Tag: carrot - Page 9 - Tiny Farm Blog

Spearmint and the other herbs

1 Sep 201110 Nov 2007 by Mike (tfb)

The fall season that wouldn’t quit has more or less come to an end. For the last few days, overnight temperatures plunged well below zero, we’ve had hard frosts and some snow, but the ground is far from frozen, and there are apparently warm days ahead (for more tilling, planting additional garlic, harvesting the last of the carrots and beets)! In the herb garden, there’s not much to do, except bring in the rosemary. Flat leaf parsley is in fine shape, doing better than the curly stuff. Sage seems indestructible, thyme and oregano are largely toast above ground, while the tarragon starters seem to be fine—I’ll put them all under a couple of layers of row cover, although the sage, oregano and thyme have come back no problem for the last two years after overwintering right out in the open. Some of the peppermint was killed off, although the roots may be okay. Apart from a few cold-burned leaves, the spearmint, in the picture, is right as rain…

Root cellar lite

15 Mar 20107 Nov 2007 by Mike (tfb)

Finally got around to starting to sort out the spot for the root cellaring experiment. It’s in the basement of the house, against the north wall. I thought the floor was dirt, but it turns out to be cracked and rubbly concrete. Oh, well. It’s still fairly warm, around 60°F (15°C), but should cool down soon. I’m not doing much, other than clearing enough room for 8 or 10 bushel baskets. Monitoring temperature and humidity through the winter—a handy little digital min/max thermometer/hygrometer is already on duty—and seeing how the veggies hold up week by week is the main thing for this round. Some squash and beets are just out of sight to the left. The bulk of the veggies go in soon…

Putting food by

15 Dec 200728 Oct 2007 by Mike (tfb)

With the farmers’ market over, time to turn to fall-and-winter things. This year, I’m for the first time organizing a proper veggie selection for storage (it’s about time I started…training for that future CSA root cellar!). Instead of the usual bushel baskets of this and that, casually left around the barn to take their chances with temperature and location, now, there’s a bit of plan. For a root cellar, the basement of the farmhouse, the side with a dirt floor that used to be filled with potatoes when this was a fully working, big family farm. For the veggies, today’s haul has a mix of potatoes, assorted winter squash and pumpkins, various carrots, onions, garlic, plus apples picked up at the market. It’s a first step, there’s still lots more in the field: beets, spinach, collards and kale, herbs, and more carrots to go… Harvesting isn’t history just yet!

Choose your fork wisely

12 May 202226 Oct 2007 by Mike (tfb)

Today’s harvest was the last scheduled one of the season—tomorrow is the final farmers’ market day. Heading out alone felt a little strange, after all the help this summer, but certainly familiar. It’s a completely different…mindset when it’s all entirely up to you! Carrots were featured. There’s lots still in the ground, and some customers at the market will want to double up on the last day. I pulled about 200 lbs (91 kg), not exactly a bulk, root cellaring quantity, but that’s 100 x 2 lb bunches, quite a lot for one market day. That took a little over an hour of digging and pulling, and it’s amazing what a difference the right tool can make. Here, it was a choice between two seemingly similar digging forks. Most of the season, I like the Blue One, with flatter, wider tines that make lifting the soil easy when the ground is fairly dry and loose. BUT, when the ground is cold and wet and dense as it was today—our clay-loam is good at getting that way—the slick stainless steel option, with narrower, pointier tines, simply slides in, where it takes twice the effort to drive down the blue one. No comparison! If the difference sounds slight as described, a few minutes of actual digging and you’d be convinced. It’s the not-so-little things!! It’s in the details… So, lots of carrots, lots of beets, a good haul of cauliflower, bok choi, spinach, kale, plus garlic and onions from storage. A nice cool season selection. Not bad!

Last big harvest of the year!

16 Dec 200819 Oct 2007 by Mike (tfb)

And then there were two! For the last big Friday harvest of the season—it’s the 18th and final CSA share and second to last Saturday at the farmers’ market—the crew was down to Conall and me. It was a rainy one, with the ground soaked from a couple of days of showers, but it was all smooth. With the cooler, cloudy conditions favoring a little extra storage time, Conall did the Brussels sprouts and eggplant yesterday. And with the shortening days, the mesclun growth has slowed to a near halt, and there’s not enough for CSA shares, so that fairly time-consuming task was out. In fact, things went so well, we managed to take a couple of hours off and head into town to pick up some things, and were still done by 7 pm. In the pic: bok choi and beets up for rinsing, with carrots and Brussels sprouts already in the bins. In today’s harvest: the spicy greens mix (arugula, tatsoi, mizuna, mustard), about 20 lbs (9 kg) of mesclun, collards, parsley, beets, carrots, bok choi, kale, a few broccoli and cauliflower, plus potatoes, onions, garlic, pumpkins and winter squash from storage. Conall’s done for the season tomorrow, so next week for the last farmers’ market harvest, it’s down to one. Time flies…!

Seasonal eating

15 Dec 200713 Oct 2007 by Mike (tfb)

The veggie selection changes over the season, but it’s not necessarily reflected too dramatically on the stand at the farmers’ market this year. Compared to mid-August, the absence of snap beans and tomatoes is clear (with the mild weather, some vendors did have standard field tomatoes today). As for early June, well, more variety now is to be expected. Still, most of the cool-season crops for around here, like broccoli, cauliflower, and collards, also, winter squash, I have only enough of for CSA. On the stand, two types of radish (White Icicle, French Breakfast), three types of beet (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme, Bull’s Blood, in smaller sizes here), two types of carrot (Nelson, Purple Haze), Red Russian kale, two types of bok choi (Mei Quing, Joi) and mesclun, plus Yukon Gold potatoes, Music garlic and Stuttgarter onions in baskets. The stand could be a lot bigger, offering more display space, and the harvest could be expanded (there are still herbs, summer squash, sweet and hot peppers, tomatillos, Brussels sprouts,…) but the marginal sales for many “secondary” veggies at this slowing down time of year don’t make it worthwhile. I’m still working on the balance between production planning, labor, harvest selection, post-harvest prep, and presentation… Sounds complicated, but it’s just…work! ;)

Unruly heirlooms

3 Oct 201125 Sep 2007 by Mike (tfb)

Left to their own devices, these heirloom Touchon carrots grew all over the place, an assortment of shapes and sizes. They’re in a bed where the mid-summer germination was spotty, and uneven spacing no doubt had a lot to do with it. Compared to our other mainstay carrot, the generally uniform Nelson hybrid, Touchons definitely show a lot more individual carrot character… As a trained-from-birth first-world consumer, I guess I’ve tended to automatically favor uniformity in many little things, like…carrots. On the tiny farm, that training’s being undone!