First harvest of the year

 

Here's a photo after I cleaned it up a bit.  There was also a smaller one growing right next to it that came out when I pulled this one.

I pulled these yesterday, and we fried them up with some potatoes and onions, and they were very tasty.

Garden roundup for March

I usually start these roundups by saying how many eggs our hens produced.  Well, they quit laying towards the end of last year.  Between their age and the cold, it wasn’t too surprising.  Well, about the middle of January we got an egg.  And then about every two or three days we’d get another one.  Given that egg prices were going insane, it was nice to have enough eggs for the occasional cake or whatever.  Then one morning I went out and found that five of our six chickens were dead.  Something had gotten in and killed them.  And it came back a few days later and got our last chicken.  About a week later we did manage to trap the likely culprit: 

So we don’t have any chickens right now.  We need to get some supplies, and then we can hopefully get a crew together to board up the holes and do some other, low priority but needed things in the coop.  Once that’s done, we’ll get some chicks and hopefully in a few months get back in the egg business. 

Other than the five or six eggs we managed to get, the only other harvest these last few months were the parsnips.  For some reason, we didn’t have that many germinate last year, but we got enough for four meals.  One with fresh parsnips, and the other three in the freezer.

The only thing planted so far this year have been some potatoes.  I’m doing a little experiment where I planted seven smallish potatoes and we’ll see how many I get in return with minimum work.  I’ve planted potatoes at the end of fall to have them come up as soon as it warms in the spring, but I didn’t get around to it last year.  It’s still freezing a few nights a week, but it should be a few weeks before they start growing, so hopefully it will be warm enough by then.

The only other garden stuff I’ve been working on are my raised beds.  I have three put together – there’s still one more I need to put together – and two of them are “filled.” I would love to have them fully full, but I’m trying to fill them on the cheap.  I put logs and sticks in the bottoms, but I’m filling them with regular dirt.  I’m screening the dirt to get the big rocks out, but it is a slow process.  I started last fall, but I stopped once the snow came.  And, of course, it seems every other day it rains, which gums up the works.  My plan/hope is that while I’m using just plan dirt, I’m also adding in a bunch of organic stuff, from leaves and what I cleaned out of the coop to banana peels and tea bags that normally would have gone into the compost.  Hopefully, as this breaks down it will turn my dirt into okay soil.  And over the years as I add in compost and other stuff, the soil quality will only improve.  That’s the plan.  We’ll have to see how it works out.

First harvest of the year!

 

Parsnips.

For some reason, we didn’t get that many parsnips growing last year.  I don’t know if it was bad seeds, too dry, slugs, whatever, but we only got about a dozen parsnips.  A couple of them are fair sized.  Once cleaned up they should be enough for two, maybe three meals.

Garden roundup for April

During April, our chickens laid 87 eggs, of which 67 made it to the house.  This is less than the 107 they laid last month.  There are two possibilities for this.  The first is our hens are getting pretty old.  It does seem that whenever we need a bunch of eggs for baking or whatever, we need to crack a few extra because we find some with blood spots in them.  So I’d say their egg laying days are numbered.  The other possibility is, now that the weather is more or less good, they’re running off and laying in some hidden nest.  I did find one nest with three eggs in it that I just threw in the compost because I wasn’t sure how old they were.  My dad is the one who lets the chickens out in the morning, and he says there’s one that immediately runs off to the barn, but I’ve looked in there multiple times and haven’t found any nests.  Of course, something that’s happened in years past, is I’ll stop looking in the barn for nests, and then a month later I’ll go to grab something and find a nest with two dozen eggs in it. 

I finished digging up all of our parsnips.  We have 17 quart bags in the freezer.  One of my goals in the next couple of days is to add some compost to the parsnip bed, work it up, and plant the new parsnips.

Other things I’ve planted so far are some lettuce, which I’m trying something new with, so there should be a post on it in a few weeks if it, hopefully, works.  I also had some potatoes that sat on the porch all winter and were starting to grow.  I planted a couple, but then it froze one night and I didn’t think to cover them.  In years past I’ve planted some potatoes in the fall and let them come up the next spring.  Sometimes these have been hit by a frost or two, but they seem to keep coming back. 

In past months, I’ve said that I planted some onions that had started to grow.  Well, I finally had a spot worked up for them so I transplanted … some.  I think I had planted seven bulbs in three batches over the last few months.  All of them grew, but then they stunted.  I don’t know if they didn’t get enough light, or it was too cold, or what.  But when I transplanted them I found that five of the bulbs had rotted away to nothing.  The other two … might still be alive.  I’ll have to see if they do anything.  I still had five or six little bulbs from last year, one of which had started to grow, so I planted them.  I’ll have to see if they can grow bigger this year.  And lastly, last year for the first time I tried planting onion seeds.  It didn’t go well.  I think all the ones I planted indoors and transplanted out died, and I think few of the ones I direct sowed even germinated, and most of them later died.  I still had some seeds left, so I planted all of them, and again, I’ll have to see if they do anything this year.

There might be something big happening tomorrow.  If it does, I’ll do a post about it, probably in a few days.  If it doesn’t work, I’ll just mention it next month.

Garden roundup for March

During the month of March, our chickens laid 107 eggs, which is a good chunk of the 250 they’ve laid so far this year.  I guess they’re happier not having to deal with the snow.  But 17 of these were broke.  If there is a hen eating them, I think it is a rare occasion.  I think they’re breaking just because possibly one hen isn’t eating the oyster shells.  There is one hen, at the bottom of the pecking order, who seems to always be off by herself, so maybe the others don’t let her at the feed.  Of course, when I do sprinkle in some oyster shells in their feed, they look at me as if saying, “That’s not food.” I had hoped that warmer weather would let them eat better, and while we’ve had plenty of nice days, we’ve also had rainy, cold spells.  Maybe once spring fully gets going, whoever is laying weak eggs will get the right nutrients.

I’ve started digging our parsnips.  Most are smallish, but I have gotten a couple monsters.  In previous years I’ve dug all the parsnips in a day or two, but this year my mom is having issues with her hand, so she can only peel a few at a time.  So I’ve been digging a basket, then washing them up so she can peel and slice them.  Some we’ve eaten, but at the end of the month we had 7 quart bags of parsnips in the freezer.  And I’ve probably dug up not quite half of what we planted.  Of course, one end of our parsnip patch is shaded a bit, which might be why that end gives smaller ones, while big ones come from the other end.  I’ve been digging at various spots, but I’ve dug most of the ones from the smaller end.  So there might be a few more monsters waiting.  Now I just have to wait for the rain to stop and the ground to dry up some.

The only other gardening news I have is to report our onions aren’t doing so well.  These were ones that started to grow, so I planted them in a pot, hoping I’ll be able to transplant them outside.  They might still be alive, but not so great.  It’s probably just that I have them sitting next to a window and they’re not getting enough light.  We’ll have to see how they do.

First parsnips of the year

The way I’ve always grown parsnips, is the way my parents have always grown parsnips, which is the way my grandparents have always grown parsnips.  We plant them in the spring, let them grow, then leave them in the ground over winter.  The next spring, once they start to regrow, we dig them up.  I think the cold, and then the process of regrowing breaks up the starches and makes them sweeter, but don’t quote me on that.  I think I looked up the reason one time, but since it’s not something I thinking about all that often, I don’t really remember.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago it was warm and I checked our parsnips but they hadn’t started regrowing.  It then got cold for a couple of weeks, but the last few days have been warm.  Today, my mom said, “Why don’t you pull a few parsnips and we’ll have them for dinner.” So I went and dug a few parsnips which were starting to regrow.

Here is them after the dirt was washed off of them.  I’m not sure what happened to that one in the middle.

I got busy doing other things, and my mom peeled and … rectangled them?  They’re not cubed.  Right now, they’re floating in some water waiting for dinner time.  Maybe I should have waited on this blog to add a picture of them fried up in some butter.  I guess I’ll save that for if I ever doing a cooking post.

First harvests of the year

So the point of this blog is to show what we harvest from our garden/farm.  But as evidence that I still have a lot of bugs to work out of the system, I completely forgot that we’ve already had some harvests.

Aside from eggs – which right now we’re getting about four a day – the first garden harvest this year was back in February, when I pulled the parsnips from last year.  The way we’ve always done parsnips is to let them grow all summer, and leave them in the ground over winter and only dig them once they start to grow again next spring.  There is a reason to do this, but I don’t feel like looking it up right now.  But this year we had a warm February and they started growing again early.  So I dug them up, and we had some for dinner, gave some away to my siblings, and froze five or six bags. 

The second thing we harvested was some rhubarb three or so weeks ago.  We have two rhubarb plants we planted last year and one, for some reason, is only about half the size of the other.  My dad picked it the rhubarb, so I think he only picked from the bigger plant to let the smaller one grow some.  What was harvested then was turned into a pie, and my dad pick some more this week which was froze to be made into pie in the future.

The last thing we’ve harvested is some leaf lettuce.  I picked enough for a sandwich about a week ago, three or four sandwiches worth earlier this week, and it looks like I’ll need to pick some today. 

That’s our harvests up to the first week in June.  This month I’ll probably also start picking red raspberries and currants.  I may also get some wild strawberries, although where I usually picked them is now a corn field.  But we’ll see.