Bring out your dead

Eating from the garden after the ice storms

More than a month after the ice storm, we are still counting the dead.

A series of winter storms left northwestern Oregon covered in 3 inches of solid ice for a week in late January. There were more than 3,000 power outages across the state, and thousands of downed trees. (The only one that earned a place in the city’s mythology was the evergreen that smashed a cop car in half, which Reddit dubbed the “Antreefa.”)

North Portland escaped the outages, which made us feel doubly fortunate because a kitchen remodel has meant we and our two cats have been spending our days in an appliance-stuffed garage office. Goodbye, black mold sprouting up behind 1980s tile countertop. Hello, dishwasher (for the first time in my adult life). When we signed on with our contractor it felt like a small sacrifice to cook all our meals with a microwave, induction burner, and air fryer and to wash dishes in the bathroom sink. Then the construction started, my ability to cook evaporated, and the entire landscape froze over.

I picked my favorite za’atar right as it was dying and threw the leaves into the dehydrator. RIP

Once the ice cap finally retreated, I spent an afternoon trying to catalog the damage. Dozens of herbs that had scoffed at December's frosts had turned crumbly and brown. Our flourishing purple artichokes melted into the ground. The lemon verbena: gone. Pineapple salvia: gone. The only surprise survival from the week were native wildflower seedlings that carpet swaths of our front yard, and stll promise a colorful April. As for the rest, now we wait.

This winter, everything seemed to go dormant: My normal January work slowdown, the isolation of the ice storms, our ripped-up home. Patience is easier when you know you’re waiting for something good. I’m not so good with the other kinds of empty spaces, the uncomfortable ones, the ones without a fixed endpoint. A sort of mental vertigo takes over, thoughts spinning around quickly and without anchor. Sure, I spent my January days using AI to generate woodcuts of my cat in Victorian-era detective oufits, learning phrases in Chinook Wawa, and dreaming up what this newsletter would look like if it were a book. But I wasn't sure what was going to prove fruitful, and what was merely filling up dead blocks of time.

You cannot hide your crimes.

The exhaustion of waiting only seemed to abate this weekend, when we finally turned on the new oven, emptied the stacked boxes in my home office back into the new cabinets, and washed all of our glasses in the new dishwasher. It felt like the right time start the rest of my life back up again.

In between spells of freezing rain, I have been going back out into the yard to prune and trim. I sent an email to the Metro Master Gardener helpline asking whether I should give the surviving carrots and purple daikon — their slumping leaves half withered away, planted too late in the year to fatten up before January — a chance to flourish again in the spring. Pull them up, the Master Gardener responded. Eat them now or else they'll grow woody.

So this weekend, I ripped everything out. It felt satisfying to scour away the last dregs of hope that my overwintered root vegetables would bounce back. I returned the garden to bare dirt and drew up my charts of where the spring plantings would go.

The fatter carrots and thumb-sized purple daikon I chopped into matchsticks, making Andrea Nguyen's recipe for ðồ chua, or sweet-and-sour Vietnamese pickles. The rest of the carrots — pencil-thin and wispy, stubby, corkscrew — I scrubbed (in the bathroom sink, no less) and shredded in the food processor. Then, loosely following David Liebovitz's recipe, I dressed them in lemon juice, raw sunflower oil, mustard, and chopped parsley for a salad of carrottes rapées. For dregs, they didn't taste so bad.

As for the rest of the yard, the waiting is not over. The rains are still interminable. The browned plants still look like someone took a blow-torch to them. I can’t yet tell which roots are mustering their forces underground, preparing to surprise us with their return. March feels more like anticipation again, though. Not the time between. The time before.

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Other good things to look for in early March

Crocuses and daffodils aside, this is still the fallow period, delayed by the ice storms, just before everything wakes up. Aside from clearing out the root vegetables in your gardens, here are a few other things to keep an eye out for

Bittercress: Now's your chance to pick the peppery rosettes in your lawn before they flower and go to seed.

Dandelion greens should be particularly sweet and tender right now.

Chickweed is everywhere, if you know how to recognize it.

Raab season should soon hit the farmers market.