Imbolc approaches

Overwintered geraniums bring much-needed cheer to the winter greenhouse.

It’s been a cold week here on the farm — cold for us, anyway — reaching the low teens at night. The ground is icy and hard underfoot, even at midday.

The savoy cabbages, lacinato kale, and brussels sprouts that typically can stay out in our garden all winter, unprotected, have instead wilted and lie on the ground like some kind of heartbroken damsel collapsing onto a fainting couch. The purple sprouting broccoli, which stands about 24 inches tall and about 18 inches wide, still stands but looks pretty devastated: a child being forced to stand up when they really don’t want to.

The cold frame we built in the autumn and filled with hot mushroom compost has worked wonderfully, and what a lucky break it went in this fall! The savoy cabbage, winter lettuce (a type called Rouge d’Hiver) and tatsoi in there look happy, green and growing. In the next few weeks they’ll begin to put on growth like it’s their job (it is), and we’ll have plenty of green to see us through March before the February-sown greens reach maturity in April.

The elephant garlic looks fine, if sort of bedraggled. Turnips, beets, rutabaga and carrots are still good below ground, but the tops have died away. When I pull them, they pop out of the soil with a sort-of snap, breaking out of the icy soil and leaving a perfectly formed mold where they once grew.

But the cold doesn’t change one thing: spring is on the way.

It’s in the way the sun shines so clear and strong. It’s in the daffodil leaves beginning to nose up out of the soil, and in the richly dark hellebore blooms that gleam out of the cold shade. And it’s in Imbolc — the day halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox, once celebrated in Celtic cultures and today honored largely by gardeners and witches (make of that what you will). Imbolc is a traditional day for seed-starting, and it is the day I’ll begin sowing spring and summer crops.

This week, in the depths of cold, I will sow seeds for tomatoes, eggplant, roselle, and pepper, as well as lettuce, radishes, swiss chard, kale, and mustard greens.

This week may be winter, but it can’t stop me from believing in spring.