Winter Garden: What My Grandfather’s War Garden Still Teaches Me

Before dawn the wind comes down off Turtleback like it’s got something personal against me. I step out anyway, half-awake, basketless, breath fogging into the dark. The winter beds are holding steady--barely--but enough to get me through the day: Forellenschluss with its trout-speckled leaves, beet greens slick with frost, the stiff frills of kale and collards, cabbage folded tight as a monk’s hands, chard glowing like stained glass even under cloud, and the snow peas clinging to their trellis as if they, too, question my judgment.

I take the biggest leaf I can find—one of those jumbo collard leaves—and wrap everything else inside it like a contraband cigar, a fat, green, dripping roll of winter survival and grip it in my hand. Elegant? No. Effective? Absolutely. A feral wrap—more survival than cuisine.

Winter lettuce holding its color after a cold night on Orcas—Forellenschluss lined up with cabbage and kale, proving the season still has a pulse.

The pond is quiet when I pass it. Not serene--quiet the way a held breath is quiet. The ducks haven’t started their gossip yet. The cattails look skeletal. The cold gets in behind my ribs and rattles something old loose, and suddenly I’m thinking of my grandfather in the war. My mother’s stories about him stepping out into his own bitter mornings, checking the acres behind their house not because he had a romantic philosophy of gardening but because the neighbors needed to eat. I remember the stories of him giving away the angora rabbits he raised, because fur was fine but protein was better. “People forget,” my mom says sometimes, “how much one person’s small plot can save another family.”

I call her. It’s still warm at her house in Texas, and she picks up on the first ring. She always does. I tell her what I’m thinking about: the cold, the garden, the ghost of her father walking beside me with a shovel over his shoulder. She doesn’t hesitate. She never does. She talks about the war years like she’s rolling out old maps: the ration cards, the winters when potatoes froze in the cellar, the time the neighbor girl fainted in the kitchen because she’d been giving her rations to her little brother. But then she says, almost lightly, “Your grandfather always had something in the ground. Always. Even in the hard winters. We never went hungry.”

There’s pride in her voice. A quiet, stubborn pride built out of scarcity and the refusal to bow to it. It’s strangely infectious. I take a seat on the cold glacial boulder by the pond, clutching my bouquet of breakfast vegetables like a medieval offering, and let her voice carry me back.

And then it hits me, sharp and embarrassing: I have a refrigerator humming inside my house. A luxury so normal I forget it’s an anomaly in human history. My mother didn’t grow up with one until she was nearly grown. My grandfather never trusted the first one they got. I am a newcomer--one of the first generations to have a machine that stands between me and real winter.

The wind picks up, as if to scold me. I sit there shivering, feeling the gap between my easy life and the heavy winters my people lived through. And that’s when my mind starts wandering even further back, past my grandfather’s acres, past my mother’s stories, past anything that could be plugged into a wall. How did people feed themselves when winter meant months of darkness, no grocery store, no citrus trucked across continents, no imported calories at all? How did they pull life out of cold earth when the season itself seemed opposed to their continued existence?

Mom says, “It wasn’t magic. It was knowledge. And work. And planning. Grit. Winter only scares people who don’t know how to prepare for it.”

And suddenly I’m not just thinking about my grandfather anymore. I’m thinking about the people across time who turned winter from a punishment into a strategy:

The northern Europeans who mastered the art of surviving on roots, hay, ferments, and cellars--people who stared down the dark and built whole cultures on the discipline winter required.

The Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, who understood our coastline’s cold not as an enemy but as abundance in disguise: salmon smokehouses, camas pits, salal cakes, winter as a season of stored wealth rather than starvation.

And Japan, where snowbound villages developed a language of survival through pickling, fermenting, drying--daikon and miso and koji not as cuisine, but as winter armor.

I look down at my fistful of winter greens, still fragrant, still alive despite the cold, and realize: this is my inheritance--not the food, but the question. The same question everyone before refrigeration had to ask: How do you make winter feed you?

And before I answer it, I sit there another moment, phone warm against my cold ear, listening to my mother breathe, thinking about how lucky I am to have her voice to guide me through the dark.

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The North—Where Winter Was Law

The cold on Orcas Island has baby teeth. The cold my ancestors knew had a legal system. In northern Europe, winter didn’t merely arrive--it ruled. It dictated what you planted, what you stored, and whether your children saw spring. Every household lived under its jurisdiction.

When we talk about “feeding yourself in winter,” most people picture root cellars like quaint Hobbit-hole pantries. They forget those cellars were the line between survival and a name carved into a churchyard stone. The northern Europeans engineered winter the way we engineer software--iteratively, precisely, obsessively.

They built hay economies: entire calendars devoted to cutting, drying, stacking, and guarding winter feed. It wasn’t romance; it was livestock triage. Haymaking was the ancestral version of budgeting: too little meant starvation, too much meant you’d wasted labor that could have gone into root crops.

They created clamp pits and earth mounds for turnips, swedes, carrots, and beets—primitive but shockingly effective refrigeration before refrigeration existed. You bury food in insulated soil, and nature pays the cooling bill.

They leaned on ferments that modern people mistake for cuisine. Sauerkraut wasn’t foodie culture--it was medical strategy. A bowl of kraut in February was the difference between “children with color in their faces” and “children who don’t stand up when you call.”

And fermentation itself came from winter discipline. Salt was expensive. Fuel was precious. The solution? Let invisible armies of microbes do the work, turning cabbage into something that could outlast a siege or an especially biblical blizzard.

When the real cold set in, northern Europeans practiced the ancient ritual nobody today likes to mention: the winter cull. You kept only the livestock you could feed. Everything else became food for the months ahead. That’s why the great feasts--Yule, Solstice, Twelfth Night--were winter celebrations. When meat could not be kept alive, it was kept edible.

Winter shaped their architecture--deep eaves, thick walls, smoke lofts. It shaped their religion--gods of fire, hearth, and return. It shaped their psychology--planning was morality, waste was sin, and the calendar wasn’t symbolic; it was a survival code.

Standing over my own winter beds on Orcas, clutching my roll of winter vegetables, I can feel some faint echo of that instinct. The part that says:

Your choices now determine what February looks like.

Winter is the test.

Everything else is practice. The wind cuts across the pond again, sharper now, as if reminding me that Orcas has its own old laws—rules I only brush against in moments like this, when winter strips the world down to what’s essential. My grandfather would have understood that instinctively. So would the people who came long before him, and the people who lived on this coastline long before any mapmaker put a name on it. Northern Europe taught me that winter shapes the hand. But there were cultures that went further--people who turned winter into abundance, not austerity.

As I stand with my bundle of greens, dripping and absurd in the half-light, I realize there’s more to learn from the cold. Much more. And that’s where we go next in Part 2.

Principle From the North: Prepare in the Season That Lies to You

Northern Europe’s true winter lesson wasn’t about root cellars or sauerkraut or livestock culls. It was this: you prepare in the season when the world pretends you won’t need to. Summer’s warmth is a liar. Autumn flatters you. Winter collects debts.

Their entire survival strategy was built on refusing the seduction of the easy season. When the fields were full and the skies generous, that was precisely when they worked hardest, storing the future, stacking the improbable, saving against the dark.

In a modern garden, it translates simply: Abundance is not permission. Abundance is warning. If you grow enough in summer, you earn a winter. If you store enough--knowledge, soil fertility, crops that don’t blink in the cold--you inherit one.

Morning harvest from the winter garden—a handful of cold-hardy greens, gathered before sunrise, the same way my grandfather once gathered what the season allowed.