The garden encounters the rain on a steady basis now, the plants still slowly maturing in the diminished sunlight. We have constructed several insulated cold-frames out of straw-filled, waxed cardboard produce boxes (wrapped in plastic), and rigid insulating foam, wood; all covered with sheets of tempered glass which the community here has salvaged from various sites. The plants seem to really enjoy them! Elsewhere, our inner cloche, set up inside the greenhouse in the garden, is just that bit warmer, so we plan to try peas there about a month or so earlier than you can plant them otherwise. We have made several, long sheet-mulch beds, covered with grass clippings and leaves, brush, kitchen compost, and straw mucked out from our goat pen. They are sheeted underneath with several layers of cardboard, so we'll see if that is enough to keep the perennial weeds at bay for a while. Even still, those sheet mulch beds are considerably easier to pull weeds from, than it is to pull plants from our clayish subsoil. We also modified the watering system inside the greenhouse, so it should provide the needed water in about 1/3 to 1/2 the time -- lessening the energy demand and wear upon our well pump.
Today, it is too cold to keep the water lines running, and I spent the morning in our starts greenhouse with a forest of kale and spinach seedlings, transplanting them into little cups... They will be our late winter/early spring garden denizens!

Our ancestors probably accidentally started gardening by creating an inadvertent compost heap. They selected for what was tastiest, for what could provide the most impressive feast. What they also unwittingly selected for is the garden that takes the most time. Our modern plants are babes in the woods, no match for the perennial grasses and morning glory, and blackberry which ever creeps over the creek garden; emissaries for the garden's eventual return to the wilderness, long after the presence of humans has disappeared. We stave off the inevitable, but -- like the Genesis story tells us -- we do it at the cost of time, of our lives, hours layered into the cycle seasons. Harvest time is beautiful and plentiful and somewhat macabre, plants lunging out with tendril, fruit, and gourd to shake the high water mark before the winter tide pulls them back into the deep. The proliferation of food is so urgent, it seems almost desperate, as the plants are shocked by frost; and today, it leaves me wanting to pass by the garden, to migrate, to follow the sun. Hours are tied to the vine, bringing in buckets of golden squash, and we sweat beneath the shortening starlight.