blanket it with a bit more straw. That night, the weather change was led by a few inches of snowfall (perfect - more insulation), the cold front followed, and the next morning it was -20F (-29C) at the house. A good test of carrot resilience.
About a week ago, on one of the last days of February, I got out to explore again with a pitchfork and trowel. Under the snow, straw and a hard crust of an inch or so of frozen soil, still more carrots slumbered in fine, crunchy fettle (see photo above). Some even retained a few garlands of their bright green leafy tops. I dug another dozen or so, and left still more behind – to see how long this good harvest can continue. I’ll let you know.
To supplement the carrots, I’m blessed to have not far from the house a beautiful spring, an oasis of watercress. I’ve heard that watercress should be collected and eaten only in months with an ‘r’ in their names (in other words, not in summer). Certainly, their green growth on the spring now is resplendent, and cress is one of my favorite leafy greens. I’ve been collecting enough to keep well provisioned in watercress and carrot salads.
In the forests of Laos, I’ve sometimes had the privilege to work with a group of hunter-gatherers known as the Atel. The Atel follow a taboo against mixing wild and domestic foods in the same dish or meal. Perhaps their instincts are right on this – some years before I met them, these traditional forest-dwellers were rounded up by the authorities and forced to settle into the domestic life of a village. They have not fared well. Perhaps above all, they have suffered spiritual and emotional trauma from severance from the forest places and lives they knew. The last time I saw them, fewer than twenty Atel – the only speakers of their language in the world – still survived.
The arc of my lesser journey is different. Mine is a return, from a fully domestic life, back to more of the wild that I (or at least my ancestral genes) once knew. A restoration to something familiar, rather than a debilitating upheaval into the new and unknown. I can take the mixing of domestic and wild (carrots and watercress, for example) as a symbolic step in a return toward something better, fuller. Unfortunately for the Atel, given their starting point and, crucially, that their changed was forced upon them, a similar mixing is a portent of loss.
Let’s take a moment to remember them.