Rethinking the seasons

(CSA Newsletter: Week 42)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Salad mix — This is a winter-y salad mix that features lettuce, spinach, arugula and various escaroles and chicories. As always, dress with something slightly sweet or creamy to balance any bitterness in the hardy greens. The mixed colors should look beautiful served on your Thanksgiving table.
• Brussels sprouts — A Thanksgiving staple!
• Butternut winter squash — Start your Thanksgiving dinner with a smooth Butternut bisque soup!
• Sweet peppers — Don’t these seem surreal now that it’s snowy out? But they’re still good!
• Carrots OR beets — Your choice between these two classic winter roots
• Red fingerling potatoes — Maybe roasted fingerling potatoes should become a new Thanksgiving standard!
• Red onions

I learned a new simple bit of information recently that profoundly changed the way I look at the world around me.

Apparently the Celts and other ancient peoples did not mark the seasons the way that we modern peoples do, with the winter solstice marking the start of winter, the spring equinox the start of spring, etc. Instead, these days indicated the peak of each season, so that the winter solstice (i.e. ‘midwinter night’) fell in the middle of winter with winter beginning at Halloween and ending at the beginning of February (Groundhog Day!).

Likewise, spring would begin at the beginning of February, summer at the beginning of May, and autumn at the beginning of August. Again, in the middle of each of these seasons would come a solstice or equinox event, marking the zenith of the season.

Some contemporary people, including Neo-Pagans, still recognize these shifted seasons. For what it’s worth, I think I might be joining their ranks. It just fits my experience of the natural world so much more accurately.

When August arrives each year, I start to feel a hint of fall in the air, even as the heat continues. The onions dry down, and we begin harvesting the storage crops. So, even though September 21 is still several weeks out, the work, weather and world feel like the beginnings of autumn to me every year.

Similarly, the weather right now feels very much like winter. Almost all of the leaves are gone from the trees, and snow is in the forecast for tonight (I’m writing this on Monday), followed by a very hard freeze. Everything about the season says, ‘Winter! Winter! Winter!’

Also, these shifted seasons better correspond to the relative power of the sun. The six weeks before and six weeks after the winter solstice mark the quarter of the year when the sun’s influence is weakest. Likewise, the six weeks before and six weeks after the summer solstice mark the quarter of the year when the sun is strongest and plants have the most growth and photosynthetic potential.

Obviously, just because I mentally now think of right now as winter, the rest of the world will continue to call it autumn. And, the notion of dividing the year into four quarters and calling them by names is a human construct. Not that the shifts in weather, life cycles, and landscape aren’t real — but we could probably divide the year just as easily into eighths or sixths if we were so inclined.

Or, maybe four seasons do naturally make most sense in a temperate northern hemisphere geography (modern Oregon or ancient British Isles), but other people in other places have identified other seasons that make more sense for their locale (for example simply wet season and dry season).

Either way, it’s useful to have language and categories for thinking about our annual cycles. The passing of the seasons is such an integral part of our life that without making a conscious effort we have developed a routine of seasonal observations that mark our year on the farm.

Some of the ‘observation’ is just related to how our work changes over the year — sowing seeds in February (now the start of spring in my mind), planting in May (now the start of summer in my mind), harvesting in August (now the start of autumn in my mind), winterizing the farm in November (now the start of winter in my mind).

But, equally significant to our experience of the seasons is the food we eat. It’s amazing to think back to our college years and remember that we’d eat the same foods year-round, regardless of the weather or season (a lot of broccoli and tofu!). Now our diet changes dramatically from month to month as new foods come into season and others drop out.

True to form, November has brought very winter-y foods to our table: pot roasts with vegetables, roasted squash, soups of all kinds … Our diet has become infinitely more interesting and pleasurable over the years. I enjoy eating this way so much that I can’t help but think this is part of the joy of living in the world.

People spend their lives searching for fulfillment and entertainment while often missing the simple natural interest provided by the cycles of the world. Eating broccoli every day is boring — but eating roasted fall broccoli and knowing that it won’t be around again until June … that is truly exciting! How much more pleasure is there in eating foods whose moment in our diet is fleeting?

As fellow seasonal vegetable eaters, you too are living the seasons through diet — tasting the summer heat distilled into a ripe tomato in July and the sweetness of frost in November Brussels sprouts. We hope that you too have found pleasure in the direct connection to the natural world provided by your fresh vegetables.

We’re about to go into the hardest part of the vegetable year. We’re moving into the heart of winter (as I now understand it) — the darkest, coldest weeks of the year. The next couple hours will be the first test of how well Casey and Jeff have winterized the farm.

They’ve been busy the last few days: row covering crops (with help from another friend), turning off hydrants, and harvesting harvesting harvesting. After last winter’s devastatingly long cold snap, we knew we needed to do something differently this year.

So, we built more conditioned vegetable storage space. And, now it’s full of vegetables. Fortunately, winter vegetables hold well in cold storage. In some cases, these crops should do better in our cooler than in the fields. That’s our goal anyway — we’ll see over the next few weeks.

Also, you’ll notice a slight change in vegetable line-up from what we predicted last week. That’s because we wanted to make sure we harvested some of the less cold hardy crops now (specifically lettuce!).

Anyhow, this week is Thanksgiving, and on my list of thanks will be a new appreciation for the pattern of the seasons and the cycle of the year. I hope you too have many interesting new things to be thankful for, as well as many wonderfully mundane things too (such as family, health, home).

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Enjoy this week’s winter vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. Reminders:

• If you haven’t signed up yet for our 2011 CSA, please do so ASAP! (Or, if you’ve decided not to return, please consider letting us know why so that we can get feedback.)
• The last pick-up of 2010’s CSA is coming up soon: Tuesday, December 14. We have three more weeks after this week.