Got the idea this morning to get something REALLY FRESH onto the Christmas dinner menu. A fat local turkey, plus squash, potatoes, carrots, beets and onions from storage (in addition to a ham and industrial veggies from the supermarket) didn’t seem quite enough. But what could I find? The bed of Brussels sprouts left standing when the snow hit was…still there, not fully buried, and possibly perfectly preserved in a frozen state. Remembering a harvesting lesson of the past, I headed up the field with short, stiff saw in hand and bagged three (once again, the saw did its stuff!). Unfortunately, between the snow and the leaves, the sprouts were too well-mulched and probably never really got frozen solid, or at least, froze and partially thawed a few times. Many were damaged and discolored, but some were definitely…fine (I tasted a few raw on the spot). In the end, between the rather unappetizing, damp mass in a bucket waiting outside the kitchen, and all the other cooking to do, this time around, the good sprouts never got sorted, and it’s on to the frozen compost heap for the lot. But there’s more out there for another try… This is not exactly part of the Professional Market Garden side of tiny farming, more like my personal garden-addicted behavior, but it’s all part of learning!
Too bad. Nice try, though!
That’s a great post about how garden can surprise us. If we have enough space and belief :) we can still have some veggies from the garden in the winter as well :) I still pick some rucola and parsley from my garden – the lowest temperatures we had so far was -9 Celsjus.
Greetings,
I’ve heard you can keep sprouts quite a while by cutting them down after the first few frosts and sticking the cut ends in a bucket of damp sand, then storing them somewhere cool, like a basement… do you know anything about this?
Ferdzy: I hadn’t heard of that, but it sounds good. Like putting flowers in water. All of the cabbage family like high humidity, so you could maybe get by with putting them in plastic bags punched full of air holes. That’s working great for beets this year. And keep ’em cold!
we just chopped our brussell sprouts down, pulled them off the stems into freezer bags, will have some Thanksgiving day. yum, yum