Cold work days

An unrelated selection of photos... this one above is the parsnip bed.  With each successive frost (nightly now) they droop a bit and with the wind, they're catching all the oak leaves.  I'm excited to dig these beauties as December comes along.  These are the first parsnips we've grown and I love the idea that they only improve as winter deepens - when all the other crops are finished.  Apparently the greens are edible, but we've not tried them yet as there are still plenty of greens in the garden and cold frames to satisfy us.  A friend came to help with the firewood this weekend and we tasted the sorrel and New Zealand spinach periodically as we worked, each of which was more tangy and sweet after the frosts.

A dehydrator special - Chili! - using up all the peppers from the garden, along with some pintos and onions, as well as tomatoes that we've been ripening in the garage.  We started with about half a bushel of green tomatoes at the last harvest in late September and more than half of them ripened within a week.  The rest are lingering, developing some rotten black spots (probably too cold?), but the chicks love the lycopene in any form.  The ones that do ripen well taste wonderful after a month without that sweet garden-fresh tomato flavor.

We wanted the neighbors to feel free to use our 'leaf corral' so we built something visible from the road.  The slats are from a nearby fence that fell down and are woven with twine to remain sturdy through the winds and snow accumulation.  We managed to collect more than 50 brown bags of leaves from our environs which we dumped into piles over this past weekend.  We have coffee grinds on the squash beds and these are each topped with lots of leaves.  The remainder of the leaves are in piles wherever we have space, ready for winterization of beds as well as mulch for the coming gardening season.

Conor is picking our two loveliest heads of broccoli from a seed blend of Fedco varieties.  Fresh broccoli takes so little time to steam, a fact which we often forget!  Two or three or four minutes is enough for these tender stalks.  There's one more big head, but the rest seem to have slowed growth with these ever-so-short days...