Winter Harvest

This is our first year we planted for a winter harvest and so far so good.  We grew a variety pack of carrots last summer and then covered them in leaves when the weather turned cold.  The other day, I moved the leaves aside and dug out a good bunch of them.  Since they were old, I expected them to be a little woody, but they are sweet and crisp.

While I was out there, I dug some parsips and kale.   The mornings have been in the low teens but the kale is still doing great.  It's not strong flavored, but I do prefer it mixed with lettuce.  However, I'm just so happy for some fresh green right now.

These parsnips are over a foot long.  They'll be great in soup or roasted.  Today we put one of our chickens in the crock pot.  I'll bet these would be great thrown in to cook with it.

With Christmas coming, the caramel season is upon us.  My ten-year-old daughter made a batch of caramel and then arranged it on her favorite pretty plate.  They are were a round success at her girl scout party.  This is all we have left.

Eggs?

I haven't had much luck with carrots, and I love carrots so I really want them to do well.  They don't come up much and those that do often die when they're little. But my Dad told me a trick.  He said to lay a board on top of them after planting and leave it there for about a week.  Then prop the board up so it shades the bed for another week or two.  I sure hope it works. 

He said you can start carrots right through the hottest part of the summer this way.  So we tried it.  The irrigation water came in and soaked the soil well.

Our egg production has dropped.  It used to be about 8/day and now we're down to about 5/day.  With kids eating scrambled eggs every morning, that just isn't enough.

Production went up with the longer days but then it started declining.  Maybe our chickens aren't getting enough to eat.  We feed them grain, kitchen scraps, and weeds out of the garden.  Maybe they're not getting enough calcium.  We give them back their egg shells and occasionally a little extra calcium.  Maybe they've gone into a molt.  I don't understand molting well and there isn't much I can do about it.  Or maybe they're getting old — they are two and a half years old.  I can't do much about that either.

But we can deal with food and calcium.  We got a big bag of crushed oyster shells and a bag of commercial chicken feed.  We'll see if it helps. 

Harvest Begins

We have been spending the mornings in the garden, getting as much done as we can before the heat hits.  The weeds got away from us while we were working on the cow shed so there's a lot to do.  While we're out there, we're noticing many things ready to pick, like this beautiful head of cabbage.

Here is today's harvest — head lettuce, cabbage, radishes, turnips, and shell peas.

We just finished our last read aloud from last "year" but with so many peas to shell, I think we'll start another one tonight.

Last fall we planted some carrots, hoping to harvest them in early spring, but when we pulled some in March they were kind of woody.  So they've been sitting in the garden ignored.  They are now five feet tall and blooming, but they're shading the tomatoes so they have to come out.

In the last week the wheat has gone from solid green to lots of yellow.  It's time to get out the book and figure out when we harvest and dry and all of that.

Our neighbor discovered a badger burrowed under his hay shed.  He got rid of it, but now we wonder if it got some of our chicks.  They don't stand still long enough to count, so we won't know until butcher day when we can count them.

Fresh Eating

I tried a new recipe, Butternut Squash Lasagna, from Mother Earth News. It took a while to make, but it turned out really good.  Of course, we used homemade whole wheat lasagna noodles with homegrown/homemade mozzarella.  The kids liked it as well as we did.  The squash gave it a creamy quality.  Next time we'll use more cheese and add meat: hamburger cooked up with onions, peppers and spices.

Lamenting the pour word, squash, for this fruit, my cousin suggested that zucca is the Italian word.  We like it!  So last night we had zucca lasagna! It has a nice ring to it.

I've been hungry for something fresh, and lamenting that I didn't do a better job getting things like lettuce, spinach, and cabbage planted for a fall crop.  Then I remembered some carrots hiding under those huge broccoli plants.  They've been out there a while, probably over the heat of the summer, so I was figured they would be dry and woody.  But they weren't.  They were sweet and crisp.

While I was out there, I walked in the furrows, even though nothing is growing in the beds.  Some weeds have grown up so I didn't look too closely.  Then I realized that I was walking on spinach!  These must be from seed that washed into the furrow and waited for good weather to grow.  There was enough for a nice salad.  Fresh carrots and fresh spinach!!  Praise God!!

Vanilla beans are on sale for the holidays.  A friend of mind told me how easy it is to make vanilla — soak vanilla beans in vodka for six months.  I got the beans at Costco and sliced them open before putting them into jugs of vodka.  She said to put three beans in a flask, so I figured ten beans in the big 1.75l bottles would work.  Next May I'll pour them into smaller bottles to use.  In the end we probably spent as much as buying the vanilla straight, but I'm hoping it will taste better.

My older daughters are studying solubility in Chemistry.  This slow dissolving of the vanilla flavor was a good illustration of solubility level.

We are eight days from Christina's due date.  Her udder looks slightly less empty to me, but nothing else has changed.  We are all watching her closely.

Still Harvesting

All summer it was easy to go outside.  An occasional thunderstorm or the heat of the day would drive us in, but we were out every day.  Now in the fall, there are more stormy days than nice ones.  The rain has stopped but now the winds are so high that we don't dare get on a ladder.  The work on the shed will have to wait.

This morning I did some harvesting.  The artichoke plants we started from seed have grown huge and this is our second cutting.  The plants are perennial in milder climates, but I'm going to bury them in mulch and try to keep them over the winter.

Some of those broccoli plants are still producing little heads down underneath the main growth.   There is enough for dinner tonight.

As I was walking through, I noticed some carrots that I had forgotten about.  They have grown huge.  I suspect they are past the the tender/sweet stage, but they'll still be good in stew.  We have a bed of little carrot plants that I'm hoping will get decent sized before they stop growing.  I've heard of people over-wintering carrots in the ground and that they get actually get sweeter as it gets colder.  We're going to give it a try.  So far they aren't big enough to bother with, and I don't know how much growing they have left this fall.

We are three weeks from Christina's due date.  I am nervous about being the human responsible for her safe delivery, but we have the vet's cell phone number and Jerseys are supposed to have easy deliveries.  Initially she will give colostrum, which is only good for baby cows, but we'll milk her anyway.  Jerseys give much more milk than a calf can deal with and it's unsafe for the cow or the calf not to milk her right away.  Inside of a week it will have changed to regular milk.  In anticipation, I got some cheese cultures that were on sale.  I think Christina is anxious to get back to her molasses grain that we only give her when she's being milked, the stuff that we call her candy.