Winter Garden: What My Grandfather’s War Garden Still Teaches Me - Part 2
- Wolfy
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Mom asks why I’m always up so early, out there in the wind, picking greens for a smoothie as if I’m feeding some phantom army. My answer isn’t dramatic. It’s embarrassingly simple: I want to stay alive long enough to matter. I want to be present for Grace, for whatever grandchildren might one day exist, for the people who rely on me now and will rely on me later. I want a long, active life—not a theoretical one, a real one—with her, with them. And lifestyle makes a difference. I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t.
My grandfather died at sixty-seven. Too young. I know him mostly through stories, the kind of half-mythic anecdotes families hand down like worn tools: the three acres he cultivated during the war, the starving neighbors he fed, the angora rabbits, pigs, chickens, and geese he raised. But I never got to stand beside him in a garden. He never taught me first-hand how to graft, prune, or plant. Maybe he wanted to—who wouldn’t want to pass on what kept them alive?—but time ran out six months after I arrived.
My father died even younger. Fifty-seven. He lasted that long only because he walked miles every day as a mail carrier, out in the weather, moving, breathing, living by necessity the kind of life modern people now have to engineer. That’s the part that haunts me: they were both outdoor men, but their bodies still had limits. They never got the quiet years. They never got to become the elders who show the rest of us how the seasons work. It's instead carried by blood, and that feels distant but good enough.
So yes—when my mom asks why I’m up before dawn gathering winter lettuce in a gale for something as unromantic as a smoothie, I don’t hesitate. This is the work of staying here. This is the price of longevity. This is me refusing the inheritance of early endings.
And as I sit there, talking to her, the wind filling in the background like an insistent witness, I think about something else—something she never had to say out loud:
Our ancestors didn’t eat well in winter because they were virtuous. They ate well in winter because they prepared. And they survived because they didn’t pretend summer would rescue them.
But there were cultures who went further than preparation—cultures who turned the winter itself into a season of abundance. Not scarcity. Not struggle. Abundance.
And that’s where Part 2 truly begins.
Indigenous PNW — Winter as Abundance in the Wet
Winter here on Orcas and the Maritime Northwest was never the storybook freeze. It wasn’t crystalline or bright or snow-bound in the Northern European sense. It was wet. It was wind. It was months of rain drumming on cedar and hemlock, the world soaked through, the ground slick and breathing, the air thick with salt pushed inland from every direction. This is the Maritime Northwest—where cold rarely bites but moisture seeps, swells, and tests everything built by human hands.
Most settlers saw that and assumed scarcity. They misunderstood the ecosystem entirely. The Indigenous peoples of this coastline—Coast Salish, Lushootseed-speaking communities, the Haida and Tlingit farther north—knew that wet winter wasn’t emptiness. It was a season of stored abundance.
Summer and fall were the harvest; winter was the withdrawal. Salmon wasn’t eaten fresh in January—it was eaten from meticulous racks: smoked, dried, hardened against the wet. A kind of edible timber. Protein that outlasted storms, raids, floods, grief.
Roots—camas, wapato, bracken—were roasted in earthen ovens and stored in ways designed not for cold, but for damp. Settlers never understood that distinction. They tried to keep food dry in cellars built like German farmhouses and wondered why everything molded. The people who lived here had already solved that problem centuries earlier.
And the salal berry cakes—dense, dark, almost leathery—were winter brilliance in edible form. Berries that modern eyes mistake for landscape ornamentals were once dried into slabs that lasted years, no refrigeration needed, humidity be damned.
But the real architecture wasn’t the food—it was the culture. Winter wasn’t endured alone. It was buffered through kinship, resource-sharing, communal planning. Surplus traveled. Responsibilities moved. If a village faced a rough season, others compensated. That’s the maritime intelligence of this coastline: no one fights the rain alone.
When you stand on Orcas in a December windstorm—the kind that shakes the house and sends gulls sideways—you feel precisely what they mastered. Not low temperatures. Not ice. Endurance in saturation. Planning in perpetual damp. And that carries a principle worth keeping:
Principle From the PNW: Build Systems That Survive the Wet, Not the Cold
In the Maritime Northwest, winter doesn’t freeze your food—it tries to rot it. The people who thrived here understood that preservation isn’t about temperature; it’s about time, moisture, airflow, and design. They engineered winter around the truth of this land: Wind, water, rain, repeat. They didn’t wait for the cold to save them. They built systems that ignored the weather’s excuses.
Japan — Winter as Transformation
Some people mistake my paternal family name, Tamayo, as Japanese. It isn’t—but the confusion makes sense. It’s used as a first name in Japan. And yet my Tamayo line comes from a tiny village in Spain, a place so small that when you say its name out loud it sounds like a secret. I’m not Japanese, and my ancestors weren’t either. Still, Japan offers a winter perspective so refined, so disciplined, so quietly astonishing that it deserves a place in this story. It shaped human survival in a way few cultures ever matched.
Japan’s deep-winter intelligence wasn’t born from vast stores of grain or endless fields. It emerged from scarcity—mountain villages, snowbound valleys, narrow arable land—and a kind of cultural attention to detail so sharp it feels surgical. Where Northern Europe answered winter with cellars and smoke, and the Indigenous Northwest answered it with communal abundance, Japan turned winter into a season of transformation.
Fermentation wasn’t a hobby. It was strategy. It was how you turned a few ingredients into an arsenal.
The daikon harvest in late autumn—white, clean, almost ascetic—became dozens of winter forms:
takuan, dried and fermented into a punchy, long-lasting staple;
kiriboshi, strips laid out to dry in the cold wind until they held the memory of sunlight;
nukazuke, buried in fermented rice bran like messages stored for the future.
And miso—born from soy, koji, salt, and time—wasn’t seasoning. It was a winter vitamin, a protein extender, a microbial shield. A village without miso in January was a village in danger.
Pickling, drying, fermenting, preserving—Japan approached winter with a kind of calm inevitability. Not panic. Not austerity. Purpose. Winter was never something to outfight or outlast; it was something to work with, using the cold as a partner, not an adversary.
Even the architecture acknowledged the season: houses designed to breathe in summer and withstand snowpack in winter; storehouses built to stay cool and dry, not warm and cozy; villages oriented to take advantage of winter winds that aided drying.
Where Northern Europe feared winter, and the Pacific Northwest planned around its wetness, Japan treated winter as a laboratory. A place where food changed form, gained depth, and grew more valuable as it aged. No waste, no excess, no indulgence—just precision.
And from this long arc of winter practice, a principle for us emerges:
Principle From Japan: Let Time Do What Effort Cannot
Japanese winter survival didn’t depend on brute force or massive stores. It depended on knowledge—how to harness microbes, wind, dryness, and patience.
They understood that certain transformations only happen slowly, in the cold. That winter isn’t an obstacle but a collaborator. That time itself is a tool, if you know how to wield it.
Most modern people try to fight winter. Japan fermented it.
Diversity is the Real Winter Gardening Strategy
As Mom talks, her voice steady and unhurried, I realize why these three winter traditions—Northern Europe, the Indigenous Northwest, and Japan—belong together. It isn’t about geography. It isn’t about climate. It’s about diversity. Not as decoration. Not as hobby. Not as politics. As survival.
Every one of those cultures endured winter because they refused to depend on a single method. They built overlapping systems: cellars and ferments, smokehouses and pit ovens, daikon and fish and grains and berries and roots and beans. Redundancy wasn’t inefficiency. It was insurance.
My grandfather understood that long before any of these historical threads entered my life. During the war he planted everything he could—rows upon rows of vegetables, more varieties than my mother can even remember. After the war, when he farmed full-time, he kept that mindset. Produce, rabbits, pigs, geese, chickens, whatever he could raise and whatever would grow. Diversity wasn’t a theory for him; it was the only rational response to a world that kept proving itself unpredictable.
Standing in my own winter beds, holding my greens in the gray light, I can’t ignore the truth: we’re not ready. Not for war. Not for another COVID. Not for supply disruptions, price shocks, or the quiet, creeping fragilities that modern life hides behind convenience. And the irony is hard to ignore: our million-dollar homes are fortresses in name only—elegant shells with no answers for real hunger.
Especially in the San Juan Islands, we’re one grocery store away from panic. One shipment away from scarcity, one ferry crew shortage from abandonment. One unlucky season away from realizing we’ve outsourced all our resilience to systems we don’t control.
That’s why these three perspectives matter. That’s why they belong together. Not to tell us which method is best. But to force us out of obedience to a single way of thinking.
Northern Europe teaches preparation. The Indigenous Northwest teaches design in the wet. Japan teaches transformation through time.
Three strategies. Three answers. Three visions of winter survival. And all of them are right.
Diversity isn’t a luxury in the garden. It’s the backbone of resilience. It’s the antidote to fragility. It’s the difference between a season you fear and a season you’re ready for.
As the wind shifts across the pond and Mom’s voice softens on the phone, I look at the bundled greens in my hand and think of the generations who came before me—my grandfather who farmed three acres like a lifeboat, my father who walked miles for work just to buy himself a few more years, and the civilizations who learned to turn winter from punishment into possibility.
I’m not them, but their lessons survived long enough to reach me. And here, in the wet and wind of this winter garden, I will use every one of them.
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