A Winter Garden: Stories of Loss, Survival, and Hope

I met up with Michelle this morning at our garden to see how our season extension is working and how our chickens are doing.  Last night we had a hard frost with temperatures reaching as low as 15°F.  The lake by our garden was frozen over in the shallower areas, and the ground was covered in frost.  Despite my wool socks, my toes still got numb!Most of our plants were frosty, even if they were covered with row cover or the cold frame.  The asian greens in our cold frame still look the best off, but our other greens are hanging in there.  Our carrots still look good too, but deer ate our little beets and spinach.  I am still surprised by how great our broccoli looks though!  It's not growing too much anymore, but the broccoli heads look healthy and happy.  Just wait until it warms up a little and then they'll be super!We have some sad news about our chickens.  Three of our adult hens and our young hen were eaten by something, probably a hungry fox or coyote.  I'm not quite sure how it got into the coop because we have a fence all around garden and  the coop is also surrounded by chicken wire and boards.  I guess since it's winter all of the animals are hungry and looking for food.  We added more boards around our chicken coop, so now I think it is pretty well secured.  I hope our three remaining hens and rooster will be alright though!  We still have a while to go before it warms up a lot.On to some good news.  Today Michelle, Marie, and I met with our farmer mentors (who are amazing), and we talked about our planting plans for this coming spring and summer.  It's weird to think about being outside in the early hours of the day and already being hot, but I'm sure in summer I won't be able to remember how cold these winter mornings feel.  We have some exciting plans!  For spring crops, we're going to plant lots of broccoli, cabbage, and lettuce.  Also, we're going to start planting earlier than we did last year, so hopefully our lettuce won't bolt as quickly.  We're also going to plant potatoes, onions, sugar snap peas, turnips, rutabagas, and (get this!) sweet potatoes to harvest later on in the summer and fall.  For summer crops, we're going to plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, bush beans, lima beans, okra, corn, and more.  In our other quadrants which we haven't used much this past year, we are going to plant berries!  Now that we have our first year under our belts, we're going to plant some perennials.  I can just imagine walking into the garden in the morning and popping a ripe blueberry into my mouth!  The berries may take a year to establish themselves, so we may not pick too many this coming summer and fall.  I'll have to wait a bit longer then, but for now, I am quite content with our winter garden.