Excerpt
"The winter was not given to us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. If it is a cold and hard season, its fruit, no doubt, is the more concentrated and nutty."
—Henry David Thoreau
PRESENTING THE FOUR-SEASON HARVEST
A heavy wet snow is falling today. There could be a foot or more, said the radio, before its voice was silenced by a toppling tree that took out our power. It's a beautiful snow, clumping thickly on the evergreen woods that encircle our little house and bringing them in closer like a soft white duvet. This is the fourth snowfall so far this month, and it's the 10th of April. Being vegetable gardeners of great enthusiasm you would think we'd be dismayed, champing at the bit, eager to grow fresh food for the table again. But that is all in the past. We have managed to turn winter from deprivation to celebration.
We throw on our coats and go out to the cold frames to pick a salad for dinner. The cold frames are glass-covered, bottomless wooden boxes, eight feet long and four feet wide, lined up at the back of the garden along our gravel path, and a celebratory sight they are as full of green bounty as the produce aisle at the local market. Lifting up the glass lids and propping them with a notched stick, we are treated to a good whiff of moist unfrozen soil. While the snow sifts about us we get busy cutting tender leaves with small serrated knives, filling a towel-lined basket. Dressed with a good olive oil and a squirt of lemon, the salad will taste like renewal—a perfect accompaniment to the leek and potato soup simmering on the back of the stove.
This fresh daily harvest goes on all year, both from our traditional outdoor summer garden and our unconventional protected winter garden. The results are sumptuous. Dinner guests habitually exclaim about the freshness and flavor of our salads and always ask,"What all is in there?" In January, for example, our answer might be "a mix of frisée endive, baby leaf spinach, Chioggia radicchio, wild arugula, miner's lettuce, buckshorn plantain, and corn salad." We can almost anticipate the next question.
"From where?" they query; slightly conspiratorially, expecting us to confess to expensive overnight air delivery from exotic foreign suppliers. When we tell them we harvested the salad earlier that day from our unheated winter garden, the suspicion changes to stunned disbelief. "In winter? But it's too cold."
"Not for these crops. They don't mind freezing temperatures. These greens are the traditional winter peasant foods of southern France and northern Italy. Granted our winters are colder, but our simple protection makes up for the lower temperatures.
They nod in understanding but then pause again after a few more mouthfuls."But you don't have enough sun way up here, do you? I mean, southern France is like Florida."
We acknowledge it may seem like that is so, but the truth is something different. "Based on daylength and sunshine, Miami, on the 26th parallel of latitude in Florida, corresponds with the city of Luxor, near the ruins of ancient Thebes, on the shore of the Nile River in southern Egypt. In contrast, the resort town of Cannes on the Mediterranean coast of France has the same winter sunshine and daylength as the city of Portland on the Atlantic coast of Maine."
"Maine? I can't believe it."
"It's true. Most of Europe lies further north on the globe than the U.S. does. Our farm on the 44th parallel in Maine is on the same latitude as Avignon in southern France and Genoa on the warm Ligurian coast of Italy. That means we have the same daylength and amount of sun they do."
The visitors' surprise and their response are not unexpected. We have received that same reaction from gardeners everywhere. In the first place, many people assume all vegetables will be killed by freezing temperatures in winter. Yet we habitually grow some thirty different crops that survive freezing temperatures with no problem when given a little protection from the wind, which is the real outdoor plant killer in winter. Secondly, many people assume there will not be enough sunshine during the winter months. Yet we get as much sunshine as regions of the world where winter gardening is traditional. That latter fact is probably the most surprising.
It is logical to assume that warm temperatures and sunshine go hand in hand. If France has a warmer winter climate, it must be sunnier. In truth, since Avignon has more cloudy winter days than we do, there is actually more winter sunshine in Maine. That raises an obvious question. Then how come the Maine climate and the French climate are so different? Just because we are on the same latitude doesn't necessarily mean we have the same climate. The climate difference between southern France and mid-coastal Maine is caused by forces independent of latitude. Different climates are a result of different air and ocean currents.
Whereas masses of cold arctic air moving south across Canada give the northern parts of the North American continent a mostly frozen winter, the situation in France is different. The Gulf Stream, a massive flow of warm water moving northward across the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean to Scandinavia, ensures that western Europe's winter will be mostly cool and moist. Similarly, the warm Pacific currents on the west coast of the U.S. mean that Juneau, Alaska at latitude 570 has a warmer average temperature in January than New York City at latitude 41º. If judged on temperature alone, a gardener in Juneau should have a slightly easier time growing winter vegetables than a gardener in New York. But for winter vegetable crops, temperature is not the principal deciding factor. Daylength—the amount of available sunlight—is.
And that brings us back to latitude. Latitude determines daylength and the quantity of potential sunlight available to a winter gardener. Places around the globe at the same latitude will have the same daylength. Thus our Maine farm in the northeastern corner of the U.S. shares a "sun line" with those parts of France, previously mentioned, which lie on the same 44th parallel. Places to the north of that line, such as the rest of northern Europe, have less winter gardening potential than we do. And places to the south of that line, which includes 85 percent of the U.S., have better sun for winter vegetable gardening than Mediterranean France. We should make better use of it.
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