I am dreaming of greens.
It is garden catalog season and they come into the house bringing promises of warmth and sunshine and glorious color igniting all our fantasies and lusts.
I think I had said, sometime or another over the past year that I really didn't miss gardening. It was a lie, the basest form of self-deception, because here I am thinking about all the things that need to be done in the yard and I get all giddy with excitement. If I didn't want to garden nothing would "need" to be done.
But I want to work on all those projects that have been spinning around in the back of my head. I want to finish promised flower beds, and plant new flower beds in the sunshine around the deck. I have never had a sun garden, well except for the vegetable garden, and I want to resurrect that as well.
Of course the seed catalogs fan the flames of planters lust, but really I am just as much egged on by Denis Cotter's descriptions of various vegetables in my current book, Wild Garlic, Goosberries…and me. Every page, every new green, or root makes me want to cook, or even more, it makes me want to dig in the earth and grow something new. I got this book because Cotter's Cafe Paradiso Cookbook had become a favorite discovery this past year. This book is more prose with recipes, not really a cookbook, but it makes me want to cook.
The chapter on greens especially got my attention. Even before reading this book I had been contemplating my own bed of Tuscan Kale, something we never seem to find quite enough of in the farmer's market to quench our lust for its dark green almost crunchy flavor.
Then Cotter starts writing about greens I can't find and I want them even more. When he wrote about sprouting broccoli I was drooling. I had to run to the catalog stash and start pawing frantically through the pages to see if I too could grow this marvelous vegetable.
Apparently it needs to overwinter.
This is a problem as it is hardy only to zone 7 and Dutchess County is most definitely zone 6. Granted the part of the county along the Hudson is warmer than further east, but still not zone 7. There is one part of my front yard, protected from the North and the West that perhaps is 10 degrees milder than the rest of the yard. I sheltered an azalea only hardy to zone 8 there for several years, until an unusually hard winter took it.
Still, I was wondering if I could plant it in one of the flower beds in the front yard. The maple has shed its leaves by winter. Would that give it enough sun? Or should I plant it in a big barrel and bring it into the protection of the front yard as the weather turns cold? Can I insulate the pot enough if I wrap it with roofing paper and layers of straw enmeshed in chicken wire? What about layers of straw alternating with layers of bubble wrap?
Have I lost my mind?
Perhaps.
I don't know if this is the obsessive gardener or the obsessive cook coming out here. Perhaps both.
Comments
2 responses to “The Greens Made Me Do It.”
I haven’t had a vegetable garden for over a decade, but Pater built some raised beds last year and this year we might even get them planted. Books like yours really inspiring garden-dreaming, don’t they!
I started some swiss chard and mixed lettuces in little pots and transplanted them amid my flowers. My vegetable bed is too small for all that I want to grow. I have always admired landscapes where people mix in food and purely decorative plants.