Then we received word that Jeff Vraets had subscribed to our posts. Welcome, Jeff! We checked out his blog and found this description of his new hoop house. It was unclear whether he was planning to use it year-round, though.

From Jeff’s blog, we hopscotched to these two blog sites, with entries on greenhouses and/or winter harvest: Henbogle and Fast Grow the Weeds.

It’s great to read that others are experimenting with greenhouses for extending the growing season and year-round harvesting!

Mark drove up to visit with Paul Arnold a few weeks ago. In addition to using a large root cellar, the Arnolds extend the growing season by using two enormous unheated greenhouses, measuring 140 x 50 feet. (By comparison, ours is 48 x 22, and Mark and Lydia have one that is even smaller.)

While Paul and a single helper tended to greens and some beautiful chard from one of their large, “echoey” greenhouses, Mark told them about our operations here in the mid-Hudson and asked some questions about how Pleasant Valley does things.

One of the takeaways that Mark reported to us was that Paul considers low humidity levels in the greenhouse to be key in the winter. Plants can survive really low temperatures, Paul said, but not if the humidity is high inside the greenhouse.

Logan reminded us that last winter, as the temperatures turned sharply down and we started using row covers, we lost all of our arugula and broccoli rabe to some sort of rot. Up until then, we had been watering regularly and the greenhouse had a lot of moisture in it. This year, we have a bed of arugula that is doing fine, and the humidity is quite low in the greenhouse.

On a related note, Paul told Mark that cold air in motion is hard on plants. Keeping the row covers close to the plants keeps the air around them still and holds the heat from the soil close to them.

Mark was so impressed with Pleasant Valley’s operation that we hope to make a return trip–with more of our Winter Bounty team–on a day when we can help Paul with some tending or harvesting while continuing to bounce ideas around.

At first, we greeted every successive snowstorm with trepidation. Then we realized that inside the greenhouse, the plants were thriving. All winter, we were posting blog entries like “Under a Blanket of Snow, an Edible Green Landscape,” and “We Survived the Blizzard of 2010.” (At the time, we didn’t realize how often we’d have the opportunity to recycle that headline!)

The Winter Bounty greenhouse on January 29, 2011, in the midst of the snowiest winter in recent memory.

During the bitterly cold and snowy season, the plants began hugging the ground; carrot foliage was spread out in circles like plates. Most of the plants turned purple. At first we thought something was wrong, but the purple foliage tasted just as good as typical green. And oh, how sweet the plants were! We did some reading and discovered that all three of these qualities–the flattened foliage, the purple leaves, and the sweetness–were physiological responses to the cold.

Late in the season, a scientist who studies the effect of snow on the soil below it told us that it was probable that the pileup of snow around the greenhouse was helping to insulate it and the plants inside. We speculated that our great first season was in fact because of the snow, not in spite of it.

Fast forward to the winter of 2011/2012. After a stunning early-season snowstorm, this has been one of the warmest and un-snowiest winters in memory–the exact reverse of last year.

The greenhouse on Febuary 2, 2012, an uncharacteristically warm winter.

This warmer-than-average weather, together with some weather events earlier in the year, has created a different sort of winter harvest experience for us.

For starters, we have seen very little of the flattened and purple foliage that last year’s cold brought on. We did notice that some of the greens are sweetening up.

However, those same greens seem plagued with a disease or something that is causing the leaves to yellow and die off. In particular, it has been difficult to keep spinach healthy. We probably won’t conquer this problem until we return the greenhouse to its original location (for next winter’s harvest) and let the elements take care of things.

Some of our difficulties go back to this summer when extreme rains brought by two near-misses with hurricanes affected our planting schedule and success. In particular, we were plagued by caterpillars after those storms, and Logan’s research indicated that many of them might have been blown north by hurricane winds. Caterpillars (and also grasshoppers) were eating seedlings as fast as we could plant them. As a result, we started the cold season with greens that were not as mature as we would have liked.

And, appallingly, some critters are still finding a safe haven inside the greenhouse. A few weeks ago I dispatched a green cabbage worm that I found on the greenhouse door, and I chased down a small grasshopper last week. Spinach seedlings that were just starting to put on new growth have been chewed by something.

We are still harvesting plenty of food; but the late start due to summer conditions and the damage to the greens means our plates this winter are filled with more with carrots, beets and leeks than with cooked or salad greens. (One exception has been the lacinato kale, which thrived and stayed healthy.)

Fortunately, because the days are getting longer, we can start planting seeds now that will feed us this spring.

Note: Thanks to Sue Grumet and Mary McWade for the nice writeup of the Winter Bounty Project in Dutchess Dirt, a gardening newsletter from Cornell Cooperative Extension Dutchess County. The newsletter can be accessed here; click on February 2012 for the PDF of “our” issue.

This happened last week when we decided to pull up the remaining hakurei turnips to make way for some lettuce that we want to plant in the next week or so. When I cleaned my share of the tiny white turnips, I realized I had at least a gallon–more than I could use. So I brought a bag of turnips and their greens to my friend Margot. They had been pulled from the ground at 10 a.m. and were part of her dinner that night.

Here’s Margot’s report:

They were delicious!  I cut up a potato with them, mixed them with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and 1/2 teaspoon of sugar.  I preheated the oven to 425 with a cookie sheet in it.  When the oven was ready, I put them on the hot cookie sheet and let them cook, for maybe 25 minutes or so. When they were ready I tossed them with the greens, and the heat cooked the greens.  Everybody LOVED them.  Well okay, not the kids. But all three adults were wanting more. Thank you so much. It so great to cook with real food.

In the meantime, our carrots are the the most logical candidate for dessert preparations. Last weekend, for dinner guests, I dusted off an old Food and Wine clipping with a recipe for a sponge cake made with finely chopped carrots, almonds, and–curiously–lady finger cookies. The robust flavors were lightened by the whipped egg whites, and the cake needed only a bit of whipped heavy cream rather than the traditional carrot cake topping of heavy cream cheese icing.

After I had cleaned up the carrots for the dessert, I pureed their leafy tops with some garlic and olive oil to make small bowl of pesto that we served with crackers. So Winter Bounty carrots both started and ended the meal. Needless to say, our dinner guests were flabbergasted to hear that the carrots had been harvested that very afternoon–along with kale, turnips, and leeks that appeared elsewhere in the meal.

I’ve looked unsuccessfully for the Carrot-Almond cake recipe online; this one comes closest and has the advantage of using flour instead of lady fingers.

Turnips are one of the stars of the Winter Bounty greenhouse--easy to grow and easy to eat

A new year’s New York Times headline advises, “Give Turnips a Second Chance.” Those of us involved with the Winter Bounty greenhouse don’t need to; they are one of our star crops–easy to grow and easy to eat.

Last fall, we planted a small bed of Hakurei turnips, a small variety with a smooth, thin, white skin. They survived the winter temperatures easily, but we ate them up too quickly.

These little turnips don’t even need to be cooked; they can be sliced into salads or eaten straight out of the garden. I particularly like a salad of raw sliced Hakurei turnips with apricots and toasted nuts from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables. The turnip greens are pureed with other ingredients for a wonderful Green Goddess dressing.

The pretty little Hakurei turnips don't even need to be cooked.

The greens are also delicious sautéed, sometimes with the small turnips still attached.

This year, we expanded the space devoted to root vegetables and planted the traditional purple-topped turnips in addition to the hakureis. During the rains following Hurricane Irene, the soil surrounding the young seedlings eroded, and as a result, all of the turnips appear to be growing above ground. As a result, the skins are a bit leathery and brown, but they are still delicious.

The Times article was timely not because we need to be convinced to like turnips but because we were looking for some fresh ways of cooking with them. Last weekend, Logan made the Couscous with Turnips and Sweet Potatoes. In addition to the large purple turnips, she made use of carrots, leeks, and cilantro from the greenhouse, and sweet potatoes and onions from her own backyard garden. The only storebought ingredients were the spices, the chickpeas, and the couscous. She omitted the harissa, because all of the ingredients were already in the stew (cayenne pepper, caraway, and coriander), and she reports it was still plenty spicy. And delicious.

I had planned to make the Rice Noodle and Chicken Stir-Fry with the same purple-top turnips, julienned as the recipe instructs. But I came home from a work session with a couple dozen very small Hakurei turnips that I’d planned to sauté with the greens on as a side dish. When a few days went by and the turnips were still sitting on my counter, I decided to use them in the stir-fry instead of the larger ones. I just sliced them in half if they were larger than a marble. The carrots in the stir-fry also came from the greenhouse, and I added some diced red bell pepper (storebought) that I wanted to use up.

A third recipe from the New York Times piece appealed to my inner Irishwoman: a mash of turnips and potatoes with turnip greens that is supposedly inspired by the Irish dish Colcannon: mashed potatoes with kale or cabbage. (No matter that I’d never tasted this delicacy.) Potatoes, turnips, and turnip greens were mashed together with some sauteed leeks and bound together with a bit of of half-and-half. The ingredients melded into a superb midweek comfort food that was delicious as a side to some sliced sausage. The only thing I’d do differently is add some garlic.

We do ad-lib sometimes, as is the case with the fennel we planted a few months ago. Logan told me that fennel always bolted when she grew it outside in the heat of summer, so we decided to plant it in the late summer, hoping it would mature by late fall and then stand up to chilly greenhouse conditions in the winter. I found seeds for Florence Fennel, or finocchio, the variety that grows with delicious bulbs above the roots.

Fennel turns out to not like the cold any more than it likes the heat. It didn’t mature quickly enough, and most of the smallish bulbs had suffered some frost damage, even in our relatively mild winter and even with an extra layer of fabric row cover protecting them. Last week, we decided it was time to pull the plug.

The fennel roots looked like small, hairy parsnips.

I began removing the plants, hoping to salvage enough healthy bits to make Mark Bittman’s recipe for chicken thighs roasted on a bed of fennel. Then I noticed the strong, sturdy roots. They looked like small parsnips. I wiped one small root off on my pants leg and tasted it. A subtle hint of fennel flavor came through.

So I came home with an armload of fennel bulbs, roots, and fronds, and consulted the internet. I found not a single recipe using fennel root but did find several references that assured me the were indeed edible. I decided to clean them up, cook them in some chicken stock, and puree them for a creamy soup. I expected a subtle fennel flavor that I would enhance by garnishing it with fronds.

The fennel root soup looked delicious but was bland and a bit too much work.

Readers, this was a wasted effort. So much dirt clung to the hairy, pinky-sized fennel roots that I had to attempt to peel them in order to keep it out of the soup. Way too much work. And, even with the fennel frond garnish, there was very little of that bright licorice-like flavor that you get with fennel bulbs. Really, the only good part was the croutons. Otherwise, bland, bland, bland.

About 20 small fennel bulbs, peeled down to healthy flesh, were chopped and made a bed for roasting chicken thighs.

Not so the chicken thighs. After trimming the rotten outsides off of about 25 stunted fennel bulbs, I was able to cover the bottom of a small roasting pan with about a half-inch of chopped fennel that I seasoned with salt, pepper, and thyme, doused in olive oil, and roasted for 10 minutes before layering the chicken thighs on top and roasting another 35 minutes. (Consult the link above for the detailed recipe.) As Bittman says, the fennel flavors the chicken and vice versa; it was a delicious way to bid farewell to the fennel patch.

But an impending change in the weather signalled time for a change at the greenhouse. A group of us met yesterday to shore up against a night when the temperatures were supposed to drop to below 10F. It was already quite frigid outside, but inside the greenhouse it got up above 40F, and we were able to drop a few layers of winterwear.

Straw piled up against the endwalls to seal in the warmth of the greenhouse. During the warmth of the day, we usually pull aside the row cover fabric to give the plants access to more light. They are covered up again late in the afternoon, and will stay covered all day on extremely cold days.

Because we didn’t have a blanket of snow insulating the greenhouse like last year, we packed straw against the bottom of the sidewalls to keep the heat from escaping out the bottom, and we worked on sealing up the air leaks at the edges of the barn doors.

Meanwhile, we also cleaned up the mizuna and parsley beds, which were both suffering from some yellowing and rotting leaves, and pulled up most of the fennel, which hasn’t weathered even our mild conditions this year.

It is not often that we have so many members of our collective under the greenhouse roof at one time, and we enjoyed catching up on holiday travels and meals.

We chatted about holiday meals and recipes before going our separate ways.

Spending a few minutes with a friend in a warm and fertile environment, rather than enduring shopping cart bumper cars and blasts of canned holiday music in order to get provisions for a Christmas or Hanukkah meal. What a great gift!

We also, finally,  have the makings for simple tossed salads. If you follow this blog, you know we had a rough start to salad season because of our late summer/early fall caterpillar infestation. We had to replant a lot of things, including the spinach that was so hardy last winter. As a result, our salad crops appear to be down in volume from last winter, but they are starting to take on that lovely sweetness that is brought on when the weather cools down. We have spinach, arugula, red-leafed lettuce, black-seeded simpson, and a couple of kinds of mustard greens.

This salad comes from Alan and Miriam, the newest members of our greenhouse group; it’s Alan’s version of a Middle Eastern salad he was served in Israel. Like most of us, Alan doesn’t measure.

Middle Eastern Salad

1/2 pound (approx.) salad greens (arugula, mustard greens, spinach), chopped
4-5 radishes, grated
Fresh mint, chopped fine, to taste
Lime juice; start with half a lime and add more if needed. It should be really tart.
Olive oil; start with just a bit and add enough to coat the greens
salt and pepper to taste
a pinch or two of Zatar

Assemble the greens, radish, mint, and seasonings and toss the salad with the lime juice and olive oil right before serving.

Alan says the mint is the key ingredient and the Zatar is a Middle Eastern spice mix that adds a unique flavor. After Alan sent this recipe, I collected some spinach and black radishes from the greenhouse and unearthed a handful of mint from under the snow in my backyard. Even without the zatar, which I don’t (yet) have, it was a delicious, refreshing addition to the salad repertoire.