Diary of My Country Life-December 11th, 2025

12/11/2025 Thursday 27-39F Cloudy

Arugula is a great vegetable. Because of the deer and groundhogs, a lot of my favorite vegetables like celery, spinach, bok choy and radish couldn’t grow since once the seeds sprouted or grew into seedlings, the critters would eat them to the ground. I can fence the deer out, but not the groundhogs—they are too capable, can climb, can burrow, and have no morality like bandits 😅. So, before I can find a way to protect those vegetables from being feasted on prematurely, I decide not to grow them. But, I love green leafy vegetables, almost every meal I need to see something green. The most common leafy vegetables which I can find in the local markets are lettuce (of course), collard greens, swiss chard, kale. While to meet my fusion cuisine, which involves braise, steam, soup, stir fry etc,. these common vegetables are not that versatile. 

To have a self-supplied vegetable garden has always been my dream, and I know it won’t be fulfilled at least in a short time. Lucky that I found arugula. 

When I lived in Shanghai, I ate arugula regularly because I liked its aroma and bitter flavor. Based on Chinese common medicinal opinion, the bitter vegetables can always help people clear their inner heat, so it’s very suitable for me. Since I started to grow my own vegetables three years ago, arugula belonged to the first batch of seeds I sowed. Since then, it has never left my garden. Why did I say it’s a great vegetable? Not only because of its medicinal use, its aromatic flavor, but also because the critters don’t touch them at all and it’s hardy enough to grow all year round in my climate.

At the end of October and early November, I sowed some arugula seeds alongside the grown arugulas; weeks later, I noticed that they had already sprouted. Recently the temperature stayed at 20-30s F, with wind sometimes it feels like lower than 10F. Despite the bitter winter, my arugulas are still fine. The pace of the little seedlings has slowed down; the grown ones are happy and healthy. I spread some fallen leaves lightly to cover the babies and I am quite positive that they will be my first batch of fresh produce next spring.

Shepherd’s purse is another marvelous vegetable. Every year starting from late January or early February in my hometown, they appeared in the fields. When I was a little kid, going out to the fields to gather the wild shepherd’s purse with my mother and my siblings was one of the precious family gathering moments. Sometimes we invited our friends or neighbors to join us thus this activity became festival-like: The adults chatted, sometimes shared jokes and stories with the kids; the kids laughed, ran around chasing each other. Our laughter filled the fields and spread far away. 

The shepherd’s purse day was a treat. After usually an entire morning or afternoon’s work, we could pick more than ten pounds of wild shepherd’s purse. So that day’s meal would be either shepherd’s purse pork dumplings, or buns. The mothers would chop and brine the shepherd’s purse as well so it could last longer as a pickled vegetable.

Thinking of shepherd’s purse, my saliva can’t help appearing. I bought some seeds two years ago, sowed them at a small corner of my vegetable bed before winter. Then last spring when I removed the covering leaves in that area, I found that they had sprouted. It wasn’t a big harvest, not enough for me to make dumplings so I added them into my soup noodles. Even though it offered me just one or two bites, that familiar umami still made me overjoyed.

I left some shepherd’s purse in the soil, letting them flower, dropping the seeds naturally. Hopefully early next spring I can see them again. I miss the shepherd’s purse dumplings very much; I haven’t had them for nearly a decade, since the day I left my hometown.

In the past, before I became a home gardener, I always took it for granted that vegetables would die in winter as if their time and action was set. Then I found out that wasn’t true-it’s the cold, the frosts and winds which killed them gradually, bit by bit. The plants in fact are like animals; their instinct is to survive therefore they can keep growing as long as the environment permits. Then fall and winter comes. The first frost may not kill them, for example, my tomato plants, at that time I noticed that their leaves and stems were still green; then came the second frost, the third one, bitter and harder and lasted longer. Finally, even though my tomatoes wanted very much to live, they couldn’t; the continuous cold kept beating them until they surrendered--there’s no way for them to win; their nature has been set in their DNA. So instead of a quick, one bullet’s shot, the procedure of their death was more like slitting--every day slit a bit so basically, it’s just a matter of time.

And another thing I observed was that in my area, it became windier in fall and winter than in spring and summer. It could be mere coincidence in the past several years; or perhaps it’s generic and could be explained by science. But I still believed that Mother Nature purposely arranged it. Why? Because She sent out Her wind troops to blow off all the leaves from those hard-working plants so She could force them to take their winter vacations. She was pretty bossy; everything and everyone (in most cases including we human beings as well) ruled by Her must follow Her rules. However, Mother Nature was also very sensitive: When She realized that Her wind troops had messed my yard with all the fallen leaves, She right away sent another troop to tidy up—I witnessed how Her troop swirled the leaves and piled them neatly at the corners. I knew it was Her apology 😘.