• Tag Archives turnips
  • Harvest and Preservation

    Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

    It changed.  The game.  After half-time most of the time, I expected to see showed up.  How about that 64 yard run by Peterson?  Wow.  Still, it concerned me that we didn’t get more pressure on Brady Quinn.  I’m looking forward to the analysis.

    Kate has made grape juice, a lot, from the grapes I picked this morning.  Next is jelly.  I have a role in the preservation process this week.  We discovered last year that gazpacho is a perfect canned soup.  When chilled, it tastes like it was made that day.  A great treat in the middle of winter, a summer vegetable soup.

    We also several Guatemalan blue squash.  They run about a foot and a half long and 7-8 inches wide.  Heavy, too.  Taste good.   We still have parsnips (next year), turnips, carrots and potatoes in the ground, probably a beet or two hanging around, too.  Above ground we have lettuce, beans, greens and some more tomatoes.  Kate’s put up 36 quarts of tomatoes so far.

    Kate also made use of our dehydrator.  Cucumber chips.  I know, but they taste wonderful.

    There’s a lot of room for improvement in next year’s garden, but we feel good about the production this year.  Next year we should get more fruit from our orchard.


  • They Nourish Us Five Times

    Summer                     New Moon

    A.T. cleaned turnips and beets, cut their greens off and prepared them for boiling.  He also prepared kale and collard greens, first washing them, then cutting their rib out and storing them for Kate who will boil and freeze them.

    An old folk saying suggests fire wood warms you five times: when you cut it, when you move it, when you split it, when you stack it and when you burn it.  There is a parallel in the seeding, tending, harvesting, preparing and eating of vegetables and fruits.  Each of these plants grew from a tiny seed placed either in soil or in soil block.  They were thinned and mulched.  The soil over and around them has been built up over the years.  When they grew to maturity, the same hands that planted them, took them from the plant and washed them.

    When Kate and I eat them, they will have nourished us five times.  As we care for the seedling, we participate again in the miracle of vegetative reproduction.  While we tend them, we pay attention with love to the soil in which they grow, checking them for disease and creating a nurturing place for them.  When we harvest them, we enter into the oldest covenant of humankind, one that even preceded the neolithic revolution, the covenant between humans and domesticated or at least cultivated plants.  When we prepare them for food, we touch not strangers, but friends, allies in the ongoing wonder of nature’s intertwined parts.  As we eat them, we become the plant and the plant becomes us.


  • In the Garden

    Summer                        New Moon

    A.T. used the chainsaw this morning.  He cut out a mulberry tree growing in an unwanted (eastern) location.  A.T. feels manly after he uses the chainsaw.

    Kate and A.T. harvested peas, greens, beets and turnips, too.  A.T. planted beans as a cover crop among the onions, where the garlic came out.  A.T. plans a much larger garlic crop for next year.  He has 9 or so large bulbs set aside for planting and set in an order for several new varieties.  At the SSE (Seed Saver’s Exchange) conference over the weekend a speaker suggested planting the garlic earlier, even in August.  A.T. asked SSE if he could get his garlic earlier than the September 7-9 ship date.  Nope.  Not to  worry, he’ll plant his own in mid-August and check the crops against each other next June.

    This whole gardening process now begins to blur the line between horticulture and agriculture.  With crops meant for immediate consumption, but others for storage:  potatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beans, garlic, onions, greens and peas, plus the eventual fruit yields, our garden has become a substantial part of our lives.  Substantial in the transubstantiation notion loved by Catholics.  We eat of the body of our garden and our orchard and in our bodies it becomes use, transfigured from plant to human.  A sacred event.  Substantial in the way it requires the use of our bodies to realize its harvest.  Substantial in the political sense since it cuts down trips by car, makes our place better than we found it and keeps us close to our mother.

    The bees have added another dimension.  An interdependent, co-creative collaborative effort.


  • As American As …

    Summer                                   Waxing Summer Moon

    As american as stock-car racing, country music, Walden Pond and the Beach Boys, another long hot summer is well under way.  The neighbors love fireworks and each fourth of July they show off the good stuff they’ve picked up.  Some of it is impressive for local effects.  Flowering showers with a boom at the end.  Fiery pinwheels with whistles.  Percussive blasts.

    Rigel and Vega did not get as upset tonight as they did last night.  Reassurance and familiarity are a powerful antidote.

    The harvest continues and picks up speed.  Tonight I made a dish with chard and beet greens, topped with baked beets in Balsamic vinegar.  There was, too, roasted turnips covered in olive oil, pepper and Kosher salt.  Potato crusted wild Cod finished the meal.

    The Seed Saver’s Exchange calendar that hangs on our kitchen wall has this quote under July’s photograph of heirloom tomatoes, onions and bell peppers:  “When the harvest begins to flow is the gardener’s joy.”  It’s true.

    Digging up turnips and beets, cleaning and cooking them feels so good when they’ve come direct from the garden.  Though there are political reasons for having one, ecological reasons  and aesthetic reasons, the real payoff from a garden is fresh food, grown in a manner you know and in a place with which you are familiar, even intimate.

    There are certain activities that just seem congruent with life.  Among them are picking, cleaning and cooking your own vegetables.  When I dig up the turnips and the beets, I remember the day their seeds went into the ground, one at a time.  Their first shoots.  Their growth over time.  All part of my life and theirs.

    Another tradition of the fourth at our house is a meal with dishes cooked from our own sources.  Hope yours went well, too.


  • A Cool Night.

    Beltane                    Full Flower Moon

    This is the kind of weather that can scare a Minnesota gardener.  Right now the temperature is 42.  It could, will, go lower, though the prediction says no lower than 40.  If I thought it were going to get down to freezing, I’d have to cover my new peas and turnips.  They have just poked above the soil and would suffer and most would die.

    My baby plants from inside are now adolescents; they stayed outside six hours today.  Tomorrow, I’ll put them outside by the beds where they’ll be planted and give them one more day in the peat pots before digging them in to their permanent homes.

    I cut up the potatoes today, readying them for planting, too.  They may be a little late, so we’ll see what we get.  A lot of new plants in this year’s garden: leeks, parsnips, turnips, greens, brocolli, cauliflower, plants I may not understand too well.  Again, we’ll have to see what we get.

    That kind of experimentation is one of the joys of gardening, eating something fresh that you’ve only ever had from a produce section of a supermarket.  This year marks a large expansion in our vegetable and fruit crop.  That means a lot of uncertainty, a steep learning curve with some plants.  All part of the deal.


  • Peas, Turnips and Parsnips Oh, My

    Beltane                    Waxing Flower Moon

    Many daffodils bloom outside the writing area.  No tulips yet, but they should bloom in the next few days.

    Snow peas, sugar peas, garden peas, snap peas all went into the ground this morning.  This took a while because there were several steps.  First, loosen the soil with a spading fork.  Rake smooth.  Create a taut twine line marking the location of the trellis.  Scratch a half inch to one inch furrow on either side of the twine.  Lay down inoculant in the rows.  Then, one by one, place the peas.  Do this over and over until 4 rows run parallel to each other.

    In between the 1st and 2nd rows and the 3rd and 4th rows, reachable with ease from the bed’s edge, white globe turnip went into the same soil.  Turnips like pea companions.

    Another bed, this one with a nice daisy and a star-gazer lily, got loosened up, too.  After a smoothing with the small garden rake, parsnip seeds fluttered down onto the scratched surface, tiny space ships with feathered brown edges and a cockpit containing the parsnip seed.  The parsnips, after thinning and trimming, get a mulch and then remain in the ground until next spring, achieving their nutty flavor through hard frosts and a hard winter.

    At that point the noon sun had made me hot so I came inside to write, have lunch and take a nap.  Later this evening I’ll plant greens, beets and carrots.

    One more thought on garage sales.  Here in Minnesota, after a hard winter, they are also the equivalent of a  social event for post-hibernation bears.  Minnesotans love the winter, but during the winter our travels outside of our home usually have a distinct purpose and almost always head away from the house.  There are no yard parties in the winter.  Well, not many anyhow.  Some folks just gotta barbecue.

    When the weather warms up, though, lawn mowers come out.  Lawn chairs.  And, garage sales.  Neighbors drop by to say hi, see if you made it through the winter, and coincidentally, to check out your stuff.