Late fall and early winter have always been the saddest time of year for me. This is the furthest point in the calendar year from tending to growing fruits and vegetables. I think this must be why somebody bunched so many holidays together at this time…to help us forget the bleak frozen dirt outside our doors.

But I’m never one to give up easily. Which is why I keep planting well into fall, and make sure that at least a few of our 52 garden beds have something hardy and green in them for as long as mother nature-ly possible.

We’ve had many frosts this year, but luckily they’ve been fairly shallow. We were able to harvest a full range of garden fresh vegetables for the Thanksgiving table. And we hope to continue through Christmas with a little sun and continued luck.

Then in January, the seed catalogs start coming…and I can spot the light at the end of the tunnel.

Take a look at our garden as of the end of November in the slide show below. (Captions below pictures.) Maybe you’ll get some ideas to extend your own garden next winter:

Winter Spinach

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 11

Last year, our Bloomsdale Spinach lived through the winter. A heavy snowfall that doesn't thaw can actually serve to insulate plants. We're hoping for the same this year.

Radish Seed Pods

Maybe the tastiest joys of early summer are baby turnips. Most of us associate turnips as one of the stoic, tough, hard-boiled root staples that get us through a long hard winter. But when planted and harvested earlier in the year, they’re like little amethyst jewels which can either be steamed, roasted, or even grated raw into a slaw.

Baby Turnips are an early garden treat.

If there’s one thing you’ve probably learned about us, it’s that we really don’t like to waste anything – especially food.  So what makes harvesting “premature” turnips even more wonderful is that their greens are also at a great stage for eating. They’re not yet at that hafta-boil-the-hell-outta-em stage.

Below is one of our favorite recipes using baby turnips, their greens, and a few other great leaves of summer. You’d be hardpressed to find a healthier salad anywhere, and this one can be served either hot or room temperature.

3-GREEN BABY TURNIP SALAD with Honey Mustard Dressing.

1 bunch of baby turnips, with greens (each turnip 1-3 inches in diameter.)

1 bunch swiss chard

1 bunch early mustard greens

(any type of early cooking green can be substituted – baby kale, baby collards…)

2 T olive oil

zest of one lemon

For Dressing

2 t honey

1 t white wine vinegar

1 t lemon juice

1 t dry mustard

2 t olive oil

salt, pepper to taste

First separate turnips from greens, remove root. Be sure to leave 1/4 of stems left on turnips. (Never slice root top off any root vegetables before cooking – beets, turnips, rutabagas, etc. The flavor and vitamins will drain while cooking.)

Always leave a little of the tops on when roasting root vegetables.

Place turnip bulbs in shallow pan, coat with oil, cover, and place in 400 degree oven for approx 20 – 30 minutes. They’re done when easily pierced with knife.

L to R.: Ruby Red Swiss Chard, Lucullus Chard, Osaka Purple Mustard, Purple Top turnip greens.

While turnips are roasting, wash all greens. This sounds simpler than it really is. Chard, mustard, and turnip leaves have deep ridges that hold a lot of sand, dirt, and bugs. The easiest way to thoroughly wash these greens is to submerge in a sink full of cold water then rinse each one separately as you remove them. No need to dry them. They’ll be boiled. Slice away and discard any tough stems on anything other than the chard. On the chard, slice away the beautiful stems and cut into one inch segments.

Chop remaining greens coarsely.

Bring pot of water to boil, add chard stems first, then three minutes later add chopped greens. Cover. Boil until just tender – only about 10 minutes, tops. You’ll want them to retain a little more texture than the more familiar wintertime boiled collards.

Combine ingredients for dressing, and shake vigorously.

Drain greens (save juice for soups or even drinking,) and allow to cool with finished turnips. Then arrange in bowl or plate, top with turnips, sprinkle with lemon zest, and drizzle with dressing.

Sweet, earthy, sharp and a little bitter...like ourselves!

Enjoy this dish on a rainy summer day…maybe one with a slight chill. The earthy, warm taste of the greens and turnips might be a little reminiscent of cooler seasons, but the surprising brightness of their younger flavors will remind you to celebrate summer even more.

Soft spinach leaves are complimented by the peppery bite of nasturtium (they’re also pretty nice to look at!). Grapes add a touch of sweetness without being overpowering and the chives, oniony and crisp, add yet another dimension. Whether you serve it with the cheese or without, is entirely up to you.

Makes 4 servings
Ingredients

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons honey
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 cups packed (8 ounces) washed and well-dried spinach, preferably flat leaf or baby
2 cups loosely packed nasturtium flowers and leaves (leaves torn if large)
1 cup seedless red grapes, halved lengthwise
3 flowering chives, greens thinly sliced, flowers torn
4 ounces goat feta, crumbled, optional

Preparation

In a large bowl, whisk together the oil, vinegar, honey, and salt until well combined. Add the spinach, nasturtium flowers and leaves, grapes, and chives and toss to coat. Serve immediately.

Each week this summer, we’re working with our friend, Sandy Gluck, to develop original recipes fresh from the garden. Next week, the carrots should be ready

Our first spring salad.

Admittedly, this isn’t exactly going to be the most complicated recipe we’ve ever posted. But it is one of the most seasonal ones. After all, there’s nothing better to mark the transition into the new gardening year than the season’s first homegrown salad.  While we’re always excited about providing for ourselves all winter with our jars of preserved homegrown foodstuffs, we always begin to deeply resent applesauce come the middle of April. (And there are still four jars to go…)

This weekend we were able to pull together our first “real live salad.” Although our lettuce seedlings are still barely sprouted, we had the amazing good fortune of watching the snow melt and realizing that a few of last fall’s spinach plants had survived the winter completely unaided. That borders on miraculous. We think the heavy, steady snow cover must have served to insulate the bed. Or whatever. We don’t really care why it happened. Never look a gift salad in the mouth.

This small outcropping of Bloomsdale Lonstanding Spinach surived a harsh winter in our garden.

But there wasn’t quite enough spinach for both of us, so we put on our foraging hats (no, they don’t have little flashlights) and went in search of dandelions. Such a search at The Beekman could be measured in steps – two to be exact. We’re smothered in dandelions this time of year. But we have a short window. Fresh dandelion leaves only taste palatable before they blossom. Some chefs claim they’re at their peak when the flower bud is just emerging from the ground, but before it shoots up and opens.

"Dandelion" derives from the french name for its toothlike leaves - the "dents" of a lion.

Most people know that they can eat dandelion leaves. But few ever do. We’re not sure why not. Perhaps it’s their bad lawn rep. They’re just as tasty as most mesclun varieties, and they’re packed with nutrients. 1 C of raw dandelion leaves has 112% percent of your daily Vitamin A requirement. That’s more than nearly any other source you can think of.

After collecting our dandelions and spinach we decided that perhaps we could thin out a few sprouts from the garden for variety. We snipped some radish sprouts, and a couple of too close for comfort pea shoots.

A French Breakfast Radish sprout.

A tasty Thomas Laxton Pea Shoot.

Everyone knows that the dressing is what makes the salad. We added some chopped chives and crushed lemon thyme (that had also survived the winter) to our homemade apple cider vinegar and let it steep a few hours in the sun. (More about making your own vinegar here.)

Lemon thyme has all the flavor of French Thyme, with an acidic lemony edge.

A week of unseasonably hot spring weather has sent our chives to flower already.

A little olive oil was all we needed to make a simple vinaigrette. (We typically use a ratio of 2 pts oil to 1 pt vinegar, though many cooks would advise 3 pts oil to 1 pt vinegar.)

A vinegrette made from our homemade apple cider vinegar, olive oil, lemon thyme & chives.

Are we going to win any culinary awards for our Dandelion Spinach Radish & Pea Shoot salad? Probably not. Do we care? …Even less than the odds of eating our way through this:

It would take us forever to eat through our yard.

We have no worries, because spring eating season is finally here!

(Do you think the goats would finish up those last four jars of applesauce?)

Dr. Brent fillin' up

IT TOOK 25 YEARS for my taste buds to mature enough to appreciate cooked spinach.  Why?  Probably they were trying to tell me that raw spinach is the better way to go.  Overcooked and canned spinach lose as much as 50% of their nutrients.  Spinach is high in Vitamin A (beta-carotene which is good for eye health), Vitamin C and folate.  It is an exceptionally good source of iron and calcium; however, spinach also contains oxalic acid which can inhibit the body’s absorption of these nutrients.  Absorption of iron can be increased by eating spinach with a fruit or vegetable that contains additional Vitamin C.  Baby spinach has all the nutrients of full-grown leaves but lower oxalate levels.

Why grow it yourself when it’s so easily available in every grocery store?  Spinach is one of the foods on which the most pesticide residues are found.

Did you know that people with latex allergies are often also allergic to spinach?

THEY BOTH MADE SPINACH FAMOUS. However, Landreth did so first. About a hundred years earlier, actually. Landreth introduced the Bloomsdale Long Standing variety of spinach in 1826 and it’s still the most popular variety of spinach sold in the U.S.  Just goes to show you that not all heirloom seeds are long forgotten relics.

Our favorite part about spinach is its hardiness. It’s one of the first to go into the garden, and one of the last to come out. It takes a few months off in the summer heat. But we all deserve a vacation. Basically, wherever a space arises in the garden in spring or late summer…in goes the spinach seeds.  Chard, though a bit more finicky and slower than spinach, is another garden star. Once we finally get a good batch growing, it seems that we can cut it for dinner one evening and have new leaves by the next morning. Plus the colors…  Our favorite variety, “Ruby Chard” is a shortened nickname for “Rhubarb Chard.” The brilliant scarlet of its stems looks exactly like miniature stalks of rhubarb.

Oh! And let’s not forget our “faux” spinaches. New Zealand spinach isn’t spinach at all. Doesn’t even look like it really. But it bridges that time in the summer when “real” spinach goes on vacation in the heat. And Strawberry spinach – also not a true spinach – has beautiful small red/pink berries that are beautiful and tasty enough that we don’t care what kind of plant it is. Tough to grow though. Give it a shot.

Here are the varieties we’re growing this year.  Let us know if you’re trying any of them in your garden in the comment section below the photos. Now we’re off to practice our Popeye laugh.

BLOOMSDALE LONG STANDING SPINACH – Introduced by Landreth Seed Company in 1826, it’s still the most popular spinach sold.

STRAWBERRY SPINACH – Grown in Europe for centuries, this is not a true spinach, but its leaves are delicious in salads. Its red mulberry-like fruits can be dried or used fresh.

NEW ZEALAND SPINACH – Not a true spinach, but flavorful in salads. Can be grown in summer when other spinach cannot grow.

LUCULLUS SWISS CHARD – Introduced in 1914, this variety was named after the Roman general and epicure, Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Vigorous plants grow 24 30 in. Large, thick, deeply crumpled light green leaves have large, white, rounded midribs. Tolerates hot weather.

RHUBARD RUBY RED SWISS CHARD–  Introduced in 1857, this is also known as Rhubarb Chard or Ruby Chard. It is very popular because of its deep crimson stalks and veins and the black green, heavily crumpled leaves. Stalks are thick, tender and juicy and taste is milder.