You call this winter?

January 21, 1985 Knoxville’s temperature dropped to minus 24 degrees, the coldest in the lower 48 states. As a new transplant from southern Louisiana just the month prior I wondered what had motivated me to move to the frozen north (Tennessee). Then just this morning the temperature at 7 am was a balmy 57 degrees, twenty-seven degrees above the normal low for this time of year and a full eighty-one degrees above that historic low.

When not dwelling on the darker aspects and implications of temperature fluctuations my thoughts have been on gardening and pasture renovations. The flood of seed catalogs, the first arriving the week of Thanksgiving, have kept me entertained with grand fantasies of what might be accomplished if only there were a few more hours in the day.

I have my favorites. Some I love for the over the top descriptions: one praising turnips in the fall when “new winds blow into the fields”. Not quite sure what a “new wind” is exactly but I get the spirit of it.  Others are loved for their encyclopedic listings of every variety known. But my favorites are Sand Hill Preservation Center in Calamus, IA, Sow True Seed in Asheville, NC and Horizon Herbs in Williams, OR. These three are work-a-day catalogs with a minimum of the frou-frou dribble that seems to appeal to the …well, you know who you are.

The problem at this time of year, as I see it, is one of restraint, resisting the urge to plant just a little too early. Maybe a few sugar peas in a protected area and we might be blessed with an early crop? Thomas Jefferson held an annual contest among his neighbors. Whoever brought in the earliest crop of peas hosted a dinner for his other neighbors. Think about that for a moment. To succeed in being first in bringing a crop to the table and the reward was to gather and feed your neighbors, not the other way around. There is value in that story and practice.

While waiting and waiting impatiently we will weed and mulch the garlic and onions this weekend. Those two kitchen essentials will be ready to harvest in late June. In the meantime I can gather my seed collection about me and plan to plant in February, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, kale, mustard, peas, radishes and celery (which I have never grown before).

Later this month we can begin to reseed some of the pastures with a rye, clover and fescue mix. Using the tractor and a disc harrow I’ll lightly disc the fields and spread the seed where hopefully it finds purchase to give us a full crop of hay later in the year. Then there are the plans to sow buckwheat in the orchard for the bees. And there are more plans for, well, plans.

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Reading this weekend Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and “The Saucier’s Apprentice” by Raymond Sokolov a history and guide to the classic French sauces. Do I dare try and master the Sauce Grand Veneur (Master of the Royal Hunt Sauce) for the leg of venison for Saturday’s dinner?