One-Block Feast: Guide to Winter Garden Vegetables

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Sunset Magazine's winter garden vegetable plan is a useful guide for making your winter menu a green one. Illustration Courtesy Ten Speed Press

Based on the James-Beard-Award-winning One-Block Diet, The One-Block Feast (Ten Speed Press, 2011) is the ultimate guide to eating local. Complete with seasonal garden plans, menus, 100 recipes and 15 food projects, this guide explains how to raise and produce everything needed for totally made-from-scratch meals, all from your own backyard. The following excerpt on winter garden vegetables is taken from “Winter.” 

You can purchase this book from the GRIT store: The One-Block Feast.

Guide to Winter Garden Vegetables

The leafy greens and succulent cruciferous vegetables we raised for our winter menu grow best when air temperatures are cool. Yet they thrive in sunny locations (at least 6 hours of sun per day). Arugula is easy to grow from seeds, while other crops, including lettuce, yield plentifully from nursery plants. If you can, avoid planting in any “frost pockets”—low areas that can get frost earlier than other parts of your garden. Use our winter garden plan as a tool to help you lay out your winter garden vegetables.

Arugula 

Arugula or rocket (roquette in French) has tender, deep green leaves that add a peppery bite to salads. Crops come fast: You can pick baby leaves in as little as 3 weeks. To prolong the harvest, sow in succession every 3 weeks.

Best Site: An open, sunny spot and well-drained soil.

Days to Harvest: 35 days from seed.

Planting and Care: Sow seeds during cool weather in ground that has been raked or hoed clean of weeds and clods. You can either broadcast (scatter) the seeds or sow thinly in rows, and cover lightly with 1/4 inch of soil. Water the plot lightly and often to bring up the seedlings, then regularly (once a week or so) as they grow. To speed them up, apply a high-nitrogen fertilizer after the first unformed leaves appear. Thin seedlings to about 6 inches apart (the thinnings are great in salads). Arugula also thrives in pots at least 6 inches deep and 14 inches wide.

How to Harvest: Pick the leaves as needed once plants are larger.

Seed Source: Burpee 

Broccoli Rabe 

Broccoli rabe, also called broccoli raab or rapini, is a choice cool-season crop to grow alongside cabbage and carrots. It resembles broccoli, but instead of producing one giant head, it grows many longer, smaller budding stalks that you can selectively harvest all winter and spring. The plant grows 12 to 15 inches tall, and usually re-sprouts from the stalks until hot weather settles in.