A Winter Vegetable Manifesto

Maybe it’s just the stubborn contrarianism endemic to New England soils and those who work them, but we think that local food is at its very best when skies are gray and icy and the leaves have fallen from the trees. We love the vibrant, rich flavors and colors of summer stored in our crops: Crisp carrots and juicy cabbage sweetened by the first frosts, buttery potatoes, pungent garlic, tender kale and brilliant red and white radicchio are just some of our favorites. 

Most of the foods we grow are technically grouped together as “Storage Crops”... But what an unsexy, unsatisfactory term. The word “storage” implies inertness, stagnation. Storage is something one does with unused furniture or frozen pizzas. By contrast our crops are alive and therefore fresh when we eat them. Some of the vegetables we grow are biennials, like onions, carrots and cabbage, who grow all summer, then wait out the winter to bloom, set seed and die the following summer. Others, like potatoes, sweet potatoes and garlic are perennials which survive the winter underground as tubers and bulbs. These vegetables breathe, awaiting spring, nestled in our cooler under optimal conditions for each crop; they don’t need chemical preservatives, freezing or canning to keep. Maybe “Waiting Crops” or “Expectant Crops” would be better. “Winter Vegetables” seems like an acceptable term, too. 

In the days before a global, industrial food system, people in temperate and cold regions across the globe relied on the generous magic of storage crops. A vast diversity of wild plants, selected across an even greater diversity of ecosystems and human cultures has resulted in a brilliant profusion of crops for winter eating. We grow purple sweet potatoes and spicy radishes from Japan, types of radicchio named for the Italian towns in which they originated, potatoes from the Andes and squashes descended from those bred by indigenous people across the Americas. 

We reject the idea that these are simply “subsistence foods”—instead we believe that these are foods for human thriving, exemplars of our symbiotic partnership with plants. We invite you to revel with us in celebrating the subterranean bounty of these delicious plants through the cold months of the year.