Living The Good Life With Helen And Scott Nearing

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In the height of the season came corn, tomatoes, shell beans, broccoli, cauliflower, and celery. As autumn approached, we turned to the cabbages, winter squash, turnips, rutabagas, carrots, escarole, Chinese cabbage, collards, with cos lettuce, fall radishes, spinach, and beets, and, for the first time, potatoes and dried beans.

We cultivated strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries and ate them in season. These berries also grew wild in abundance, along with chokecherries, shad, and blackberries. For other fruit we had pears, plums, and apples.

After the snows, when the gardens were white and frozen, we turned to our vegetable cellars with their winter roots, cabbages, winter squash, potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, onions, rutabagas, celery root, parsley root, and pears and apples. The hardiest of these vegetables would still be fresh and edible up to the time the snow melted and we were digging parsnips once again.

Through this entire twelve-month cycle, we ate a great variety of fresh food. It was garden fresh from the first thaw in FebruaryMarch to the heavy snows of December. The balance of the time it came from an outside vegetable cellar. By following the seasons, we got a succession of foods ... each at its peak. We enjoyed each in turn. We tired of none, but always looked forward to its coming in the new growing season.

Early spring gardens are made by wintering over leeks, chives, multiplier onions, dandelions, parsley, collards, chicory, removing the protecting brush and mulch when heavy frosts are ended and letting the sun bring them along. This gives one mature vegetables even before seed-planting time. Another help for the spring garden is a small, portable cold frame, made with a few boards and some window sash or cold frame sash, in which early radishes, lettuce, cress, and mustard greens may be sown. Under favorable conditions radishes mature in three to four weeks. They are hardy and will stand some freezing,

Fall gardens grow out of summer gardens. About July 1st, as we removed radishes, lettuce, early beets, and spinach from the garden, we scattered an inch of compost, worked it in, and planted onion seed, beets, escarole, endive, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, kale, collards, A little later we planted oak leaf lettuce, cos lettuce, wint er celery plants, spinach, and finally mustard greens, garden cress, and radishes. We did our last planting late in September or early in October.

When our cucumbers, squash, peppers, and tomatoes froze, we replaced them with transplants of lettuce, escarole, broccoli, and kale, and with sowings of mustard, cress, and radishes. On October 1st our garden was prolific, and greener than it was in August, because it was a greenness which is associated with autumn rains, night frosts, and hot, humid, and misty days. Insect pests had left for parts unknown. With the protection of a few evergreen boughs and some mulching with leaves, hay, or straw, these green crops were available until they were covered by heavy snow. If the first snow was wet, frozen brussels sprouts, collards, escarole, Chinese cabbage, kale, and parsley might be dug from under the snow blanket. At no other season are greens so delicious.

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