We’ve had about ten days of snow and temperatures, sometime daytime as well as nightime, in the single digits. We’ve had over two feet of new snow, which is good, because it insulated my one experimental hoop house where I planted cold-hardy greens. There’s one row each of chard, laccinato kale, bok choi, and arugula, plus I started komatsuna seedlings in mid-October (they’re tiny). I also transplanted a row of scallions between each row of greens, since they’re the one thing I buy most often during the winter.

Here’s what the hoop house looked like before I dug up the edge of the plastic on the far side to take the photo above. I really did not expect anything to be green in there. It was zero or below for three or four days straight. In my past experience, even the most cold-hardy greens succumb at that point. So it was a delightful surprise to find things still looking green and alive in there when I peeled back the cover.

We’ll have to see whether they survive. Everything is green, but the soil is frozen, and so are the bok choi. I cut a few bok choi this morning, as well as some arugula and chard leaves, and managed to pull a couple of scallions. I still don’t know if this is going to work over the course of the whole winter, but so far, things are green, if not necessarily available. The experiment continues ….

I’ve been just the tiniest bit obsessed with peppers this year. I grew a bunch of different varieties — Hungarian Wax, Cayenne, Aci Sivri (a Turkish pepper), hot Italian cherry peppers, Spanish pequillo — and for once, I got a decent crop. I also bought a few bags of hot peppers from the local farmer’s market (as well as several bags of roasted New Mexico green peppers from another vendor). I made salsa out of the roasted green peppers, and I pickled just about everything else. For the pickled peppers I used Michael Symon’s Pickled Pepper recipe (via Michael Ruhlman). This is going to be my go-to recipe, maybe forever — I love these peppers. A little vinegar-y, a little garlicky, with coriander and peppercorns. I’ve been eating them on everything and only hope they’ll last all winter.

The cayenne and aci sivri (a nice sweet-hot Turkish pepper) I strung into ristras. The problem was that they were almost all green, and after hanging up for a day or two, they weren’t really ripening. So I took them down and put them in a cooler with a couple of apples and a couple of potatoes. The apples and potatoes give off ethelyne gas, which helps with the ripening. This is what they looked like after about four days — the ripening is noticeable — and the smell emanating from the cooler is marvelous.

It was a long hard slog this year growing peppers, and most of the season, they had to be under plastic in the hoop house, but I’ve got perhaps a year’s worth of delicious, home-grown peppers. And as we all know, using my own home-grown stuff makes me weirdly happy.

Fall must be upon us since I’m back to making no-knead bread. I bake once or twice a week during the winter — seems goofy to spend four bucks on a loaf of bread when I can make it myself, but in the summer I can’t bear to heat up the house any more than I need to. So this new loaf of bread felt like the beginning of cooler weather and more cooking. My sourdough starter is getting it’s mojo back, and this loaf came out so pretty that even though I’ve posted a zillion no-knead bread pictures on this blog, I thought I’d pester you all with one more.

I’ve also been playing with hoop houses this year. The one on the left has peppers inside. Because we had such a weird summer, cold through the end of June, and no real heat until late July, but then this other odd stretch where we have yet to see a real frost, they’ve pretty much been under plastic all summer. In the hot part of the season I either opened the plastic or took it off altogether, but mostly, they’ve been covered. Which I don’t love the aesthetics of, but since I’ve finally got peppers beginning to turn red, I guess it was worth it.

The other hoop house, the one on the left, I’m thinking of as my “winter garden.” I got rereading Eliot Coleman’s Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long and decided to see how far I can extend the season this year. Usually by this time of year, I’m bored with the garden and ready for everything to just die already so I can get some writing done, but I don’t know — maybe it was that the dino kale was still so small, or that the scallions had just started looking great, or that the chard was finally tall and crisp and beautiful. I wasn’t ready to let it go. So I dug up one bed, and transplanted kale, chard, lots of scallions, some arugula, and the green Chinese cabbages. I also planted a row of komatsuna, which I fell in love with this spring, but I’m not sure we have enough daylight for it to sprout.

Then I got real with the hoop houses and put some brackets in to hold the hoops. Last spring, I just stuck them in the ground, which worked okay, but they got sort of hunched and sad looking. By bracketing them they get enough stability that I’m hoping they’ll survive some snow. Plus, they look nice now. Crisp. Upright. Official.

So now I’m looking forward to seeing if I can get some fresh greens for part of the winter. I put the plastic up last night on the winter garden because it was supposed to go down to 28, but I don’t think it did. I think they like the extra warmth though, and the humidity. When I pulled the plastic back this morning to take a photo, everything was looking pretty upright and perky. We’ll see.