Cold damage; winter gems

So, here we are in the dead of winter, but I have spent some quality time in the garden over the last few weeks. Just a week ago we had a sunny, warm weekend, and I took the opportunity to remove all the damaged, brown, limp leaves from the bottom of the kale, collards, and chard plants. As a matter of fact, every large leaf on the chard was ruined, but there were new ones arising from the central growing point! The collards are quite happy with the weather, and here you see all the new growth in the center of the plant.

In addition to those leaves that were obviously dead, the broccoli plants had plenty of leaves that were living but showed great cold damage symptoms. They had turned almost white! Now broccoli usually does fine here in the winter, so these are another symptom of this strange winter: where these leaves formed and grew in unusually warm weather, then were immediately hit by bitter cold weather in the teens. New, young leaves are emerging on the broccoli, and they seem fine.

And why do I still have broccoli plants, when I picked the broccoli head months ago? For the tender side shoots that I harvested this week, along with the first of the tiny, sweet turnips, which needed to be pulled to thin the row. These two vegetables (both the leaves and root of the turnip) made an excellent garden couscous.

Finally, here is a shot of the marsh at sunrise right after this weekend's freak snowstorm.

Fine feathers

All four hens finally finished the longest molt in history. They now are stepping out in fresh new feathers, and look beautiful! Now, despite the long nights of winter, we are getting eggs again. Only one or two a day, but that is pretty good for 2 year old hens in the dead of winter. Here they are this morning, eating fresh, although frozen solid, collard leaves from the garden. With all the greens they eat, their egg yolks are gorgeous dark yellow. I made the most amazing eggnog on Christmas eve!

The beauty from the beast

It has been beastly weather here over the last few days. Bitter cold (for us here in coastal NC, I know that cold is a relative term!), with temperatures near or below 20 at night, remaining below freezing during the day. It felt especially harsh because we had such a short time to get acclimated to the cold. Remember, we still had basil and peppers in the garden just two weeks ago!
The garden was hard hit, but, in some ways beautiful. Here is a red chard leaf, frozen solid. The colors are so bright and deep, and the surface shiny and clear. It reminds me of stained glass, and was just as hard and solid. The bed of young mixed greens is not so pretty. You can see how many of the plants have been knocked right to the ground by the freezing weather.
So, what will recover and what is now gone for the year? It is too early to know. The broccoli certainly looks bad, and while the kale is drooping, it doesn't seem as hard hit. Will the chard spring back? What about the young plants? Maybe. When this snap passes, and we get back to more typical weather, I will know the long term impact.