The famous Livingston winds hit last night — up at Choteau, near Glacier, the gauge clocked 114 before it broke into pieces — I don’t know what it was here, but it was the kind of morning where stuff is all over the yard. Among the things that blew askew was the cover that’s been on the hoop house all winter.
Here’s how it looked inside — the scallions are pretty battered, but they look like they’ll come back strong. The chard, hard to tell? I pulled the deadest leaves off the surviving chard plants, and pulled a couple of dead-looking ones out altogether. The fetid arugula came up, as did what was left of the baby bok choi. I left the laccinato kale, hoping that with a little warmth it’ll fill out some — if not, it’ll come out in a couple of weeks and I’ll succession plant.
And then I planted. I’ve never planted anything this early, but it’s supposed to be in the mid-40s all week, and although I’m sure we’re going to get more snow, and more cold, somehow it just feels like maybe we’re out of the sub-zero zone. At any rate, I’m tired of store produce, and what I really really love is spring greens. If it wasn’t for the tomatoes and peppers I’d be perfectly happy in a climate cool enough for greens all season. So here’s what I planted: arugula, green baby bok choi, a few more chard, spinach, white baby bok choi, komatsuna, and some mache, which I’ve never had any success with, but who knows? maybe this year?
I watered until it all seemed pretty saturated. The ground was nice and un-frozen, unlike the rest of the yard, so I’m kind of hopeful. A couple of weeks? maybe some spring greens of my own.
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 ….
Winter has arrived with a bang here in southern Montana. That’s my patio furniture which is suddenly buried.
I don’t dare peek in the hoop house, because it’s supposed to go down below zero tonight, and I’m hoping the snow will insulate. We’ll see if anything survives. It’s slated to run a degree or two either side of zero tonight, and to be even colder tomorrow night. The experiment gets an early test.
Funny, this summer, while the garden was in progress, I found myself uninspired, and not actually eating that much from it. Perhaps its because the season was so strange — once my early success with spring greens under hoops burned out (because it got hot, and the plants burned up), I wound up in this long odd period when there wasn’t much out there a person could eat right now, most of it was things like carrots and beets and tomatoes and peppers and beans that took a long long time this summer to ripen.
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 
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.