The garlic has been tucked in under a thick blanket of chopped leaves and hay and all is quiet in the garden. These days it’s dark by the time I leave work in the afternoon, so I only get over to the garden on weekends. Not that there would be much for me to do over there anyway, but I do miss my evening visits to the garden.

We’ve has plenty of kale to eat all through November, but I think I picked just about the last of it last week. The red Russian kale did pretty well, but most of the lacinato kale was badly damaged by frost. I thought it was supposed to be a very cold hardy variety, but it sure didn’t prove to be in my garden. I planted it late so the plants didn’t have a chance to get very big. I wonder if they would have held up better if they had had a chance to grow bigger before the cold. I think next year I’ll try to make room for more kale and put a low tunnel over it to try to keep it going through the winter.

One crop that really doesn’t mind the cold is leeks. I piled lots of straw around them when it started to get cold and I’ve been harvesting them as needed. What a delicious winter treat! Leeks are one of my favorite things to grow.

We managed to get the second of our two new cold frames in place in early November before it got too cold. They are both full of greens, so as long as they don’t get completely buried in snow any time soon, we should be able to keep eating from the garden for a little while longer.

The seed catalogs started arriving in the mail last week. Four or five of them have been delivered so far, and I’ve resisted the urge to peek at them. Though I’m already thinking about next year’s garden, I’m setting the catalogs aside for a few more weeks, until the New Year when I’ll pull them out and start making lists. Planning next year’s garden is the best cure I know of for the January blues.