Mail Order Onions

This is the time of the year that we always plant our onions.  I tried one time to plant onions from seed.  It was disastrous.  I didn't harvest a single onion.  One year I'll try again and try to determine what went wrong.  For now, we've found a fool-proof (almost) way to grow onions - we order them in the mail.

We purchase them from Dixondale Farms and you can check them out at THEIR WEBSITE.  They are located south and west of San Antonio, Texas about 25 miles from Mexico.  Their website is very helpful in telling you which types of onions you should plant in your zone.  In South Louisiana we plant Short Day Onions.  I generally purchase a couple of Short Day Samplers which include a mixture of 1015 Sweet, Texas White, and Red Creole Onions.

They ship them to us in early January and the first sunny day we get, we go out to plant them.

The first thing I did is to tie some baling twine from fence to fence to "pop a line."  Then I used a rake to rake back the wood chip mulch that fully covers the garden since we're doing the "Back to Eden" gardening method now.  Once I exposed the soil, I worked up the soil with a hoe.  The soil is teeming with earthworms and that is a good sign!  One thing that is not so good is soil moisture.  Naturally, the wood chips are going to preserve moisture in the soil and that is a great thing in the dry summer month.  But we've had 10 inches of rain SO FAR in January.  The soil is a little muddy right now.

But nevertheless, we pressed on and planted.  I planted the onions four inches apart and planted them 1 inch deep.  You don't want to plant them any deeper or they won't bulb and then you'll just have green onions.

We finished planting them all.  We have planted five 25 foot rows of onions in our garden this year.  If they all make it, we'll have onions to last the whole year.  One thing I have to work on prior to harvest is building some drying boxes.  In the summer when the onions ripen, it is usually hot and humid.  I've had problems in the past with both onions and garlic.  They want to soften and rot.  I have to do a better job of curing and drying so that they will store.  I have a plan!  I am going to build some boxes with hardware cloth bottoms that are the same dimension as a box fan.  Then I'll set the onions in the boxes that are stacked atop the box fan blowing upward and hopefully that will dry them.  That's the plan anyway.  We'll report how it goes this summer upon harvest.

Saying Goodbye to Store-Bought Salsa

Usually in the summer when we produce a good tomato crop, we make salsa and then we can it in quart-sized mason jars using a pressure cooker.  Then we kind of ration it so that it lasts whenever we have tomato crop failure like we did this past summer.  Even when the crop DOESN'T come from our garden, we still love eating salsa.

Tricia learned a new trick that she tried out this weekend.  We all think it was easy, delicious, and a great success.  She bought some tomatillos  at the grocery store.  I had never had much experience with tomatillos.  They are similar to tomatoes, but have a different flavor.  She also added a big tomato, some sliced onions, peppers and several cloves of garlic to a baking pan.  She broiled them all in the oven for 6 minutes and then flipped them over for another 6 minutes.  You can see that the vegetables have roasted.  The skins are blistered.

She cut the stems off, removed the garlic skins, blended it all up and voila!  Salsa Verde!  Doesn't that look great?

We opened a bag of blue corn tortilla chips and in no time at all, the salsa verde was gone!  We found that the salsa was especially delicious while still hot, coming right out of the oven.

We liked it so much, the next morning, we made some more.  We didn't have any more tomatillos, but we put some tomatoes in the oven in their place, along with sliced onions, peppers and cloves of garlic.  After broiling for 6 minutes on each side, they were ready.

Tricia used a slotted spoon to remove the skins from the garlic cloves and the stem from the peppers.  Then she put into a half-gallon sized mason jar.   The steam coming off the hot vegetables collected on the rim of the jar.

With this batch of salsa, I ran outside and picked a nice handful of fresh cilantro growing in the garden. A few cilantro plants came up on their own this year from seeds falling off the plants last year, but not enough.  We'll end up having to plant more cilantro pretty soon to keep up with demand making salsa.

Once it is all in the jar, Tricia got out her stick blender and let it go to work.  The stick blender is a great invention.  We use it for so many things.

After the milking chores were done, Tricia fried a couple of fresh picked country eggs for me and then I poured some fresh, hot salsa over the top of the eggs.

Delicious!  We'll never buy salsa in a jar again.

2019 Egg Production By the Numbers

Last week we summarized cumulative rainfall totals for 2019 that fell at our little farm three miles north of Jennings, Louisiana.  We also do the same thing with egg production.  For seven years we've written down the numbers of eggs we pick up each day.  First, it was Russ' job and then Benjamin's to gather eggs and record daily production. Now, we're experiencing the empty nest syndrome (pardon the pun), since it is just Tricia and me at the house, we gather eggs and record egg production daily.

So let's take a quick look at monthly and yearly egg production compiled since 2013:

Although we haven't counted the number of chickens in a few years, Tricia and I estimate that we have around 90 laying hens.  The number of hens we have vary over the years and that is one of the variables regarding the number of eggs we pick up.  We haven't added any new pullets to the flock in several years, resulting in the age of our flock becoming older and that results in fewer eggs.  We've lost a few hens to predators and old age, too.

As far as trends go, you can see that, once again, April is the best month for egg production on our farm.  The weather is nice - not too cool and not too hot.  Comfortable, non-stressed chickens lay more eggs.  There is also fresh, green vegetation growing in April and that yields more eggs as nutrition in better.  December is, once again, the poorest month for egg production.  Shorter days and a lack of fresh green vegetation diminishes the eggs we collect.  To alleviate this, we could leave lights on in the hen house and get more eggs, but we've decided against that.

In 2019 we picked up 8,446 eggs or 703.83 dozens.  Since we've been raising hens, we have gathered 64,422 eggs or 5,368.50 dozens.  That's a lot of eggs!  What do we do with all of them?  Well, we eat a bunch of them, we sell a bunch of them, and we give a bunch of them away.  They are delicious and nutritious.

Here is a summary of 2019 Egg Production by month:

The last thing is kind of interesting.  We have 90 hens.  They lay almost 94 eggs per bird per year.  We collect, on average, almost two dozen eggs per day.  The hens lay 0.26 eggs per day or put another way, the hens lay an egg every 3.89 days.  All these egg production numbers were skewed low this year as we did not count all the eggs that were broken by the egg eating chicken.  January 2020 egg production numbers are already markedly higher since we put her in the freezer.

2019 Rainfall By the Numbers

Each year we track certain things like rainfall.  In early January we sum up the totals and calculate rainfall here at our little family farm.  We have a rain gauge out by the garden right next to the cow's water trough.  Every day after a rain I dump the water out and record the precipitation on a paper log in the utility room.

Here are the statistics from 2019.  As you can tell, March was the month in 2019 that had the least amount of rainfall with 1.1 inches and May was the month in 2019 with the most rainfall at 12.05 inches.  For the year we had a total of 64.6 inches of rain.  If you do a search to see the average rainfall in our zip code, it shows 60.35 inches.  We are once again over the average rainfall for 2019.

Why do we do this?  I guess curiosity.  But I also like to see trends.  We began tracking rain back in 2013, so we have seven years of data.  From this data we gather some neat information.

First, our average rainfall at our farm is almost 68 inches or 5.66 feet over the past seven years.  The highest rainfall totals were from back in 2017 with 79.9 inches and the lowest in 2012 with 58.15 inches.  It is kind of neat to see that over the last seven years, we have gotten right at 40 feet of rainfall.  That's a lot of water!

In 2019, the month with the lowest rainfall was March at 1.1 inches in total and the highest was May with 12.05 inches in total.  Over the last seven years, the driest month has been March, averaging 3.03 inches, and the wettest has been August, averaging 9.67 inches of rainfall.  Torrential rains in August 2016 leaving almost 26 inches of rain on the ground, skews the data though.

One other thing to see that was interesting is that there were three days of the month FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR that it never rained.  It never rained a drop on the first day of every month, the 9th day and the 11th day.  Meaningless information, I know, but it is fun to track and see. 

We're already tracking rainfall for 2020 and on the 23rd day of the month, we've already surpassed every year except 2013 in rainfall total and still have a week to go!

Tomatoes, Peppers, and Eggplant - 3 Weeks Later

On December 29th I planted tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant into seed pots.  I always plant those crops from seed at this time of year and raise indoors until the chance of frost is minimal.  This year I also planted some broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage seeds since the hard freeze back in November killed those seedlings in the garden.  So, to plant, I put two seeds per pot, labeled each container, watered and waited for germination.  After the seeds all germinated, I moved them inside and placed beneath a grow light.  (Really it is just a shop light with two fluorescent bulbs in it.)

Let's check in on the plants now that we are three weeks down the road from plant date.  Here are the tomato seedlings:

Probably this weekend, I will thin these out, breaking the two seedlings apart and planting each in its own larger pot so that they don't get root-bound before it is time to plant in the garden.  Now that they have their 'true' leaves, I've begun to water with fish emulsion diluted to half of its recommended application dose as I don't want to burn them.  I want to give them some nutrients to feed on.

You can see my amateur grow light apparatus below.  Nothing fancy.  The light is positioned just a few inches from the seedlings so they don't get too "leggy."  We keep the soil moist throughout the day.  Each day we turn the lights off for 10 hours.

The Cole Crops are below: Several varieties of broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage.  Since this photo was taken, I've separated the cole crop seedlings to allow for only 1 seedling per seed pot.

The peppers and eggplant always germinate slower than the tomatoes.  In the bottom left below, you can see some jalapeno peppers growing.  In the bottom right, there are some eggplant just sprouting.

We will continue to baby these seedlings until it is time to carefully transplant them into the garden soil after hardening.  Speaking of hard, it is hard to imagine that spring is not far away.  The Farmer's Almanac tells me that the last Spring frost is March 2nd.

Dinner On The Grounds

Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31

Our little country church, Cornerstone Baptist Church, has been without a pastor for a while.  We have been praying and waiting and praying and waiting some more.  Well, good things come to those who pray (and wait).  Our new pastor started at the first of the year.  We are so happy to have him and his family!  One of the first things he requested is that we have...  Dinner on the Grounds!

See, this guy is starting things off on the right foot!  We usually have about 40 people attending morning worship services on Sunday Morning.  As I mentioned, we are a small church, but we are big on our love for the Lord, big on enjoying fellowship with one another, and big on having meals.  Generally, when we eat in our fellowship hall, if it will be light foods, we call it "Finger Foods or snacks."  If we are going to really get serious about eating, we call it "Dinner on the Grounds."

The term has a couple of mis-nomers in it.  It is not Dinner and it is not on the Ground.  We generally call the meal at noon, lunch.  We generally call the meal at night, supper.  But, oh well.  Secondly, we don't eat on the ground.  We all acted like respectable adults and sat in chairs around tables.  Seriously, I think the term means we are eating on the grounds of the church.  And that's what we did.

Dinner on the Grounds is when we ask everyone to just cook a meal with the main dish and ALL the sides like you ordinarily would for your family, but bring it to the church to share with everyone else.  Folks show up before Sunday School with all sorts of pots and pans, trays, and roasting pans, tupperware and aluminum foil wrapped goodies and put them on the table in the fellowship hall.  There are admonitions against sneaking a cookie or a slice of pie before church.  Then we go to Sunday School and "Big" church where we pray, sing hymns of praise, and of course, open the Word.  When the last verse of the Hymn of Invitation is sung, the preacher prays for the congregation and also blesses the food we are about to consume.

We put our "game faces" on and walk across the breezeway into the Fellowship Hall.  The aroma of roast beef, rice & gravy, jambalaya, sausage, fried chicken, and dozens of casseroles!  A few bowls of healthy salad stand in defiance against a table of any manner and sort of dessert.  Why, there are homemade pies and cakes and cookies and puddings.  At the end of the table, there are soft drinks, where you can choose what type of "Coke" you'll have: Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Barq's Root Beer, Pop Rouge, or Orange, oh, and of course, Coke.

Then we sit down and eat and visit with neighbors and eat and talk some more and eat and laugh.  Then, we'll get up and circle the table in search of something that we heard was good that we weren't able to fit on our plates on the first go-round.  Everyone brings their best and no one leaves hungry.  At the end everyone pitches in to clean things up.  We bid each other farewell, but knowing we'll be back at 5 pm for Evening Worship.  We leave the parking lot slow, thinking about going home and taking a big nap.

Church Fellowships like "Dinner on the Grounds" are a good opportunity to break bread with Christian brothers and sisters and truly be nourished both physically and spiritually.  Everyone is always glad they came. 

Checking on the Cows

Tricia, Benjamin and I took a ride out to Oberlin, LA on a beautiful afternoon to check on the cows that we recently purchased.  It is about a 30 minute drive north from our home.  We drove the pickup truck and Benjamin brought the Marlin lever-action .22 and had a good time shooting at things in the pond.  We had a nice visit.  It is always nice to have passengers with you for the conversation, but also for the passenger to be the "gate-opener."

If you have a gate-opener, you can stay in your seat and just drive on through, while your gate opener closes the gate up behind you.  Who needs an automatic gate opener when you have your wife with you?

The cows are real tame.  They come walking right up when you drive in.  I should have had some sweet feed or some range cubes to feed them, but we weren't prepared as we decided on the spur of the moment to go check on them.  The cows were all around one of the ancient live oak trees on the farm.  This tree is right in front of where the old Sonnier homeplace was.  The huge limbs of the tree are covered with Resurrection fern that greens up after rains and then turns brown and looks dead in dry weather.  Many times as a kid I climbed up into the crown of this tree and surveyed the countryside.  Beautiful old tree.  If it could talk, it would have many stories to tell.  There is a big hole on the east side of the tree that once was home to a den of foxes.

I don't remember the old Sonnier homeplace that was here.  I'm sure it was torn down before I was born.  I do remember attending family reunions around this tree and watching my grandfather and his brothers barbecuing while all the ladies set up tables with potato salad, baked beans, and cakes and pies.  Us kids ran around with the cousins playing while the food was being prepared.

Directly west of this photo is an old pecan orchard that my great grandfather planted.  They haven't produced pecans in a few years and are getting really old.  They provided shade for the cows (and for us) in many hot summers.  Standing in that pecan orchard brought back memories.  Even though it is winter and there are no leaves in the pecan trees, if I listened real hard, in my imagination, I could hear the wind blowing through the green leaves on a hot summer's day.  I could hear the "cawing" of the crows as they congregated on a fall day to eat pecans, to our consternation.  Directly west of the pecan orchard was a stand of bamboo against the gully that was planted to give the cows a wind break on cold winter's days.  The bamboo created a 'jungle-like' environment that, as kids, we'd run through and pretend we were in Viet Nam.  The cane break also gave us many cane poles that later became spears, or fishing poles, or walking sticks.  I can distinctly remember my grandpa cutting some tall cane poles from the bamboo stand, tying a newspaper to the end of the pole, setting it on fire and using it to reach high into the trees to burn the bag worm webs that filled the pecan trees.

The farm is truly a beautiful place with beautiful memories...

Egg Oddities Part II

I can still remember when we first got chickens.  Tricia tells me it was 2006.  We had a few hens in a chicken tractor in the back pasture before it was a pasture.  We waited and waited for them to begin laying.  Every day we would check the laying boxes.  Finally, one day Tricia walked out and checked and... there were eggs!  She left them where they were and when Benjamin got home from school, she showed him.  She took a picture of him finding the eggs.  He was so excited.

It is still exciting checking the egg boxes.  Fresh laid eggs are pretty to look at and we definitely enjoy eating them.  I wake up too early to eat eggs for breakfast on the weekdays, but on weekends, we always eat eggs.  This Saturday, when checking the egg boxes, I discovered a neat egg. 

Looks like a normal egg, doesn't it?  Except normal eggs don't do this...

Growing up, I had a "Stretch Armstrong."  Do you remember those?  You could grab his arms and pull and he would stretch like he was made of rubber.  Well, this eggs was sort of like Stretch Armstrong.  It was like a rubber egg.  I could squeeze it into a rectangle.

Or even a square...

It's as if the egg shell never hardened and just had rubber instead of the shell.  So what causes this to happen? 

One of the reasons is that sometimes young pullets that just begin laying eggs don't have it all together yet.  There is some sort of kink in the works while their bodies are figuring out this whole egg-laying trick.  All of our hens are old, so it can't be this.

Stress can cause this.  Years ago, we had some neighbor kids that would come over and chase the chickens.  The chickens would be so stressed out when they would leave, that their egg-laying went way down for the next couple of days, but I don't recall this leading to "rubber eggs."  Plus, we've had no one chasing hens around, so it can't be this.

If your hens have a calcium deficiency, they can lay thin-shelled eggs.  I'm not sure about "rubber" ones.  Anyway, we have free-choice oyster shells for them to eat at will, so I don't think it is a calcium deficiency.

I read that a Vitamin D deficiency can cause hens to lay eggs with soft shells.  I'm leaning on this being the cause.  The shorter days in the winter along with a string of gloomy, cloudy days with no sun could have contributed to this, although we do feed them hen scratch mixed with laying pellets, which I'm pretty sure has Vitamin D in it.

At any rate, collecting 'rubber' eggs is a rarity.  We don't get many of them.  I think it is just an anomaly.  It is kind of neat to hold in your hand, though we don't eat them when we find them.

Egg Oddities Part 1

Yesterday we talked about having to butcher one of our laying hens that developed a really bad habit of eating eggs.  She would crack them with her beak and commence to eating eggs sunny side up.  We couldn't have any of that.  We butchered the Rhode Island Red hen.

Upon eviscerating her, removing her heart, liver, gizzard, intestines, lungs, etc. we found something interesting.  Look inside the carcass of the hen to see a plethora of tiny eggs right in the center of the photo below.

When a hen is born (just like a woman), she has every egg (ova) already inside of her.  One by one the eggs are released into the ovaduct.  A hen can lay an egg just about every day.  Each egg first develops into a yolk.  In the photo above, you can see the different stages of development.  In the photo below, you can see an ova that has developed into a yolk.  I pulled this out of the hen.  Once it develops into a yolk, the rest of the egg is formed around it and then the egg is ready to be laid.

One might say, as I originally did, that it was a shame to butcher this hen and lose out on all of the eggs that were yet to be laid.  I agree with that sentiment; however, this hen would have, over time, destroyed more eggs than she laid.  Secondly, this hen is fattened up due to all the eggs she ate and is going to make us a mighty fine gumbo.  Finally, it was a good science experiment.  We normally butcher Cornish Cross meat birds and never get an opportunity to see the inside of a mature laying hen with all the eggs.

We Caught the Egg Eater!

"Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences." - Robert Louis Stevenson

We posted several times about a chicken that has been eating eggs in the hen house.  This has been going on for quite some time.  Aggravating, yes.  Not only was this chicken eating eggs that WE could be eating, but when eggs were cracked and eaten, the yolk would get on uneaten eggs, making them difficult and quite time-consuming to clean.  Countless hours over the past several years have been spent cleaning eggs.

We tried several tactics and remedies to try to resolve this issue - all to no avail.  The best thing we could do in order to save the eggs and ensure that we had some to eat, was to go out to the hen house numerous times a day and pick up eggs and put them in a basket out of reach of the beaked bandit.  By doing this, we were somewhat successful, but oftentimes, we were too late.  

It has been said that if you play with fire, you're going to get burned.  Well, Tricia walked out one day week before last to gather eggs and lo and behold, she spotted a Rhode Island Red Hen cracking and eating a just laid egg.  Tricia quickly grabbed the egg eater and put her in solitary confinement.

We kept her here for a few days while checking the egg production.  The next day there were NO broken eggs.  The day following - no broken eggs.  And so forth and so on for a week.  In fact, where we were previously gathering no eggs to 3 or 4 eggs each day (and those eggs were dirty, sticky, yolk-covered eggs), now we began collecting 14 to 17 eggs a day!  Beautiful, clean eggs at that!

A trial was held and due to proof beyond reasonable doubt, the perpetrator was tried by a jury of her peers and found guilty.  She was transported out of her cell in general population and into her new cell on death row while she waited out the appeal process.  During the next week, there continued to be no broken eggs.

The sentencing phase of the trial took place on a sunny Saturday morning.  The egg eater was found guilty of numerous counts of... (gasp) cannibalism.  Stern justice was meted out by the judge/executioner so this time of crime would be abolished from the hen house, thereby sending a message to other copy-cats that this would not be tolerated.  The egg eater was hung by her feet, bled out, scalded and plucked, while the barnyard inhabitants watched.

The egg eater was pronounced dead at 11:28 am.

She was not buried.  Instead, she was put into the deep-freeze and will become the main protein source in our next Chicken and Sausage Gumbo.  The eater will become the eaten.  Poetic justice, indeed.

Juicy Fruit

This is the time of year for picking and eating citrus fruits.  We have tangerines, navel oranges, and now... grapefruit.  We have been eating a bunch.  Their color is vibrant and the taste and tangy and refreshing.  They'll keep just fine on the tree unless a deep freeze threatens.  If that happens, we'll pick them all and store them inside.  Otherwise, we'll 'store' them on the tree.

One of the things that we hadn't done yet, but will be doing lots more of is making fresh squeezed juice.  Tricia bought a new contraption that I wanted to try out.  It is essentially an old fashioned glass juicer that sits atop a jar.  After cutting a tangerine or orange in half, you squeeze the fruit on the juicer.  Theoretically, the juice flows through holes in the juicer and it fills the jar below it.

That's the idea.  Unfortunately, the seeds and pulp stopped up the holes and the juice couldn't flow down into the jar.  First, I resorted to using a steak knife to poke the holes and allow the juice to fill the jar below.  Then, I simply picked it up and poured the juice into the jar below.  It was just taking too long and I'm not too patient.

We save all the peels of the citrus.  In the past, we'd compost them until we made the discovery that our cows and goats absolutely love eating them.  Now, we save them and throw them over the fence and the animals come running to eat them up.

We did get a full jar of tangerine juice with the new juicer.  Truly delicious stuff!

But then I got the old glass citrus juicer and got to work.  It is fast work.  Simply cut the citrus in half, juice the fruit, and pour through a strainer into a jar or pitcher. 

In no time I had a half gallon of fresh squeezed juice!

We had homemade ice cream that past couple of nights and i mixed the ice cream with tangerine juice to make an "Orange Julius."  Pretty good stuff!

Preparing "Heart Pine" for Kindling

I can remember when I was a kid on the farm.  From time to time, Dad would "bring new land" into the farm, meaning we would plant rice on a piece of land that had been fallow since, well forever.  Clearing that land was quite an undertaking.  One of the last things we'd do before opening up the land with a plow was collecting pine knots and heart pine.  We would pull a wagon through the field and toss all the pine knots on top.  Eventually we'd pile up the old pine somewhere.  This heart pine was the very center part of old-growth long-leaf pine trees.  It was resistant to rot and decay and insects.  It lasts forever.

I still have some and still use it.  We never hooked up the gas jet to our fireplace to start firewood.  Why do this when you have heart pine that you can split into kindling?  Below I'll show you how I did it the other night.

I use a double-headed ax that I sharpen up.  Cutting heart pine is not like cutting any other wood.  It is hard as stone.  I stand the heart pine on end and then commence to cutting kindling off of it.

I said heart pine lasts forever.  I may be exaggerating there, but there is really no telling how old some of this stuff is.  I want you to look at the photo below closely:

That old post is solid heart pine.  If you look closely, you can see an old, rusty hinge on it along with a dozen or so nails and staples that were all hammered into it decades and decades ago.  I'm sure it was not easy to drive nails into this wood.  I have that old post, but I'll probably never cut it for kindling.  I think it has a lot of character and longevity and speaks volumes about quality.  If you buy a "landscape timber" at a hardware store, that thing will begin rotting as soon as you put your turn signal on leaving the parking lot.  This old log of heart pine stands the test of time...

From another heart pine log, I carefully cut long skinny pieces of kindling.  The wood smells like Pine Sol and is sticky to the touch.  The colors of red, yellow, and amber are rich.  If you inhale the scent, it reminds you of simpler times.

I put these pieces in the wagon along with some firewood.  I'll put a stick or two of heart pine kindling on the fireplace grate and then put some dry firewood on top.  I crumple up a piece of newspaper or two and strike a match.  Fire consumes the newspaper I've placed under the heart pine and it quickly ignites.

The sap-enriched wood crackles, sending up billows of black smoke that coats the inside of the fireplace, ensuring that we'll need to call a Chimney Sweep to come and clean our chimney from time to time.  Heart Pine is an old relic from the past.  I'm glad I have a pretty good supply of it as its existence is growing rarer by the day.

Keep the Home Fire Burning!

Turnip Greens

"Thank God for good directions and turnip greens..."  - Billy Currington from his song, "Good Directions"

I've tried year after year to develop a taste for turnips.  So far, no dice.  I just don't like 'em.  At all.  My eyes fool me into thinking they are potatoes in the pot, but the taste is just so different to me.  A little bitter - just not tasty.  I know plenty people disagree, but I just can't like them.  But, turnip greens are another story.  Turnip greens, especially when young and tender, are absolutely delicious.  I planted a row of turnips entirely too close, but intending to feed the turnip roots all to the cows over the winter.  The cows really like them.  I've read numerous stories about farmers in the old days keeping their livestock healthy over the winter by feeding them root crops like turnips and beets.

Turnip seeds are very, very small.  I have a brown paper bag of turnip seeds that I've had in the freezer for years and years.  Despite the age of these seeds, the germination has got to be near 100%.  After planting them this year, I put the seeds back in the freezer.  I must still have 1/4 of a pound of seeds.  At this rate, I'll run out around 2030.

The turnips are planted on the first row in the garden, so it is very convenient to go pick a "mess" of them each night before supper, wash them up, and cook them.  We've had a few warm days which have brought some bug out of dormancy to begin eating some of the turnip greens, but for the most part, they are healthy and fine.

Tonight we're just eating turnip greens, but Tricia likes to mix mustard greens with them, along with chard, kale and beet greens.  We'll wash them up and then slice them and put them in a cast iron skillet to cook them down.

So delicious and so healthy, too! 

The turnip greens are located at the 12 o'clock position on the plate above.  I ate all those and went back for seconds with the quickness!