Root Crops and Hardy Greens

Today I finished harvesting the rest of my carrots.  All that was left were the purple carrots from my box and they turned out to be the best carrots I have harvested this fall.  They were all a nice large size; there wasn’t any insect damage or cracks.  Next year I am planning on growing most if not all of my carrots at home in boxes.

I have harvested a few parsnips so far and they have been huge.  I am digging them as we eat them and probably will continue to do it that way.  There aren’t tons and that’s where they will be the safest.  There are some mice in the basement that have nibbles on a potato or 2 and I see no reason to give them anything else to eat.  The cats do make sure they only appear every so often but still.

Something I also learned after the 5 inches of snow we got yesterday is that bok choy and kale are both winter hardy.  The kale looks perfect and is going to be coming out of the garden next week.   The bok choy went to seed a couple weeks ago and I have been using some of the leaves, but pulled the remaining plants today.  There are a couple that I brought inside to use this week but the rest are compost.

Mulching Garlic and Asparagus

Last week on Nov 12^th, I finally finished the garlic bed for the year and mulched it.  I used the mulched leaves that I gathered a couple weeks ago from the cottage.  They were a mixture of maple ash and poplar leaves.   I spread the leaves loosely over the garlic at approximately 2-4 inches deep.  I used shredded leaves so that when the garlic sprouts it will be able to push through them.  If the leaves were whole the garlic would have more trouble pushing through them. 

I also dug up around one clove that I planted a month ago to see how it was doing.  Although it didn’t have a sprout on top of the clove, it did have roots!  Now I didn’t dig up the whole clove just the side of it so I could see it and then rebury. 

I also mulched the asparagus.  For this I used whole leaves and spread it around 4 inches deep.  I spread it thickly all around the plants with a little right on top.  I'm not as worried that the asparagus will have trouble coming up through the leaves.  It is a pretty hardy plant.