Late November Harvest

I’m usually a lounge-about morning person, sipping my coffee, surfing the internet as I eat breakfast. This morning I was itching to get outside after our week away. It was compounded by the freezes the week before that and general dreary weather the last several weeks. I was outside by 8:30 this morning with a wonderful spring-like atmosphere. It was glorious!

My goal was to start attacking the edible garden. Before the freeze it was in decent shape though it needed to be weeded and some leaf removal from the rows of seedlings needed to occur. After the freeze lots of plants needed to be taken down and added to the compost.

I started with the okra, which I had hacked up back in October. I’d left some pods on a few of the plants so I could save seeds and they were all ready to be taken down. Then I turned my attention to the ginger which had just flowered before the freeze. They did really well through last year’s hard freezes and proliferated even more. I’d harvested a couple of hands of ginger back in October and dried it and then blended it into a powder. It smells delicious! I pulled out several more clumps so I could do more blending and for using fresh but there’s plenty left to spread next year.

Moving down from the ginger I checked in on the sunchokes. I’d started them from a few pieces I bought at Central Market last December and I will say they produced really well for a first year! I thinned out quite a bit of those but left plenty to continue growing for next year.

The next big chore was to assess how everything I’d sown the last few months/weeks was doing. The radishes were plump and needed to be thinned so they were added to the list for harvest. Leaves were swept from the rows so the seedlings wouldn’t be struggling for light. I thinned other seedlings and moved them to other areas where plants hadn’t filled in or germinated. I still need to fill in some gaps this week. It doesn’t look like much right now but when everything starts growing it will look wonderful!

The cleaned sunchoke and ginger harvest. While I was out getting groceries with Forest Chris had started drying about half of the ginger and I think he’s going to dry the rest of it and leave a piece of two for fresh use.

Currently there’s four deer down near the edible garden browsing on whatever they can find in the grass. Two are sitting cozy and two are doing the browsing. The weather has changed in the last few hours from that balmy spring-like weather to a bit of a chill in the air. We’ll dip down into the 40s tonight and the 30s tomorrow night with highs in the 60s I think for most of the week. At least that’s what it looked like on the forecast yesterday.

I’ll do some more gardening at lunch this week to get caught up and in the mean time, keep planning for spring!