Some people in Maine have been doing this for a long time. Right across East Penobscot Bay in Harborside, Barbara Damrosche and Elliott Coleman have been doing it for years and teaching everyone else how. Finally, this year, out in the new garden past the barn, we, too, have a moveable, unheated green house. A layer of hefty plastic over the steel pipe frames of a second-hand plastic-covered shed covers a section of ground planted in mache, mizuma, mustard, chard, carrots, cress, spinach, and several sorts of lettuce. Astride the vegetable beds inside the greenhouse, we set wire hoops that look like giant staples that support floating fabric covers. Each layer of protection fools plant into thinking they live in a growing zone south of here, so on a Hardiness Zone Five island, we have created Zone Seven.
An actual visit to North Carolina a couple years ago plus a startling conversation with an Alabama-based food editor was an education in winter vegetable eating. My Charlotte, NC, hostess described being able to pull carrots right from the ground in December, and we have had unnaturally mild enough winters here that I could have done that, too. The food editor objected to the inclusion of broccoli in a potato salad I’d made to accompany a Maine summer lobster bake. “Broccoli,” she drawled, “is a winter vegetable.” I thought, “Not here, it isn’t, Toots.” Winter vegetables for me are traditionally anything I can stick in a cellar and use in February. Time-honored roots like carrots, potatoes, rutabagas, beets, and durable cabbages. Now around the kitchen when we talk about winter vegetables we mean green stuff.
Stepping into the green house on a sunny day from outside temperatures in the teens or twenties is like going to Eastern Pennsylvania. If I stay inside long to pull the odd weed or two, I have to take off my jacket and think twice about the long johns. The warmth is as welcome as a mild March day when we the snow retreats and ground opens up under bright sun. When I lift the cloth over the plants I can’t detect the difference in temperature that the plants can and the ground feels cool and damp. That will change later this winter when warmth will be more perceptible. I like the smell in there, a whiff of spring, wet soil, sweetly muddy, and fresh air.
Most of us in Maine are accustomed to knocking off gardening work in the late fall, letting it all go in face of freezing temperatures and frozen ground. To tell the truth, some years by the time we get a killing frost I am downright relieved, weary of the pressure to take care of and harvest green growing plants. Even though we often manage to eat homegrown salad stuff well into November, sometimes even presenting a tossed green one on Thanksgiving and offering Brussels sprouts on Christmas, the break is welcome. I like the rhythm of the seasons and if I really wanted to farm year round I’d move to California.
For years, to use the winter-stored cabbage, carrots, beets, apples, and other vegetables, I switched from green salad for dinner to cole slaw and its many variations: cabbage, alone, cabbage with shredded carrots, cabbage with apples, cabbage with carrots, apples, and pickles, cabbage with just pickles. Or beet salads: beets with apples, beets with apples and pickles. You get the picture. It is fun in a sort of Iron Home Cook way: how many ways can she vary cabbage or beets in the twenty minutes before supper?
Sooner or later in February or so, I’d get hungry for lettuce and acquire some of the well-traveled stuff that arrives slightly limp and exhausted at stores in Maine winters. If you are lucky and live near one of several winter farmers’ markets or a store that offers local produce, you might find lettuce grown in a hoop house like ours. That won’t include most Maine islands right this minute, but no doubt will in the next few years. Until then we have to pretend that the so-called fresh lettuce in the stores still has nutritive value beyond fiber. I add cabbage, carrots, beets, apples, and pickles to the store-bought stuff, so the lettuce is outnumbered by what I know still has nutrients.
For now in the greenhouse, we are harvesting growth that occurred this past fall and ended as the days shortened towards the Winter Solstice. As the days grow longer through February, something our chickens notice long before we do and show by a distinct uptick in egg production, the vegetables under row covers will begin again to grow and I’ll cut newer greens. It will turn the season upside down to have Eggs Florentine in February-eggs cooked in a nest of spinach-which for years has been an early spring treat.
Here is how I make Eggs Florentine in case you want to try it. It is a way to have vegetables for breakfast or eggs for supper.
A large pile of spinach, washed and tough stem removed, at least three handfuls per person. A couple tablespoons of butter and a couple tablespoons of olive oil. A large shallot or small onion. One or two eggs per person. Some parmesan or romano cheese or any kind you like.
Chop the spinach coarsely. Melt the butter with the olive oil in a sauté pan. Chop the shallot or onion and add it to the butter and olive oil, and cook until you can smell it. Put the spinach in the pan, and as it wilts, add more, turning it over to soften it all. When it is soft, make dents in the spinach with the back of a spoon, and drop the eggs into the dents. Put a lid on the pan and reduce the temperature. Cook until the eggs begin to firm up and the white turns cloudy over the top, then sprinkle the eggs with the grated cheese, and run briefly under the broiler to finish. Serve on or off toast.
Sandy Oliver is a food historian and food writer who lives and grows food sustainably on Islesboro.