E-scaping Harvest Day

The leek moth has been at 'em but left enough for a nice pesto.


Lovely curving scape from a hard neck garlic.

One that contains a teeny tiny invader - unfortunatley, it's hard to see this guy as s/he's white on white. You can tell more from the damage of frass near a borer hole.


Last year, I believe that most of my scapes were moth eaten but this year, perhaps because the garlic is hidden in a pile of seeding mache, only about 50% were hit (so far).

***

Leek Moth from the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture

Harvest Day - Tomatoes!

Yup, I'd like to announce that on January 19th, 2009, I am harvesting tomatoes.


Winter Keeper tomatoes nearly all eaten up.

These are long storage tomatoes by the name of Winter Keeper, a variety that I got from Mapple Farms. They have been sitting on this rack since the end of September and have been slowly ripening ever after. Some but only a few have succumbed to rot. Most have stayed blushy gold with a red interior until I eat them. The taste is no where near as sublime as a sun ripened tomato but it is not bad considering they have been riding the shelf for the past 4 months.

Let us harken backward to other end too where I am starting Tiny Tim dwarf tomato because I'm curious how well it will grow on a window sill. I'm also going to be trying Red Robin which is apparently adapted to this sort of growing. Aren't they cute?


Teeny tiny baby tomato with huge pointing finger.

Harvest Day - it's too darn cold!

I was going to go out and show you my coldframes today:



But I figured with the -20 temps that we were going to get shortly that I shouldn't take the insulating blanket off my babies until next week when temps are going to moderate again.

Snow as an Insulator

A gardener friend once told me that the average temperature under a good snow cover was about -5 Degrees Celcius. This intrigued me so I thought we should put it to the test and find out what the experts said. Apparently inside a well built igloo, the temperature is around 2C. Snow can help protect plants from the freezing and drying winds of winter and moderate temperatures so that the plants don't go through repeated freeze thaw cycles. I'm not the only one who says so - there are other bloggers like in This Garden Is Illegal.

Anyhow, don't curse the white stuff except when you're shovelling and then make mazes in your driveway and say your doing it for your kids, dogs or very hardy cats...

OK, I'm bored of this topic now.

Harvest Day - someone else's potatoes and sprouting celeriac

Potato sharing

Canadamike from Homegrown Goodness popped round my place with a bunch of potatoes from his garden and I very much appreciate it. In the lingo of my husband, 'muy amable.'



There were lots of goodies inside for eating but it will be hard for me not to save plenty to grow out next year. I can't help it. I love growing stuff!

(P.S. I found those darn chickpeas)


Sprouting Celeriac



Mind the fuzzy picture. This is celeriac trying to escape the cellar by sprouting. I think I'll have to cook up these forced greens. In the meantime, I'll have to store them some place a bit cooler until the real cold weather arrives in Ottawa and the temperature in my cellar drops to its usual level of just past frosty.

Links

http://www.earth-house.com/Disaster_Readi/Sanctuaries/Root_Cellars/root_cellars.html

Harvest Day - cold snap and the coldframe

We have had a cold snap for the last couple weeks bringing temperatures significantly below freezing, even reaching the double digits at times and that's not even counting the biting windchills during the day which I saw as low as minus 16C. These plummeting temperatures have frozen the top layer of soil and killed off many of the cold hardy vegetables that remain in the garden, though some of the kales are still holding on. Tonight it has started to snow and by tomorrow we are expecting around 15cm.

Here is the ground in the garden today:


Pea shoots, mustard greens and kale in the frozen garden.

My polytunnel is usually a peaked structure that I can stand in but some changes meant that it is temporarily a low tunnel covered in vapour plastic over commercial coldframes. Next year, my hubby and I will be designing and building a more interesting and insulated greenhouse and I look forward to it!

Meanwhile, how are the plants inside?


Calendula in flower, coriander, bunching onion and a radicchio I think, along with others.

Alive!

The florence fennel which some suspicious, though published, print sources say is hardy to zone 4 (I think the other quote of zone 7 is probably more on the money but we'll see) has broken tops and minimum cold damage and the chard, along with some other plants, have fainted but I know the chard for one will recover quickly. All in all, things look not too bad. This week the temps will be closer to normals for this time of year, hovering around 0C, which might allow for some recovery.

I'll be cleaning off snow tomorrow.

Harvest Day - cool cabbage, leaves of plenty

Oak leaves from the two very generous trees overhanging our yard.

This harvest day, I took in the last of the leaf bounty. The end of my driveway lacks the usual row of 10 yard waste bags as mine are spread out on my perennial beds and on the pathes of my vegetable gardens. I had quite a surplus this year as I raked up all my neighbour's leaves (they were ill and as I usual scam their leaf bags after they've done all the work, I figured it was karmic time for me to help collect them) so I also have extra high piles of leaves in the back turning into leaf mold.


Cabbage versus hand. Oh and that's no petite feminine hand, I outspan some guys.

I would also like to draw your attention to this massive cabbage. I know that they can grow bigger but I grew this one. Even with those chew marks, isn't it gorgeous? Most of my cabbages were the normal 2 year's old head size or smaller, which I expect with my tight spacing. But this one was planted near the edge of the patch and if I remember correctly, its neighbour was eaten by something so it had more room than the others. So now that I've managed to grow this Mammoth Red Rock, what the heck am I going to do with it?

For more on my befuddled and often mismanaged well planned and executed cabbage growing instructions, see Cabbage as Big as My Head from last year.

Harvest Day - Strange Mustard?

I noticed that after my Osaka Mustard had finished flowering and the thin stems had bent to the ground that new leaf rosettes started forming at the leaf axils. Some of these even look like they might reflower.

I also found this?



What is it? The petioles appear swollen which is a characteristic of some mustards and this bit of the plant was more cold hardy surviving a frost that wilted the rest of the plant. Not only that but it looks to me like a gall?

I broke it open and it is made of spongy tissue with no buggy inside that I could find. What is it? From the information I have found, I think it might be a gall from a swede midge.

Any clues?

Harvest Day - the roots of fall

We've had a couple hard frosts so I yanked up some roots for a simple roasted dish of mixed veg.

Carrots, turnip, beets, scorzonera (black skin), jeruselum artichoke (bumpy thing), and salsify (thin white roots)

Freshly pulled are dandelion, chicory, beets, carrots, jeruselum artichoke, chinese artichoke, salsify, scorzonera, horseradish, sweet cicely, and turnip. Next year, I hope to add skirret (tried to grow these before but no luck), apios (already added thanks to a generous gardening friend), tuberous sweet pea (found a patch in Gatineau park), turnip rooted chevril, hamburg rooted parsley and more parsnip. I might even grow rampions (campanula rampunculus) but then again, I think it already grows in my yard as a weed.

From left to right: chicory, horseradish and sweet cicely (the last two look similar but feel and taste very different).

You may wonder why I have such a thing for roots but in the cold climate of Ottawa, a root cellar can mean the difference between eating store bought food and cooking from the fresh larder of your own garden. I am lucky enough to have an old cellar built under our front step which is the right temperature but a little dry for root storage. To compensate, I put bowls of water down there and sprinkle a little on top of my roots from time to time.

Scorzonera, salsify (both collectively known as oyster root) and carrot

Also, some roots are great for forcing in the winter to produce fresh greens. Of the above, you can eat the leaves of dandelion, chicory, beet, carrot, scorzonera, horseradish (young leafs), turnip, and sweet cicely. Of course, you can also eat parsley but not the leaves of the turnip rooted chevril. Particular types of chicory are grown for the purpose of forcing them in darkness to produce tasty crunchy chicons for the gourmet market. Thankfully the plant itself is easy to grow in the home garden as are many roots.


Left to right: Jeruselum Artichokes and Chinese Artichokes

Given a light soil (though there are varities of many of these vegetables that will grow in heavy soil such as oxheart carrot, egyptian beet and Russian Kral parsnip), roots require little space compared to other vegetables and some will even take a little shade. They are also the basis for many a meal from mashed to baked to fried to boiled. The famous 'root' used for these purposes is the potato which is actual a tuber but I am playing fast and loose with the definition here. Any undergrown food storage organ is being named 'root' in this post.

In Ottawa you can also grow Gobo (or wild burdock as I'm sure you know if you've ever taken a dog on a country walk), wild carrot / Queen Anne's Lace, short season sweet potato (I did last year with great success), tiger lily (really?), evening primrose, daylily (really, really?),jicama(according to Solana Seeds - who knew), chufa (have grown but was difficult to process) , dog's tooth violet (according to one source only survival food but it's pretty and native here), and many aquatic species such as the very useful cattail, and I'm sure I'm missing something.

-- inserted next day: how about radishes and rutabagas? (someone else should really be at the helm of this brain ship) --

I have the last two in my garden but extraction of a couple first year primerose rosettes revealed no tap root so I shrugged and moved on. The daylily I haven't tried yet.

* You can also cheat by digging a trench and filling it with loose soil or using a crowbar, shoving it into the ground, whirling it around to make a cone and filling with loose soil then planting your seed at the top.

***

Root storage and inulin

And now a fun little lesson. Inulin is a polysaccarhide that is used by many plants to store food. It can give people gas and if I remember correctly, it is one of the culprits in beans. In one of my wild edible food books, the writer talks about cooking roots with high amounts of inulin to break it down. Unlike many people who complain after they eat Jeruselum Artichoke of a gassy tummy, I don't normally react like that. I don't know if this is because of the variety I grow, the way I cook it or my own digestive system but I thought this was an interesting factiod.

More on inulin at Doc Weed's Doin's

Links:

Four Season Harvest by Coleman
Plants for a Future - has other roots that grow in milder climes as well
Wikipedia entry on edible roots with specific classifications between taproots, tuberous roots, modified stems and so on.