Sweet Potato Harvest Part II

 

About a month ago we harvested about one third of our sweet potato crop.  We allowed the rest to grow and then a couple of days ago, I enlisted the help of my sweet potato digger/wife.  We have a segregation of duties.  I clip the vines and toss them to the cows, and she finds where the sweet potatoes are and digs them up, trying not to disturb the soil.  She puts the sweet potatoes in a bucket and has another bucket for the small sweet potato roots to feed the cows.  As you can see, they gather around the fence to eat.

As soon as we finish a section, I prepare the seedbed by pulling back the wood chip mulch to expose the soil.  Then I work up soil for planting with a hoe.  I planted a row of Monstrueux de Viroflay Spinach.  It is an heirloom spinach from France that dates back to 1866.  Then I planted a row of Galilee spinach from Israel that I saved from seed from last year.  Finally I planted a half row of mustard greens and a half row of a new crop I got as a Free Seed from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds.  It's called mizuna, a Japanese mustard.  I've never heard of it.  We'll see how it grows and how it tastes.  It's supposed to be like mustard greens, but peppery.

Here is an example of some of the harvest.  You can see that these are Beauregard sweet potatoes.  The majority of the crop that we have harvested is the Golden Wonder heirloom.  Tricia suggested that we try to pull up the heirloom and keep only the Beauregard sweet potatoes for next year's crop.  The Beauregard sweet potatoes are larger and prettier.

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As you can see in the photo below, we've been curing the ones we dug up a month ago by hanging them from onion sacks in the garage for a month.  We graded them and have four sacks like this hanging.

Since we harvested last, we have a new method of curing sweet potatoes (and potatoes, onions, peas, etc.)  A gentleman from our church dropped off a drying wagon that he made.  He made himself a larger one and offered to give this one to us!  

It has casters and wheels and a trailer hitch so we can pull it around.  

The frame is lined with hardware cloth so that it promotes good airflow around the potatoes. 

This will come in handy.  Once we harvest the rest of the sweet potatoes, we'll weigh them up to see the total weight of the sweet potato harvest for 2022.  The ones we dug last month ought to be cured and sweet and ready to eat!

The Turkey That Keeps On Giving

The day after Thanksgiving the skies opened up and it began to rain.  A slow, soaking rain that nourished the landscape.  In true feast or famine experiences, rain either refuses to fall (this summer) or comes down in refreshing abundance.  We had plenty of leftovers.  There was not much to do outside.  The options were slim.  So we stayed inside and ate.

Around the back of the house, I have water catchment that enables us to catch over 400 gallons of water with a 1 inch rain.  All of our rainwater reservoirs were overflowing.  You can see one below.  Our cup runneth over.

Look at this big ol' turkey wishbone.  I'm not a superstitious person.  I remember as a kid, we would each grab one side of the wishbone and pull until it broke.  If I recall correctly, the person holding the biggest piece of the wishbone was supposed to be able to make a wish and it would come true.  

One thing I was wishing for is to turn the carcasses of the fried turkey, the baked turkey, and the smoked specklebelly goose into stock.  My wife wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about that venture as it makes a big mess in the kitchen.  The results, however, are well worth it, in my opinion.  We make lots of broth and stock, primarily out of our grassfed beef and chickens.

It's a little different with store-bought fowl as you really don't know what's in the bird.  It's surely not near as healthy for you as the animals that come off your land.  At least the specklebelly goose was wild and we could be sure there was no antibiotics in him.  Stock and broth is really good for you.  It's loaded with nutrients, minerals, protein, amino acids.  It's got collagen which is good for your connective tissue.  Broth and stock is a big booster of your immune system, giving you power to fight off sickness!

So I pulled out the big pot and put the carcasses into the pot with some celery, onions, carrots and herbs.  I added water and got it boiling and then turned it down to low and let it cook for hours and hours.  The next day I heated it up again and then let it come to a luke warm temperature.  I poured through a sieve and captured 12 cups of turkey/goose stock!

We froze it in quart-sized ziploc bags.  We'll use it as a base for soups in this winter season.  I like to use it in place of water when cooking rice.  There were a couple more beneficiaries of the stock-making enterprise other than our family.  I completely picked all the remaining meat and fat from what was left of the carcasses, making sure no bones remained.  This was placed in a big bowl.  Belle, our Great Pyrenees, and Ginger, our cat, will get to enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers for a few more days than their humans.  They like it a lot better than their normal diets.  

Though making broth or stock can be a messy ordeal, resulting in a lot of dishes and countertops to clean, the dividends are great!

Thankfulness!

 "Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; His love endures forever." Psalm 118:29

Thanksgiving Day 2022 has come and gone.  Time seems to be such a blur.  We hosted the celebration at our home and our immediate family, my Dad & Mom, My great aunt Julee Rae, my sister and her family and my brother and his family were here.  We held hands together in a big circle in the kitchen before serving and asked God's blessing on the food and our family.  We thanked HIM for all the blessings in our lives.  Things aren't perfect, but He, the Giver of all things, is so good.

We had more food than an army could eat, including a baked turkey, fried turkey, beef brisket, and smoked specklebelly goose, along with all the side dishes and desserts that you could ever imagine.

We had tables stretched across three rooms and we laughed and talked and enjoyed one another's company, stretching the meal out for easily more than an hour, telling funny stories and recollecting memories of times past.

Then we retired to the den and visited some more.  Here's Mom & Dad:

And here is our family:  Front (Tricia, Me, Laura Lee) Back Russ and Benjamin.

That was Thursday and today is Sunday.  We just finished up all the leftovers!  I hope you and yours enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday as well.  God's given us another year.  He is so faithful.

It's Citrus Time (Again)

A couple years ago, we were hit with some really cold weather for Louisiana.  It was in the low 20's and I was worried about our citrus trees.  We have navel oranges, tangerines and grapefruit.  Prior to the freeze, I heaped mulch around the trunks, hoping to insulate the tree.  They are too tall to effectively tarp for protection.

Once it thawed, many of the limbs died.  We held out hope, though, as there was green growth above the graft.  We pruned all of the dead branches off the trees and waited.  Last year the trees were still in stress, recovering, and they did not bloom.  We had ZERO fruit off of our trees all last year.  This year, however, we saw blooms and smelled the heavenly aroma of orange blossoms.  Now it wasn't near the blossoms as in previous years, but the trees are still knocked back.

As the year went on, fruit began to develop.  Here are some of the navel oranges on our one orange tree.  They won't be ripe until late December or early January.  They are just starting to turn to a tinge of orange from the green color.

Here are the tangerines.  They are a fluorescent orange color.  They are tart and tasty.  We have two of these trees remaining.  We lost one of them to the freeze.  We've begun to pick a few of these.  They taste SO good, especially after not having any all of last year.

And here are the grapefruit on our one grapefruit tree.  It is a small tree.  We only have four grapefruit on it.  We'll have to savor each bite!

My intent this spring is to plant more fruit trees.  In addition to the citrus, we also have a pear tree, a number of blueberry bushes, muscadine vine, persimmon tree and thornless blackberries.  One of the things on my to do list this winter is to compile a list of additional fruit trees I'd like to put in.  It would be beneficial to have an orchard of various fruit trees from which to harvest - a food forest, you might say.

Tucked In For The Night

I might have told you that about a year ago when I began new employment, I started on a self-directed health program.  Here's why.  I just turned 56.  Although I'm not on any medication, my doctor was telling me to watch my blood sugar.  The numbers had been increasing.  Despite us eating very healthy eating mainly things we grow on our little homestead, I've never met a sweet that I don't like.  Snacking on sweets was going to hurt me sooner rather than later if I didn't make a change.

I don't like lifting weights.  I don't have time to go to a gym and don't like running.  So what could I do?  I could walk.  I set a step goal of 10,000 steps a day.  That seemed simple enough.  So a year later, I hit my goal 99% of the time, going out at night and walking the perimeter of our 5 acres and have lost 20 pounds.  I listen to podcasts while I walk.  My favorites are: Art of Manliness podcast, Victor Davis Hanson podcast, and Jordan Peterson podcast.  

I also look up at the sky.  It is peaceful and serene.  At least once or twice a week I see shooting stars.  It's unfathomable to try to understand in my little pea brain that when I see a shooting star, I'm looking at something that happened many, many, many years ago.  But I don't just keep my head in the stars, I look around, too.  Tonight, I saw the cows sitting down and resting in the pasture.

After a full day of eating grass and hay, Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu are taking it easy.  As we discussed last night, Nick is gone.  Hopefully, all three of them are bred.  I was looking at them sitting peacefully in the pasture, I began to fast forward my thoughts 8 or 9 months from now.  Right now it is crisp and cool.  When the calves come, it will be hot, humid, and the landscape will be swarming with mosquitoes and deer flies.  I welcome the cool weather we're experiencing now.

I began to think about the possibility of having three more calves.  What would they be?  Bulls or heifers?  Heifers are nice because there is a demand for registered Jerseys.  More people are seeing the benefits of having a family milk cow.  We could sell the heifers.  However, bull calves would be fine, too.  Our deep freeze is almost empty.  Raising a bull calf for a year and a half and then sending him to slaughter would refill our stores of fresh meat.  We wouldn't complain about that either.

We will watch them closely for the next month to ensure they don't come back into heat, signaling that they weren't bred.  During the winter we keep them fed with hay and a little bit of sweet feed.  We supplement with some of the smaller sweet potatoes from the garden.  This weekend I'll be planting some turnips, too.  Toward the end of January and February, I like to pull up turnips and cut them up with a pocketknife and feed them to the cows.  They love turnips.  Me?  Not so much, but I love turnip greens.

Well, the podcast is over.  As I look down at my step counter, I'm at 11,348 steps.  Time to go in and get tucked in for the night, sort of like the cows.

Nick Goes Home

Nick is a Jersey Bull that we've "borrowed" from some friends down the road.  He had a very specific job to do and that was to seduce our Jersey cow, Rosie and our two Jersey heifers, Elsie and LuLu.  Exactly four weeks ago today, we picked him up and brought him to Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  He is a big dude and he's not halter broken.  My immediate concern was, "How in the world are we going to load him back up in the trailer when it is time for him to go?"  We don't have a corral or loading chute.  It might end up being an adventure - or impossible.

We're kind of "fly by the seat of your pants" folks.  I just thought that we'd deal with that problem when we had to deal with it.  First things first - we had to get our three animals bred.  Cows have a 21 day cycle.  It's been four weeks.  We see no more 'activity' so we're thinking the romancing is done.  But here's the thing: We saw evidence of the two heifers going in heat, but never Rosie.  Even with the heifers in heat, we never Nick and our cows consummate their relationship, if you know what I mean,  but, we weren't watching 24/7.  There was programming on a TV network Nickelodeon a long time ago called "Nick at Nite."  Perhaps Nick was amorous at night, hidden from view.  We hope so.

So today we had a window of time between morning and evening worship service to load up Nick and bring him back home.  How was this going to work?

We backed the cattle trailer to the gate and opened it up, chaining the gate to the trailer, so there was no way for him to escape.  Then I got a bucket of sweet feed to coax him with, because everyone knows the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

Nick was very suspicious.  I opened an escape door in the back of the trailer and then walked backwards with the bucket, luring him to the open gate.  Slowly, slowly...  I got him to where he got his front two feet in the trailer.  Benjamin ran up from behind to shut the back gate in back of him.  Ol' Nick figured out what was up and he backed up in a hurry.

I'm not one to give up easily.  This time I led him with the feed and let him get a good taste of the molasses-laden sweet feed.  He liked it!  I pulled it away and walked into the trailer, setting the bucket in the very front.  I walked out of the side gate of the trailer and waited.  Nick jumped up in the trailer and Benjamin slammed the cattle trailer gate closed.  Got 'em!  Nick was not happy that he'd been hoodwinked.  We fastened the gates shut with ropes and began the ten mile drive back to Nick's home.

Three ladies bid Ol' Nick farewell.  They'll miss him, but it'll mean more hay and feed for them.

A cows' gestation period is nine months, so we'll hopefully have three calves somewhere around August of 2023.  That means we'll be milking again in September.  C'mon Nick.  I hope you did your job and our cows are carrying.

Ol Jack Frost

Tonight's forecast predicts our first freeze.  Will it happen?  I don't know.  We're around trees and cloud cover may prohibit the temps from dipping colder than 33.  Trouble is, sometimes we like to push the zone and plant things late just to see if we squeeze additional time out of the growing season.  For instance, we have been picking buckets and buckets of green beans lately.  Our peppers and eggplants are producing great quantities.  

And our tomatoes.  They look fantastic.  Fall tomatoes are always prettier and healthier than the spring tomatoes around here.  There's no bugs or worms to compete.  The issue you run into is an early freeze.  In 2017, we had a HUGE crop of beautiful tomatoes.  All were still green.  Then an early freeze came and decimated the crop.

I picked every single tomato and researched what we could do with them.  I came up with this:

Pomodori Verdi is a green tomato pasta sauce made with: Green tomatoes, onions, bay leaves, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano and lemon juice.  We canned a bunch of the stuff.  It still sits in our pantry.

The other day we were rotating the stock in our pantry and Tricia made a Cream of Tomato Soup with the pomodori verdi.  You know what?  Pretty doggone good!  (You gotta get past the green color of the soup, though.)

Speaking of Green Tomatoes.  Let's walk out and look at the crop.  The plants look great.  They are about 5 feet tall and still growing.  I have them trellised with the Florida Weave Trellising system.  They are happy plants.

The vines are loaded with blooms AND tomatoes.  Still a ways from harvest, but looking good and coming on strong.  In a few short weeks some of these bad boys would be ready.

But with the freeze coming,  I don't know if they'll make it to maturity.  I got a blue tarp out and threw it over the 13 plants we have.  Maybe it'll work.  Maybe it won't.

But at least we know if Ol Jack Frost comes, we can still make green tomato sauce.

Happy Big # 80, Dad!

Hard to imagine, but last night we met in Kinder for Dad's 80th Birthday celebration.  My sister made two cakes (coconut cake - Dad's favorite) and mom make two coconut pies.  We ate a huge pot of shrimp etouffee over rice, garlic bread and salad.  Mom, Dad, the kids and grandkids and family all gathered in the kitchen and we held hands and Dad asked God's blessing on the food and the family time we'd share.  I took a photo of everyone around the circle.

And more people...

And more...

And even more...

We sat around the table for a long time, eating and visiting and laughing about memories.  We thanked Dad for being such a good model for us as a leader, a husband, a father, and a grandfather always being there for all of us.  

Then it was time to blow out 1/10th of the candles.

And he got the job done!

Happy Birthday, Dad!  We love you...

The Hay Gets 'Em Through

 

This photo was taken about a month ago.  It was warmer, with temperatures reaching up to 90 degrees.  Today, the weather has changed.  It was in the 30's this morning with a brisk north wind.  There was a light frost on the ground and then the rain began to fall.  We always say, "The animals don't mind the cold and they don't mind the rain, but when it is BOTH cold and rainy, then they have trouble."

When the temps fall, the grass stops growing and the animals clip down every blade of grass in the pasture.  They depend upon the hay we give them.  A month or two ago, we reported how we put 70 square bales up on the hay loft in the barn.  We keep round bales out in the hay ring so that they can free choice eat at their leisure.  Normally a round bale will last a week, but now that we have Nick, the bull, here with us, the round bales don't last that long.  He's a big dude.

Speaking of Nick, we're thinking that Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu are bred, so we'll be trying to load Nick in the cattle trailer to return him to where he's from.  Hopefully we'll be successful.  He isn't halter-broken, so it's not as easy as putting a lead rope on him and walking him into the trailer.  We'll have to get creative and coax him into the trailer with some sweet feed in a bucket.  If we're not successful, we'll have to borrow some cattle panels and build a corral.

Back to the hay, I've arranged for a friend to deliver us 8 round bales at some point next week.  Once Nick is gone, that should last us through December and the better part of January.  In addition to the round bales, we'll begin giving them square bales each day along with sweet feed.  We generally ration the square bales so that it lasts until the spring grass comes in.

Should He Stay or Should He Go?

We've had a visitor in our barn almost every night for the past couple of months.  He's leaving his calling card - piles of poop all over the hay.  It looked like possum poop to me.  Funny thing is, there were no chickens missing.  Possums kill chickens.  When they do, they leave most of the carcass behind.  It's always frustrated me because I think, "If you're gonna kill my chickens, eat them.  Clean your plate.  Don't kill them and leave most of the body behind.  That's very wasteful."

So our culprit was not killing our laying hens, but was in the barn.  Why was he coming in the barn?  I got to thinking about it and discussing it with Tricia and we both noticed that we haven't seen ANY rats in the barn.  We researched and found that possums DO eat rats.  So perhaps this possum is doing us a favor and cleaning out the rats.  But there's another variable.  We know that there is also a big rat snake in the barn taking care of the rats, too.  We were' leaving him (or her) alone until it goes in the henhouse, then it must die.

In the photo below, you can see the hole that the possum has made to enter into the corner of the northwest corner of the barn.  If you zoom in, you can see several of the many piles of possum poo.

What to do?  In the words of a song by The Clash back in the 80's, "Should he stay or should he go?"  If he goes, then our rat problem will rebound, especially with wintertime coming and the snake won't be hunting until it warms up.  If he stays, there will come a time when the rat population is diminished (like it is now) and the possum will shift his prey to one of the laying hens in the hen house.  We can't have that.

So with that decision made, I baited up my cage trap with some Pedigree Dog food.  Possums are the easiest animal to catch.  In two days, I had a big, hissing possum in the cage.

Benjamin was home, so I had him grab his rifle and go put him down and compost him.  We will keep an eye on the rat population in the barn.  Hopefully, in the possum's absence, we won't see a population explosion.  Possums poop on the hay and the animals don't like that on the hay.  I wouldn't either!  However, rats poop and pee on the hay and the animals don't like that either.  It's tough to balance these things out!

Home Sweet Home

There is a small town twenty miles north of us.  We pass through this town many times and have friends that live there.  There is a good little spot that we like to stop at and buy boudin and boudin balls.  There's one other thing that I learned about this town that I wanted to pass by and check out.  It just so happened that I had an appointment for work in this town and was able to drive by this site.

Know what it is?

Do you remember the Sears & Roebuck catalogs that would come by mail?  I remember the Sears Wish Book that would come out and we'd go through it with a marks-a-lot and circle what we wanted for Christmas.  It was exciting.  Sears was like Amazon before there was Amazon.  The reason I'm telling you this is that Sears didn't only sell toys and clothes from their catalog...

The home in the photo above is a Sears & Roebuck Mail-Order home. Now, I felt a little creepy taking photos of someone's home like this, so I made it quick. I didn't want them to come out and "pepper my tailgate" with some buck shot.

I did a little research on these homes.  This website right here had an informative write-up of these homes.

From the article:

"From 1908 to 1940, the Sears Modern Homes Program offered complete mail-order houses to the would-be homeowner — what would come to be called “kit homes.” Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive in a train car, its door secured with a small red wax seal (just like the seal on the back of a letter)."

This home sits about a half mile from the train tracks that run east and west, so the homeowner didn't have far to carry his building materials.

"This seal was to be broken on arrival by the new owner, who would open up their boxcar to find over 10,000 pieces of framing lumber, 20,000 cedar shakes, and almost everything else needed to build the home — all the doors, even the doorknobs."

I laughed when I read that, thinking of the times I've put a swing set or something together and it had missing parts or extra parts leftover once I was done.  Can you imagine all the parts (including door knobs) with a house?

"Sears promised that, working without a carpenter and only rudimentary skills, a person could finish their Sears mail-order home in less than 90 days."

My skills are far less than rudimentary.  I would hate to see the house that I would build!

But look at the Sears mail order home in the two photos above.  It looks GREAT!  Even after all these years.  It has character and charm.  In looking at some of the blueprints in the article I linked above, I think I found which kit they bought.  It looks a lot like the home at the bottom right of the brochure below:

Can you imagine?  Ordering your home from a catalog, having it come in on a train, and then putting it together on your lot yourself?  It's a quality home that's still standing today!  Home Sweet Home, for sure!

 

Fall Garden (Part 2)

Earlier this week we looked at the 'Salad Rows' in the garden.  Let's look in at the rest.  In this photo below, in the top right corner, you can barely make out the potatoes in bucket experiment we're working on.  The rest of the photo makes up a bunch of the cole crops along with some others.

Starting left to right:  The first two rows are cabbage (brunswick and Jersey wakefield varieties).  The next row is cauliflower (amazing and purple varieties).  The next row is Romanesco broccoli.  The next row is 'regular' broccoli.  The next row has baby bok choy, kohlrabi, and kale.

Here are some sugar snap peas that are beginning to trellis on a hog panel I have fastened to some t-posts.

Here is a big section of sweet potatoes that I haven't harvested yet.  To the right where you can see the dirt, that's where I have harvested some of the sweet potatoes to make room for planting three rows of carrots.

Below is a row of some French breakfast radishes.  These grow really fast.

Here is one row of Cosmic purple carrots I have planted that are coming up.  I have three additional rows of carrots (Atomic Red, Danvers half long, Uzbek Golden varieties).

I have a couple of rows of snap beans that are really producing, both Contender Green Beans and Italian Roma II beans which you see below.

Every couple days I pick a large bucket of beans.  We eat them with new potatoes and butter and they are delicious.  We'll begin blanching a bunch to freeze.

One thing I didn't show you is the beets and rainbow swiss chard.  We had poor germination on the Bull's Blood beets.  We had to get some Detroit Dark Red beets to fill in the holes in the row.  Probably this weekend I'll be planting turnips, spinach and mustard greens.

Like Sand Through the Hour Glass...

Time marches on, doesn't it?  A couple of Saturdays ago, Tricia and I went to a festival in our town.  They blocked off Main Street and people set up booths in the middle of the street selling arts and crafts, food and drink, baked goods and preserves - all sorts of things.  My wife pulled me into an antique shop as she had found some cups and saucers she liked.  While she made the purchase, I looked through little rooms filled with items from yesteryear.

Then I found this guy.  Little Professor.  I remember this thing.  We had one in 1976.  The Little Professor was a backwards calculator.  It would provide an equation like 2 x 4 and you would answer 8.  You had three chances.  If you missed the third try, it would print EEEEEE across the screen and then show the correct answer.  I'd like to say that the Little Professor helped me become better at math, but that would be a miscalculation.  EEEEEEEE.  I've never been strong at math.  I did take a photo of it and texted it to my brother, telling him, "You know you're getting a little age on you when you run across things from your childhood in an antique store."

In one additional nostalgic look back, I was listening to a Country and Western radio station last week.  The DJ was talking to someone and said, "You know how I can find out how old you are without asking your age?"  The lady said, "How?"  The DJ replied, "Do you remember when you could dim the brights in your car with a foot switch?"

I hadn't thought about that little silver button by your left foot below the emergency brake in a long time!  See it in the photo below circled?

Image Credit

The foot switch for dimming moved from the floorboard to the steering column in the 70's and early 80's when cars moved mainly from rear wheel drive to front wheel drive.  Well, time for me to take the brights off and put on the dimmers.  Tomorrow or the next day, I want to show you some more of what's going on in the garden.

Quick Look at the Fall Garden (The Salad Rows)

Let's take a look at the Fall Garden.  The spring garden is tailing off with only okra and butterbeans producing still.  Well, our many varieties of peppers and eggplant are starting to really produce after a dormant summer slump.  Today, we'll look at the salad rows.  We have one full row with various types of leaf lettuce.  We've enjoyed salads deep into winter by covering these rows during freezes.  Here is the most prolific variety of leaf lettuce - the Black Seeded Simpson.

Growing up, I had never planted lettuce, so it was a new crop to learn.  In fact, when the lettuce got big, I'd pull it up by the roots.  Not smart!  My wife told me, "Why don't you cut the leaves off from the different varieties and they'll re-grow over and over?"  Why didn't I think of that?  This was the start of the "never ending salad bowl" during the fall and winter.

Here's a patch of Red Romaine.  It looks spiffy next to the Black Seeded Simpson (green leaf lettuce) that is it's neighbor to the east on the row.

Here is a mix of lettuce called Rocky Top Blend.  It must originate from Tennessee.  It has a nice mixture of different varieties and different colors.

And finally here is a variety of lettuce called Oak Leaf lettuce.  Yep, you guessed it.  The leaves mimic the appearance of an oak leaf.  The colors are different, the leaves are different, but I think that most lettuce tastes the same.  I'll admit I don't have a refined palate.  There was a salad mix I planted one time that was "spicy," you might say.  It had arugula, radicchio, and endive along with others.  It was just too strong for our tastes.  The varieties I have planted are all sweet and tasty. 

Along with every salad, you'll want to slice up some cucumbers.  This is the first time I've attempted to grow some in the fall.  If the frost holds off, we'll have at least ONE cucumber to cut up.  There's lots of blooms and lots more on the way!

Tricia likes to slice up homegrown tomatoes for the salad.  We've got lots of tomatoes coming.  I've trellised them using the Florida Weave method and they are happy, adding inches of growth each and every day.  Annie, the Nubian Goat, is coveting the tomatoes.  If she could, I promise you, she'd be in there making a mess of the garden.

We have lots of blooms and lots of tomatoes coming!  We'll see if we can get a harvest in before the first freeze hits.  The Old Farmer's Almanac shows November 26th to be the first FROST date for our area.  We can protect these from a frost, but not a hard freeze.  We'll watch and see what happens.

While I was pinching off suckers that grow in the tomato plant's 'elbows' and squeezing to death four or five late season Army worms that were feeding on the tomato plants' foliage, I saw one of our honeybees that was busy (as a bee) pollinating one of the tomato blooms.

That concludes the salad rows.  I'll show you some of the other rows a little later this week.  We still haven't planted a few fall/winter crops like mustard greens, spinach, and turnips.  Those will likely go in once the okra finishes up.