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...

Winter Crops

Kale trees

I'm always surprised by how much time passes between our posts.  Lately I've not been home during daylight hours, biking off to work at dawn and returning after dark.  I have a few more months until that changes!  On the whole, though, the passing of seasons is delightful.  The weather has warmed up again and we're having brilliant sunshine.  Tough on the root crops in 'cold' storage, which are sprouting, but nice for us.  We've been eating kale almost non-stop - it's so delicious now that the first few frosts have sweetened it up.  Tonight I had roasted portabella mushrooms stuffed with kale and salata ricotta cheese. Delicious. Our most wonderful recent kale success was a nice potato/squash gnocchi tossed in sage and kale butter.  The trees themselves:

We have so many kinds of kale:  Wintorbor, Red Russian, White Russian, Rainbow Lacinato, and some of the more common varieties.  The collards are also doing well, and we tried a few parsnips last night but they're still starchy and would benefit from a few more good frosts.

Jack Frost

  The weather is brisk and rejuvinating, but the winter darkness is creeping in.  With the recent frost, a certain subset of the garden flora is gradually fading.  The collards, kale, broccoli, cabbage and all the lettuces managed to survive beautifully.  The first night was a lighter frost, followed by a pretty solid, hard freeze.  I had forgotten to put the glass on the coldframe, and fortunately had the first night as a warning of what followed.  But yesterday, in the howling winds, the top of one coldframe was lifted and carried 20 feet to smash in the blueberry hedge.  Oops.

We were relatively ready for the frost, but did have to pull the beets in order to save the greens and we lost a few shelling beans.  Otherwise, all the summer crops had been harvested.

The strawberries will be mulched soon, to protect the crowns from freezing and thawing.  They'll be ready to put out the flower hands come spring, and I'm already dreaming of the sweet juicy fruit.

Hiking in the Whites

Last weekend we went for hike up near Gorham,  NH in the White Mountains.  The weather was quite chilly - a reported 6 degrees overnight in the hut, and an early taste of winter.  It was amazing to see the gradations of seasons as we drove further north, from peak foliage in Massachusetts to snow-on-the-ground in New Hampshire.

A bear sharpened his claws on this tree.

The view from the ridge near Mt. Moriah.

Foraging

With the recent rains I've been finding a lot of mushrooms lately... my new passion. The ones above are Hens of the Woods and puffballs. The bright orange ones below are Chicken of the Woods, otherwise known as Sulfur Shelves. I sauteed each in butter, froze some and made some quiches. They're so delicious on their own but I imagine they'd be tasty in a pasta or rice concoction. I did dry the majority of them because its easier to just rehydrate and toss them in soups - and we've run out of freezer space.

Onion Drying

We dried our onion harvest on top of window screens propped up with two sawhorses. They spent about two weeks outside under a sheet. It rained lightly a couple of times but the sheet wicked the moisture away and they dried quickly. The idea with giving them the air circulation is to dry out the roots and tops to prevent rot while they're in storage over the winter. We harvested about 45 pounds of onions for the year, but I think with all the sauces, salsas and chutneys we'll use considerably more than that this year. The onions pictured here are Copra - good for storage. We also had a few varieties of sweet onions for salads and eating. Next year I'll plant some red onions and more storage ones. We interplanted with lettuce, carrots and beets - but the ones interplanted with lettuce didn't fare as well (very small). The idea is to get the tops really established and green before day length starts to decrease so that the plant has energy to put into the bulb. Onions also like plenty of water and fertilizer, and do well in fairly sandy soil, all conditions we're capable of creating... and we love onions.