The Indian Warriors are the first wildflowers to come up here at home. They start to emerge after a few good rains in the middle of winter. This one is just out. It will grow quite a bit more, bringing out fern like leaves and going from pink to red, a deep red wine color.
No, I don’t mean tonight’s dinner. That one I just ate, a delicious oxtail stew. Someone ate my February or March kale. Argh! those caterpillars or whomever it was…
Who ate my lettuce?
For the last couple of months I haven’t noticed chewing monsters in my garden so I let my guard down. I guess I am back on a war foot. I’ve got chewed up kale and lettuce plants, rodents burrowing among my newly planted onions, and aphids making themselves comfortable in the fava beans… In the southern California garden no one takes a winter break and the gardener shouldn’t either!
I would love to have some fresh fruit from the garden on these very short winter days. Let’s go and check out the orchard, let’s see if we find any fruit ready to pick!
Limes, lots of limes. I can take a few home now and leave some in the tree to ripen further. Limes will turn yellow when they are truly ripe, their flesh still a pale chartreuse green. They will be more fragrant than they are right now and also sweeter, still fresh and vibrant but definitely sweeter.
Clementines! Nah, not ready yet… These are Algerian clementines, packed with seeds and flavor. I need patience with my clementines, else I will pick them too early. I have to let them develop their sugars to the max and the reward will be well balanced and rich citrus goodness. Today I’ll pass. I will wait until until their color is fully orange and they yield slightly to the touch.
Seville oranges. Way too green. Good, I don’t need more reasons to make sweets theses days. This is my marmalade tree, my bitter orange marmalade tree, I’ll make marmalade in February then!
Next? More oranges, navel and moro blood oranges. The navels… let’s see… not yet, still too early. Light orange in color, not fully ripe but I need to keep an eye on this tree. Soon they’ll be ready. Oops! I am not even going to take a picture of the blood oranges. They are so green I can barely see them. Well this is disappointing, I was hoping to find some oranges ready to eat. Patience and a trip to the farmer’s market are called for.
Those lemons look like limes, don’t they? They are eureka lemons, or “regular” lemons. Still green but this yellowish one to the right of the image, or the ones hidden in the shade can be used now. Good enough. Right now this tree seems a bit sluggish but soon all those green lemons will be ripe and I’ll have more lemons than I know what to do with.
Last tree is my beloved Meyer lemon. Flowering and fruiting all at once. Quite a representative image of the southern California winter garden! I can take some of these lemons home.
What am I taking up to the kitchen? Limes and Meyer lemons. Fresh fruit from the garden that I can use in my cooking, baking and for lemonade and mojitos. Not too bad… Lemon Buche de Noël anyone?
Anywhere you look you’ll spot the Toyon berries. Up the hill, next to the compost pile, by the house, in the orchard, past the driveway, anywhere you look, there they are, the red Toyon berries.
Don’t they look like an exotic tropical flower or some such fabulous thing? They are favas. Friday they were getting ready to bloom, today they are blooming.
The pea vines are also blooming, the pods are ripening slowly but surely. Harvesting peas these days means being content with barely a handful of peas at a time. How far from the fast and furious pace of pea vines in the spring! Still, this is pretty good. Usually by now my vines have succumbed to mildew. I’d rather have just a little handful of peas.
Kale and chard are taking their time unfolding new leaves. All sorts of seedlings are more or less sitting there, doing not much, waiting. I too am waiting. Waiting for them to get going again, to pick up their pace and start growing. That’s what they are supposed to do, isn’t it? Not now, not in midwinter.
For years I was focused on temperature as the limiting factor of plant growth in winter. Since it doesn’t really get cold here — except for the very occasional frost — I happily kept my planting rhythm throughout the year, no modifications, no allowances for winter. I was mystified about the fact that my February plantings quickly caught up with plants from January or December. It didn’t seem to be any point in planting anything between Thanksgiving and late January. And what’s worse, there never were enough greens, I needed to plant lots and lots more than in summer. What’s going on in here?
Eliot Coleman’s excellent Four-Season Harvest solved the mystery for me: day length. There simply are not enough daylight hours in midwinter for optimal plant growth. At this latitude, 18 days before and after the winter solstice we have fewer than 10 hours of daylight. Not enough. What is a gardener to do with those deceivingly warm and sunny winter days? Plant lots in the fall and then take a break. Time for a vacation: enjoy the sunshine, harvest, cook, and, above all, do not dig.
This is the first winter I have favas mature enough to bloom. They don’t seem to have slowed down so far, and I doubt they will. From now on the days are getting longer. Right now I am enjoying their flowers, their striped and spotted glorious flowers. I am celebrating midwinter with favas in bloom.
