12 Steps to Whole Foods

Reaping a Gardener’s Rewards
How Can I Get Garden Produce in the Winter?
If you want to extend the life of your garden and grow cold-weather greens without an expensive and
complicated greenhouse, I highly recommend the following book:
Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, by Eliot Coleman
The author lives in Maine and gets hardy greens like mache (lamb’s lettuce) and spinach throughout the winter,
using modifications to the square-food gardening boxes that protect plants and allow the sun to warm them
through Plexiglas. You can also interact with others and ask questions about four-season harvesting online,
where support communities are thriving.
Keep in mind that we will be learning about fermented vegetables in Chapter 8 (page 223). We will “put up”
cabbage, cucumbers, carrots, and beets while preserving and enhancing all the raw-food nutrition!
Money-Saving Tips
Using the Produce of Your Garden Long after the Growing Season
Make sure to grow as much as possible of cabbage, carrots, beets, and pickling cucumbers. In August, when
fermented foods become your focus, you will have plenty of “free” nutritious food for the winter, without
having to invest in new canning lids and without having to pressure cook, steam, or boil the food.
The following is adapted from a blog on my Web site, www.greensmoothiegirl.com, that I wrote one Saturday
in October 2007 on extending the life of the garden to have raw foods past the first frost.
Since I quit putting up sugar-added, processed food in jars years ago, I’ve learned new ideas to preserve
nutritional value in my garden’s yield. Here’s how the garden will “keep on giving” its raw food in the winter
months—this is what I did today with the help of my family:
• We made sauerkraut. It’s both raw and preserved for the winter, and it provides good lactic acid and
healthy cultures your body needs to aid digestion, when used as a condiment or side dish at dinner. You
will read more about the importance of fermented foods and how to make sauerkraut in Chapter 8
(page 223).
• Emma and Kincade cut down all the chard, washed and dried it, cut it in thirds, bagged it in gallon
freezer bags, and put it in the freezer. It’s months’ worth of green smoothie ingredients. [Note: I used
the last of it on Apr. 24, the next spring!] You can’t preserve greens for other uses, but who cares if
wilted, formerly frozen greens go into your green smoothie where it gets all blended up anyway.
• I made 3 quarts of pesto sauce in our high-powered blender with spinach and basil from the garden. I
put enough for individual family dinners in containers and stuck them in the freezer.
• The kids brought in all the bell peppers—red, yellow, and green—as well as jalapeños and Anaheim
peppers, and I chopped and bagged them in sandwich bags to add to big pots of vegetarian chili this
winter.
• Kincade pulled most of the beets—some as big as softballs!—and washed, bagged, and froze the beet
greens for use in green smoothies. I peeled the beets and froze chunks for my Hot-Pink Breakfast
Smoothie (page 285) and Chocolate Beet Cake (page 305). [Don’t use frozen/thawed beets for steamed
beet recipes in this chapter, though—they just aren’t the same.] I think I have enough to last the year in
my freezer.
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw 12 Steps to Whole Foods 133