We spent the week of Thanksgiving planting. This is a little ironic while celebrating our harvest, but that is how the gardening world keeps spinning. The cycle never stops and every harvest starts with putting seeds in the ground.
Today we got seeds in the mail to grow wheat and rye. With the advice of our master gardener, we are going to attempt a cover crop of winter grains. My main concern is that we are too late to plant the seeds, but with our current weather pattern of warm and sunny days, I am feeling more confident that the seeds will germinate. We will also have irrigation water on the rows, so we won’t be dependent on water from the sky.
This week’s harvest started out with purple top turnips. This isn’t the most charming vegetable, but they are pretty. Turnips always make me think about a demonstration I did with a third-grade class, the students had no idea what a turnip was and ate them without much thought.
Turnips are sweeter than you might think, you can avoid the bitter tastes by eating them raw. Just like raw broccoli is more kid-friendly, do the same with turnips. In fact, slice them into thin strips and serve them with ranch dressing.
We had a short row of Asian vegetables ready, in fact, one of the bok choy heads had actually bolted with our warm weather. Members received either bok choy, baby bok choy, or Napa cabbage.
We had curly kale ready to harvest for the first time. We pick the largest leaves on the bottom of the plants and then they will continue to grow and we can harvest them through the winter and even spring depending on the weather.
We got another cutting of our prolific arugula this week. I hope people aren’t yet tired of this spicy green.
The Brussels sprouts are starting to get bigger, and soon we will strip all of the lower green leaves from the plants. But in the meantime, cutting these leaves for harvest has been a great idea to supplement our fall baskets.
We had four items that reached the end of their fall season. This will be the last of these for a while. Although we do have beets and green onions in the ground for spring harvest.
The sweet potato harvest was completed today. With lots of thoughts about how to do it better next year. This year’s crop was much more prolific than the previous two years, given that we had the same amount of space. Our biggest challenge is our clay soils make drying difficult. Hopefully, by harvesting earlier, we can dry them better.
We had a few Chioggia beets in the ground that I pulled and sent out today. We will wait until next year for more.
We picked the last of our late summer planting of green onions. These have been great, and I would even like more as we will have to wait for our next batch of alliums. We have leeks coming soon.
I was able to find 22 heads of garlic that weren’t completely sprouting. There were just a few heads remaining for our volunteers to use. Next year I will have to make sure to make a concerted effort to send out the remaining garlic by late October so that it can be used before sprouting. I am happy with the quantity. We can never have too much garlic.
For the next two weeks before our winter holiday break, I am hoping to have enough produce each week to make bountiful baskets. I have one more round of winter squash ready to go. But I stare at our broccoli, looking for heads that are large enough to pick. I don’t want to pick them too early if I can let them get bigger for one more week.
I will let you know.
Have a great week,
Julie Moreno