EAT-FREE-OR-DIE MIRACLE MACHINES
It is not everyday that you stand in awe of spinach. I did and lived to tell the tale of the spinach plant from hell. The plant changed my very life.
In August nearly two decades ago, I digested a book entitled Four Season Harvest by Elliot Coleman from the Great State of Maine. This fellow had discovered how to grow green food all year ‘round without heat in frigid northern New England. I thought I would try my luck at growing a few greens over the winter as an experiment, based on Coleman’s work.
I proceeded to plant the seeds of cold-hearty vegetables in late August. In mid-May the following year, about the time people begin to plant seeds in their gardens here in the north, I was confronted by a spinach plant that stood as tall as my navel and as big around as a car tire. No exaggeration here.
I called that living marvel the spinach from hell. But a neighbor figured, and rightly so, that I should have called it the spinach from heaven.
Somewhere between that late August and mid-May the following year I had my first experience with what I call an Eat-Free-or-Die Machine that cost nothing to build but would yield a cornucopia of green food.
My spinach salvation experience began by slapping several boxes of recycled wood together, one side higher than the other and placing the boxes in the garden, low sides facing south. Each was covered with a hinged, recycled old window that could be lifted and propped up. That was it. I now had in my possession two cost-free coldframes. Nothing fancy. I spaded the soil, added compost inside the frames, and planted seeds of spinach, kale, chard, cold-hearty lettuce, collards and the Asian greens pak choi, tatsoi, komatsuna and mizuna. My first seeds went in the ground on the last days of that August.
Through the end of October the plants continued to grow but slowed and stopped their growth in November. Most of varieties did best in cool temps, so the plants were luxurious looking, stout and vibrant green when, at last, the cold strengthened to steel and the daylight waned to a fraction of its summer brilliance.
Dormancy set in. The plants stopped growing altogether and seemed to shrink from the cold. I covered them with a poly row cover, closed the glass for good for the winter, and left the plants to fend for themselves. Throughout the chill months I let the snow pile up on the coldframes to act as insulation. I’d check on the plants on fine sunny days, harvested a few leaves now and then for soup or stew, but for the most part I left the greens to themselves.
In early March, with the snow brushed from the glass, I noticed that some of the plants were responding to the increased light and temperatures inside the coldframe boxes. The plants were coming out of dormancy and just beginning to grow. I watered them, covered them up, and waited.
By mid-March most of the plants had revived and were indeed putting on growth. The chard and komatsuna did not fare well, nor did the lettuce. But most of the other varieties had beat the winter blues. I knew kale could stand severe cold, but I did not expect spinach to tough out the tough times as it did.
I had never known spinach to be anything but a rather small plant best harvested when the leaves are young before it bolts to seed. But grown over the winter, spinach can sometimes become otherworldly and may assume dimensions of legend. Growing protected in the cool temps of spring, the leaves become verdant, crisp and delicious without a hint of insect damage.
Today, I am finishing the expansion of a Build-Free-Or-Die greenhouse, constructed largely of recycled lumber and boards, recycled aluminum storm windows, and off-the-shelf (purchased) corrugated poly roofing. There are raised beds inside and spun poly row covers to act as my coldframes. I am assembling largely free materials now to build a rocket stove/thermal mass heater so I can modify and raise October and March temps within the greenhouse by touching off a single hot fire of sticks and scrap wood that will burn for just several hours a day to warm up the masonry so it may radiate its trapped heat all night.
Come spring I should have completed every last detail on my food miracle machine. The hope is to eliminate for good running to the megastore to buy greens of any sort. Carrots and parsnips will be stored undisturbed in the ground in the greenhouse, too, so there will be fresh root crops to consume all winter. Beets and turnips can stay put inside, too, under hay until the winter solstice.
In the summer, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes thrive inside in the heat. Greenhouses are ideal environments for these favorites. On days in the 90s and touching 100F, I’ll leave all the windows and door open and let a little solar panel-powered fan move air. I swear I’ll have July 4th tomatoes here in the Granite State someday.
The effort to grow food all year has been my figurative rabbit hole to Wonderland. The spinach from heaven or hell, as it were, led me down the path to a lifestyle mode I like to call Independency. Independency means the opposite of dependency. Globalization ensures that consumers all over the world are dependent on scores of other people a world away to provide goods -- in this case food -- in order to survive. I wish to slowly wean myself from dependency on people in other states, in other countries, in other hemispheres.
The best place to do that, to embrace independency, is at the dinner table. It starts with spinach, of all things. Lowly spinach. Miracle spinach.
