Vernal equinox: The (cold) shoulder season.

Happy first day of spring, also known as the vernal equinox! Doesn’t our yard look…equinoctical?

At left is a view of our snow-covered garden, shot through the living-room window. The cage at the back surrounds our two apple trees, which look spindly now but will produce a startling amount of fruit once summer arrives.

Summer will arrive again, right? At this time of year it’s easy to second-guess the seasons. Yesterday it sure felt like spring, hitting 47 degrees – and on a day when the sun didn’t set until 8:14 p.m., it was easy to imagine that the best season had somehow sneaked up on us. That is, until I had to tippy-toe down our partially glaciated driveway to check the mailbox.

We mostly refer to spring as “breakup,” as in ice breaking up on a river or lake. Indeed there are huge puddles during the day as winter’s accumulation starts to disappear. But there’s still a lot of snow left, and we are ready for it to be gone.

This shoulder season, this in-between time. So close to spring you can almost feel its glow on your face, so far away that you wonder if your feet will ever truly be warm again. We were picking dandelions and wearing sneakers at this time of year when I was a kid in South Jersey.

Not here. Vernal equinox means wearing Icebugs and viewing the Renee’s Garden Seeds website, dreaming of the delights that will someday come from our backyard. (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee from products bought through my link.)

Right now, all we can do is dream. And remember.

For example, the fences sticking up out of that backyard snow are supports for what will once again be our pea crop, which was prolific last year. We’ll likely add a third fence, as we want to grow even more peas this year. That includes a new Renee’s Garden Seeds variety called “Sabre,” which promises 10 to 12 peas per pod. We’ll also grow their Super Sugar Snap, because we already know they’re sweet and delicious. (As a Renee’s Garden Seeds affiliate, I will receive a small fee for items bought through my link.)

In both cases we’ll get double duty because after shelling the peas, we cook down the pods to create a pale-green broth that’s so sweet we’re tempted to sip it. Instead, we use it as a base for split-pea soup. Add some celery (also from our garden) sauteed with onion, some chopped ham and/or a hambone, and a splash of “hammy essence” (the liquid from the roasted ham, saved in the freezer), and you have a potage so savory you don’t care if there’s anything else to eat that night. Of course, a slice of our bonehead-simple rustic bread is great alongside the soup, or any soup.

See what I mean about dreaming, and about remembering?

More food from the yard

Here’s another backyard view, this one from the back steps. It’s part of our homemade greenhouse, sadly unemployed at the moment.

 

 

The mounds of snow in front of the greenhouse come from the use of a roof rake to clear the top. It’ll be months before we can use the space, since it’s unheated. We can’t even start the tomatoes and cucumbers until the first of April.

About those cukes: We fully plan to go with “Chelsea Prize,” another Renee’s Garden Seeds selection. Last year they grew incredibly fast, incredibly large and incredibly sweet. We feasted on the fresh slices (when we could grab some away from his grandkids, that is) and then, oh, then, I found a tasty-sounding cucumber relish recipe. I read it aloud to DF, and he suggested adding a bit of pickled jalapeno.

I did. The result was a relish so good we sometimes eat it by the forkful. Very sweet, slightly garlicky and with a peppery zing! that lingers.

 

So yes, it’ll be Chelsea Prize cukes, and this year we hope to get at least four quarts of that relish. We can always tell DF’s grandkids that the greenhouse broke.

As for our killer tomatoes, we’ll stick with what works: Black Prince, Cherokee Purple, Stupice and Patio, grown from seeds that we save. Last year, as usual, they grew so voluminously in our long summer days that we had to put some of the plants outdoors. If the greenhouse has too much tomato foliage, air can’t circulate properly and plant fungus may develop.

The in-ground tomatoes produced valiantly but – also as usual – we had a lot of green fruit at the end of the growing season. The larger ones we let ripen slowly, in a bowl in the kitchen. The smaller ones went into the food processor and then became, with the addition of vinegar, peppers and spices, 12 quarts and one pint of green tomato salsa.

 

We turn this salsa into a chile verde with chicken or pork and black beans. It’s so good over rice that you can’t stop eating it. More importantly, it uses up tomatoes that might never have ripened – while bringing back the heat of summer in the depths of winter.

Waiting and watching

At the far left of the greenhouse photo you can spy a forest of sad little sticks. That’s the  front part of our raspberry patch, which last year produced half a dozen jars of jam, 30 quarts of frozen fruit, and who knows how many fresh berries that went directly into our mouths and down the gullets of his grandchildren. I think my niece and her daughter came over to pick some, too.

In honor of Pi Day last week, I pulled out some of those raspberries and mixed them with frozen chopped rhubarb (from our yard) and frozen blueberries (from Costco). As pies go, the combination is utterly unique: both sweet and tangy, with the three very different flavors harmonizing instead of warring.

My niece bought a larger freezer this year, and has offered us her old one. We rejoiced, because our current freezer just isn’t big enough for what we have planned: More raspberries, pumpkin (that pompion pie has us hooked) rhubarb and peas than last year, and at least as much celery, garlic scapes, apple pie filling and applesauce. We’ll also grow potatoes, mixed lettuces, Purple Moon kale, red cabbage, Asian greens, carrots, strawberries and garlic – some of it eaten fresh, some of it preserved.

In part that’s because food prices are frankly terrifying. But it’s also because this food is so healthy, and so delicious. If you’ve never had a new potato or a cuke so sweet it tasted like a melon…well, I hope you get the chance some day.

Writing all this has made me long for a tomato, eaten within 30 feet of where it was grown. I want to make a big bowl of salad with lettuces, Asian greens, rogue quinoa leaves and maybe even some young fireweed. I want to tour the garden with DF every morning, to see if raspberries are turning red or pumpkins are turning orange.

For now? I have these little green beacons of hope:

Very little, but recognizably green, these are some of those Asian greens I mentioned earlier. We don’t know what kind they are, as they came from a long-gone packet of seeds. They diligently re-seed, but I always pick some of the seeds to hang onto, just in case. Like me, these seedlings are yearning toward the light.

At the same time as he put these seeds in, DF also started celery. It usually takes up to two weeks to germinate; knowing that, he threw in a few Asian greens, just to give us something to watch. We expect the celery to sprout any day. Spring, however, will take longer.

Related reading:

• Breaking up is hard to do
• Civil twilight
• The marvel of an Alaska summer
• 11 signs of spring in Alaska