A Garden in Transition

This is an odd time to be in my garden. The beginning of March is neither spring nor winter, neither warm nor cold as the sun creeps toward equinox.

Here in Northern California many of us garden through the winter months because we rarely get more than a few days where temperatures fall below 30 degrees, and even then never for more than a few hours.

Gardeners with a sunny plot can raise bountiful crops of tricksy veggies like cauliflower, which swoons into sullenness if you even think ill of it. Alas, my garden is designed to shield my hot weather crops from a Sacramento summer, when we become the sun’s anvil. It works wonderfully for this, but in winter the light fades and my winter’s garden struggles.

I still get a decent winter harvest, most notably of salad greens and chicories, about which I have written. I also get a few little cabbages, Lacinato kale, carrots, broccoli rabe and lots and lots of parsley. I am reasonably certain I would be a less happy man without a steady ration of flat-leaved parsley.

But now that days have grown warmer – we had our first 70-degree day yesterday – Nature has told each of my little charges that it is time to move on, to bolt into flower. This is all well and good for them, but for me it means the end of their eating quality.

As usual, the broccoli rabe was the first to go. The cabbages were next, and the beets and carrots will no doubt follow them in a few days. I have a patch of leeks that have occupied the same stretch of ground for going on 11 months, and they too will send up flower stalks before too long. Time to get moving before I lose them all.

But it is so hard to do this kind of pulling. in some cases, I have tended these plants for the better part of a year. Most, because of my shade situation, are undersized. Will they grow just a little bit larger before they succumb? This hope is the same one that causes a fisherman to cast her line one more time into an unfeeling stream, or the hunter to ignore the cold and his sore feet to crest one more hill in search of that stag.

In the end, most of these little hopes will fail. But this is a garden, a place with life and death sit down and break bread together in happy company. Just a few feet from my fading broccolini sits a 20-foot collection of Italian fava beans, already lush and flowering.

The eagerness I await them with is every bit as strong as the melancholy I feel gazing on a bolted cabbage.