Rutabaga Under Cover

 

I just finished reading this girl Jackie's blog.  She made a commitment to post every single day during the year 2011.  I enjoyed reliving 2011 through her eyes, and was inspired by her writing.  Plus, she's funny!  Why can't I be so funny?  Probably because I write about rutabaga.  There's only so much humor to be found in a root vegetable.  Even knowing I'm unlikely to inspire a giggle, I've just got to show you what was underneath the cloth in the greenhouse.  I hadn't even peeked inside since the middle of August, but I could see leaves practically bursting from the cloth.  What's going on in there? 

Whoa.  I folded back the cloth to reveal a mass of green leaves.  These guys grew with no help from me.  I didn't even water them, so I am impressed with their vigor.  Weeds trapped under the cloth grew to the size of hay.  

I pulled out all the hay, yellow leaves, and a few dead plants to give them some breathing room.  Despite being covered, there were some big striped caterpillars enjoying a free meal, but the damage was minimal.  

Look at that - it's a rutabaga!  A big one!  I should get a small harvest at end of this month.  

I carefully tucked them back into their dome and began to dream up ways to expand the rutabaga operation next year, now that I have a system that works.  Just imagine - I could grow lots of rutabaga and store them in the root cellar.  We would be rich in delicious and healthy tubers!  

Yesterday, after months of riced rutabaga being one of our go-to vegetables, Brandon announced that he was officially sick of eating rutabaga.  Doh!  Of course.  Sigh.       

Shuck Beans and Cabbage

The garden has been overtaken by weeds.  The ragweed is nearly twelve feet tall and has stems so thick they can't be cut with the weed eater, and need to be manually removed before they start dropping seeds.  The squash vines are dead, the cucumbers are buried alive, and who knows what state the potatoes are in - they haven't been seen in weeks.  

In the greenhouse, under domes of cloth, cabbages and rutabaga have been growing unsupervised for nearly a month.  They weren't watered, weeded, or fussed over in all that time. I was afraid to lift the cloth and see what was happening under there.  

But look, the rutabaga are growing!  I didn't get very many of the seeds to germinate, probably because it was hard to keep the soil moist under that hot greenhouse plastic, but once there were plants a few inches tall, I assembled the hoops and tucked them in.  They might actually make a rutabaga!

The cabbages were planted early, and were plagued by caterpillars before I managed to erect some homemade hoops from sticks and cover them with cloth.  I was fearful that they would be ruined.  

They had lots of bug bites on the outer leaves, and a few seemed munched by rabbits, but once I peeled the chewed parts away, I was left with a whole basket of little cabbage heads!  

After I harvested the cabbage, I pulled up all the weeds, sticks, and cloth, and now have a nice place for another crop.  I'm encouraged by the cloth covering.  I think if I put it on before the bugs lay their eggs, I might be able to grow a bigger cabbage head next time.  

A few years ago I met a man named John, who showed me photos of his green bean plants.  They were beautiful!  He had a whole wall of lush green plants and shelves of canned beans.  I've had his green beans in my mind for a long time, and this year I think I may have a trellis and harvest to rival John's.  

I've picked baskets of green beans.  Last night I made a meat loaf and surrounded it with green beans and onions and baked it all together.  The beans cooked in the juices from the meat and were so delicious.  We've saved all the dripping from baked chicken and baked green beans in it too.  So good!

In addition to the trellis in the garden fence, which is sixteen feet long, I planted beans inside a ring of tomato cages.   The beans flourished.  The goats realized they could climb on the cages and knock them over to get the tender vines on the top.  They gorge themselves, crush the cages, and make a mess of the vines.  I was half glad to think I wouldn't have to pick any more beans! 

Brandon helped me pound in some fence posts to prop the cages back up, and I crawled around inside the ring of beans and picked another giant basket full.  I don't think the goats ate enough to hurt the vines at all, and there are plenty of tiny beans still on the vines.  

Picking the beans is the easy part.  The tedious part is pulling all the strings.  

In years past, I've frozen green beans, and they are handy for soups and stews.  This year I cleaned up the food dehydrator and have been drying the beans.  They shrink so much it seems hard to believe it took hours of breaking beans to fill all the trays only to have a few quart bags.  Brandon's mom made the best beans from dried white half runner beans.  I hope my beans will be half as tasty as her shuck beans.   We'll see!

Garden Getting Away

The garden is getting away from me.  I've been able to hold my own against the weeds and the bugs better than ever this year since I've been home more, but even still, I nearly lost the whole potato crop (just twelve plants), to these voracious leaf devouring bugs.  I spent some time kneeling in the dirt picking these cute little orange and black larvae from the nearly defoliated plants, and dropping them into a bowl of soapy water.  

They didn't even try to hide or run away!  The next day I checked and found a few stragglers, but after that they haven't returned.  I looked them up, and these are the larvae of the infamous Colorado potato beetle, called Leptinotarsa decemlineata.  Whoever named these guys decemlineata must have had their crop decimated too!   The plants started making new leaves right away.  Whew, close call!   

The little cabbage plants in the greenhouse were being munched on by the green caterpillars of little white butterflies called cabbage white (Pieris rapae).  Sigh.  Despite the heat, I searched each leaf and squished the poor caterpillars. Then I fashioned some hoops from cut branches, and draped some garden cloth over the hoops and anchored it with bricks.  I meant to do this chore much earlier, before the butterflies arrived, but apparently I needed eminent cabbage death to encourage me.  After a few days I could tell which plants still had caterpillars because the new leaves in the center of the plant were chewed.  I've been patrolling, and I think the cloth is working!  

That green tangle of plants in the greenhouse next to the covered row of cabbages is the overgrown spring greens.  In the center of that mess is a row of onions.  

The lettuce plants were still pretty, but turned bitter once they bolted.  I usually just let them go and clean up the beds in the fall or winter once it's not so hot under the plastic dome.  Not this year!  I chopped, yanked, and pulled until I removed every plant, and then collected the onions.  

I spread the small onion bulbs on some mesh chairs so they can dry, and draped some burlap over them to block the direct sun.  I like to cut the leaves, peel the outer layer from the onion bulb, and grill them.  Bite sized and tasty! Once they all dry I'll cut off the leaves and store some for planting next spring.  

Now the greenhouse is so tidy!  I prepped the bed in the center by hoeing out all the plant stubble, and mixing in buckets of compost.  It made for a nice seed bed, so I planted two rows of rutabagas, and a row of two types of kale.  I've always thought that it would be possible for the greenhouse garden to produce lots more food if only I would cycle in new crops and keep things growing in every season. 

The greenhouse dome helps protect the cabbage row cover from the wind and heavy rain, which is good so it doesn't disintegrate, but it gets so hot in there that I'm struggling to keep the newly planted seeds moist even with twice daily watering.  I'm afraid I will forget one time and the little seedlings will be toast.  

After taking this photo I got motivated to pull weeds from the squash plants and their purple onion neighbors.  The squash vines look amazing!  I'm hopeful the the vine borer bugs won't show up until after I get some zucchini and spaghetti squash.  

All of the mustard greens and some of the mixed lettuce plants in the summer garden are bolting too.  If I get ambitious, I'll remove all these plants too, and start a new crop of something.  Maybe.  It's getting hot out there! 

Guineas and Gardens

After all these years, I still have two guinea fowl - both males.  They seldom roost with the chickens, and prefer to sleep in the rafters of the barn.  They make funny whistles and squeaks when I disturb them on my way to close the chicken coop and do my nightly animal checks.  They keep an eye on things around the farm, and Wendigo knows to be alert when the guineas sound the alarm.  My parents are currently raising fifteen guinea keets.  I can't wait to hear them all sounding the alarm at the same time - they are going to make such a racket!  

I'm enjoying the herb spiral near the back door this year.  I forced myself to do some weed management, and I think the plants are enjoying a little elbow room.  The milkweed is dominating the spiral, and I counted over twenty stems, all from that single transplant a few years ago.  I was complaining to a friend that the milkweed was taking over the herbs and turning my spiral into a butterfly garden and he reminded me that it has "weed" in its name for a reason!  

But look, the oregano is holding it's own amidst the forest of milkweed stems.  There's also a volunteer black locust tree that I keep cutting off and letting send up new shoots.  I transplanted some dill from the greenhouse to the very tip of the spiral, and it's getting ready to bloom.  Monarchs love the milkweed and swallowtails love the dill.  I should probably rename the herb spiral the butterfly spiral after all.  

Look, Mom, the lemon balm I transplanted from your garden is really taking off!  The mint is doing pretty good too.  Wouldn't it be nice if the whole spiral was perennial plants, and they came back thick enough to choke out the weeds?  

I pulled all the weeds from the row of green beans in the summer garden.  You can hardly see the bean plants, but they are there, just to the left of the row of mustard greens.  It's past time to harvest mustard greens.  I guess I know what I'll be cooking for dinner!  

I planted onion bulbs in two different areas in the garden.  I asked Brandon yesterday if he could remember what animal stall we emptied onto the north side of the garden, because the onions in that area are three times the size of the other onions.  We think it was really thick goat bedding,  Whatever it is, the plants love it!  

The spaghetti squash and zucchini are also in this part of the garden, and they are thick and dark green.  I put tomato cages, on their sides, over the planted seeds to keep the chickens from scratching them up, and now the plants have grown so much I can't get all the cages up without pulling up the plants!  Doh!  

I managed to get a sunburn on the back of my legs and the top of my feet yesterday while I messed around making a garden fence out of tomato cages.  I used some pieces of deck railing that we salvaged from a friend, and sort of wove the cages together and made a big circle, that's open in one spot for access to the center of the circle.  In theory, chickens can not get to the inside of the circle.

I dumped bedding from the chicken coop into the cages, to suppress weeds, and planted about thirty feet of green beans just on the inside of the circle.  My hope is that the beans will climb the wall of cages, and we can pick from outside and inside the circle.  I didn't stake the cages down, so I anticipate the whole thing being knocked over by a wind, or a goat.  I can't say that I wasn't warned, huh?  

Rambling Story of Recent Things, and Then it Snowed

 Rufus has such a good kissy face!  I have some photos to share, of recent things. 

We harvested green beans.  Lots and lots of green beans.  My parents came, and we gathered round the bean harvest, and picked all the little beans from their shells so we can save them to plant next year.  The focus of the 2019 summer garden was green beans and sweet potatoes.  I did my best to harvest and eat the beans as they ripened, so by the time the last of the beans were ready to save for seeds, we were glad to take a break from stringing!  If I plant all those seeds next year, we will be covered up in green beans.  

Would you like to admire Turkey?  She's grown into a giant bird, who coos softly, and squeaks loudly for food.  She's a champion pear eater, and sleeps on the top perch with the chickens. 

Brandon and I dressed as our future selves for our Halloween costume this year.  We sprayed our hair white and grey, emphasized our wrinkles, and added age spots.  We also nearly caused a fender bender while taking selfies in the car!

We joked that the best part of going to a party at the age of one hundred and three is that we could wear our most comfortable sweaters and no one thinks it's unacceptable to take a nap during the party! 

Somehow, despite his busy schedule, Brandon managed to squeeze in enough moments to build an addition to our barn.  

 

It's a an extension of the roof line, that perfectly shelters the tractor.  I was happy to move the tractor out of the hay hoop barn, to make room for my hay bales.  Now the tractor is nearer the electricity, which is good in case we need to plug it in to warm up, should we need to use it this winter.  

Wendigo was galloping around and hurt her knee.  Her good knee.  So now she has one bad-ish knee, and one pretty bad knee, and she hobbles.  It's no wonder I tweaked my back trying to lift her into the car for a visit to the vet - she weighed in at one hundred and three pounds!  The vet took scans and said that her hips are a little bad, which probably puts pressure on her knees. She likely has tears in her ACL tendons.  Wendigo's only consolation for her limited mobility is that the pain medicine goes down easiest when embedded in hot dogs.  She doesn't mind a twice daily dose of hot dog one bit.    

The main route away from home was flooded one day last week.  I turned around to try the other route...

and it was flooded too!  It's an odd feeling to be trapped at home, but nice to have an excuse to stay home from work. 

It was past time to harvest the sweet potatoes.  The vines were so pretty all summer, but I was unconvinced there would be real potatoes under the ground.  I was wrong!  

It took me about five digging sessions, but I finally made my way through the entire bed.  I didn't have to dig too deep, as most of the potatoes were in the top layer of loose organic garden soil, and not into the clay subsoil.  Even still, it was a lot of work and I couldn't help but dream of the giant bin of organic sweet potatoes at the grocery, all clean of dirt and harvested by someone else!  Especially when I would carefully excavate a giant whopper of a potato only to turn it over and find that some type of rodent had gnawed all the way through it!  Grrrr!  

 

Even though we shared about a third of the harvest with the voles, the other two thirds make an impressive display on the dining room table.  

My root cellaring book says to cure the potatoes for ten to fourteen days at eighty-five degrees and ninety percent humidity.  Yeah, right.  Who has a sauna fit for potato curing?  To store them after they are cured, the book says they need a relatively warm and dry root cellar, or they do well wrapped in newspaper and stored in an unheated room.   All the potatoes in the bowl have chewed places, or were damaged during harvest.  I've been cleaning them up and baking them.

Brandon prefers that I cut off the chew marks from the voles. So picky!  Ha!  Even uncured, they are delicious.  Maybe they were worth all that effort to dig, after all. 

We did all that stuff, bean harvesting, Halloween partying, barn building, dog toting, flooding, and potato digging, and then it snowed.  Nice.