It's March and the first harvest is around the corner

Amazingly, last year's garden is still providing tasty food, while the spinach in the cold frame promises the new season's first harvest next week. The black jug in this photo is a passive solar heat sink, a Poland Spring jug filled with water, which helps keep the soil warm at night. Walnut Street gardener Deb Cole reports she had a delicious salad from her cold frame last weekend. Recently, I ate the last of 2005's frozen creamed spinach and sorrel, put up after Thanksgiving. But the baskets of garlic and shallots on the shelves in the cellar promise lots of good cooking until this year's cloves are ready in mid-summer. Aside from garlic and shallots, the food cupboard in the cellar still has a supply of canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, pesto, salsa, and peach chutney.
This year's mild winter has made year-round gardening much more accessible to city gardeners without high tech greenhouses. And it's not just cold frame aficionados: today's Press Herald featured an article about the work in Maine of Slow Food, an international organization of fresh food aficionados. Slow Food is working with schools and chefs from southern Maine restaurants to reacquaint Maine students with vegetables and herbs, and the kids love it.