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Monday, December 10, 2012

Harvest Monday Emergency


Well with all the Christmas parties and shopping and decorating to do, I wasn’t supposed to have a harvest this week. Mother nature decided to force my hand. I have lettuce that has bolted because it has been some warm, but today…..we had to do an emergency harvest because the next three days will see lows in the 20s. Yep, a 40 degree drop in the lows from just a week ago!

I don’t have any weights yet; and when you see the picture below, you will know why. We barely squeezed pulling the stuff from the garden. Now we need to squeeze in weighing it and blanching it too! Thanks Mother Nature.
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Starting at the top with the cauliflower and going clockwise, we have: cauliflower, a bag of broccoli (small head and lots of side shoots), a boat load of turnip greens, and finally a stack of collard greens. I know having these on our kitchen floor looks very unsanitary; but, we had no place else to put them. Plus, we will thoroughly clean and blanch them. In the middle of all of that, just below the cauliflower, is a little bit of celery. That celery plant is still putting out. I will dry this batch. I think the freeze will kill the celery plant, but it’s sure been good to me and I will be sure to ‘lose’ more celery under the tomatoes next summer.

Here is a closer look at everything:

Celery
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Cauliflower
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Bag of broccoli
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Also here is a close up of one of the turnips. I mostly planted seven-top turnips; which doesn’t produce an actual turnip, only the tops. But, I did plant a few Purple Top White Globe Turnips; here is a look at one of them.
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Well, I am glad for the freeze; maybe a few bugs will die. This is how my beds look now.
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Tune in later this week to see if there were any casualties. In the meantime, check out other harvests at Daphne’s Dandelions Harvest Monday….our bloggers in Australia should be starting to crank out more of their summer crops now.

5 comments:

  1. That is one giant turnip! Great harvest. Our weather should get colder after the rain pushes through today, too.

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  2. Holy cow! That's quite the December harvest! The weathers been funny lately...glad you were paying attention enough to save all your harvests! Now, good luck preserving them all...wow!

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  3. Gorgeous, so jealous of the cole crops!

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  4. Well that harvest will keep you busy and supply quite a few meals...I grew turnip tops (Italian seeds) this year for the first time and was really pleased with the amount of produce they produced, very tasty and we enjoyed them nearly everynight, great in stir-fry.

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