Winter Gardening

Saturday, January 21

One month beyond the winter solstice, and we're deep into the kind of weather that sends farmers, retirees, and other "snowbirds" south to places like the Texas and Florida gulf coasts. The kind of weather that gives a special punch to TV ads touting cold remedies, snow tires, ski lessons, rock salt, and Caribbean love boats. The kind of weather that tells me to pull on my heavy wool socks, long johns, t-shirt, flannel shirt, and sweatshirt, and enjoy the simple pleasure of keeping warm on a bitterly cold day. The temperature this morning just ten above and the north wind gusting up to thirty-five miles an hour for a windchill factor of twenty below. Not exactly the sort of weather to tempt even the cross-country skiers outside.

But shortly before noon this morning, when I was up in the attic scanning the landscape, touching up some of my previous reports, and thinking about the one for today, I noticed Kate lugging our large splitoak harvesting basket back and forth between the house and the gazebo. She'd mentioned something the other day about having to defrost the basement freezer, but not wanting to do so until the weather turned cold enough outside so she could temporarily store the frozen produce outside. But I'd forgotten the plan, so when I ran downstairs to ask her what she was doing, her answer momentarily brought me up short.

"I'm just making something out of winter."

And so she was. At the north end of the gazebo, she'd carefully piled up all the frozen cartons, containing all the beef broth and duck broth she'd made during the fall, the fresh gulf shrimp we'd bought this summer and fall, and all the tomato puree and spaghetti sauce we'd made from the bumper harvest of tomatoes this summer. At the south end of the gazebo, she'd set up a large cardboard carton filled with ducks from a local farmer's wife, chicken pot pies she'd made a few weeks ago, and ice cube trays of frozen pesto that I'd made from the bumper crop of basil this summer and fall. The box was closed, the top weighed down with a heavy stone garden turtle to protect the stuff inside from the neighbor's untethered dog.

But the mere sight of it all having come back outside to the gazebo at the edge of the garden on one of the coldest days of the winter gave me a sudden feeling of intense warmth, a renewed sense of the deep interconnectedness of things in the world, of the seasons and a new understanding of Shelley's timely question: "If winter comes can spring be far behind?"

"You bet," said Kate, the point of which I could feel acutely in every one of my chilled fingertips after carrying all the frozen boxes back in again.

From Carl Klaus's Weathering Winter: A Gardener's Daybook