Our vegetable garden may never see snow, but here, just south of San Francisco, we get some hard frosts. Just before New Year's Eve, I woke to find the rooftops white and a skin of ice floating on the watering buckets. The rainwater puddled in the leaves of the brussels sprouts had turned into ice cubes.
By noon, the frozen lettuce had thawed. We expected to lose all the greens, but they just went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. As we reached mid-January, the air smelled of Spring.
