A Strange Vegetable, Indeed

Yesterday we talked about a medley of root vegetables that we've been roasting in the oven.  We just can't get enough of them.  But our carrots are coming to an end.  As discussed yesterday, I'm not a fan of turnip roots.  I like turnip greens, but the turnip roots I mainly give away and also feed to the cows.  However, I have found a relative to the turnip family that I like.

Kohlrabi!  I had never heard of this vegetable.  We certainly never grew up eating it.  The kohlrabi is NOT a root vegetable.  It is actually the swollen stem of a vegetable that grows above ground and is a brassica.  That means it is related to cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower.  The name "kohlrabi" is German for 'cabbage turnip.'

I would have never thought to plant this in our garden.  We got it as one of the free seeds sent out by Baker Creek Heirloom seeds orders.  The seeds we got were Purple Kohlrabi.  The seed looked exactly like any other brassica seed.  When it grew... wow!  Look at this vegetable.  It looks like something cultivated on Mars or Saturn.

Mixed up in the purple kohlrabi seed envelope must have been just a regular old kohlrabi plant.  It looks just the same except for the color.

Here they are side by side in my hand to give you an idea of how big they are.  I've tried to let them grow bigger, but learned that's not a good idea.  They get tough and 'woody' if allowed to continue growing.

I tear off the leaves and give them to the cows and goats, but to be honest, kohlrabi leaves are edible for humans, too.  I use a sharp knife to peel the outer skin off and then I half them and begin slicing into thin cubes.  We'll roast those in a pan the exact same way that we did the carrots, beets, and cauliflower.  I have a good many of these that I'll be harvesting soon to make room for the spring garden.

A Nice Cold Snap!

For the last three days and continuing into tonight, overnight lows dipped near 30 degrees.  It wasn't nearly a hard freeze.  I didn't worry about winterizing the pipes.  In fact under the trees, I saw no ice in the water troughs.  I knew that the freeze would end the green beans, though.  They had a nice run.  Not only did we get fresh snap beans for Thanksgiving, but we were still picking green beans for New Year's Day.  We've never done that before.  After I picked the last of the beans, I used clippers to clip the plants off at ground level and tossed the foliage over to the cows.

The fall garden always produces some wonderful meals.  I get excited about vegetables.  What kind of a weirdo does that?  I showed you a nice cauliflower we harvested last week:

I neglected to tell you our favorite way to eat cauliflower (or broccoli).  Chop up the cauliflower into florets.  Place on a stoneware baking pan and add kosher salt and a bunch of minced garlic.  Drizzle olive oil and stir it all up.  Place in an oven and roast until they turn golden brown.  I would assume people just call this Roasted cauliflower.  We call it cauliflower candy.  It is so delicious that there are no leftovers.

The freeze wrecked the peppers and eggplant.  We picked all the remaining fruit off of them and cut down the freeze-damaged plants.  Everything is brown now in the garden, except for bright green leafy things like kale, swiss chard, mustard greens, turnips, and things like radishes shown below.  The red radishes contrasted against the radish greens in the morning sun are pretty.  I don't get that fired up about cut up radishes in a salad.  I'll enjoy them like that, but Tricia makes a radish dip that's quite addictive.  She'll take a few nice sized radishes and put them in a food processer and mince.  To that shell mix in a softened block of cream cheese and a little salt, pepper and chili powder.  

The purple kohlrabi is a relatively new addition to our garden repertoire.  Growing up, I don't imagine I ever even heard the word kohlrabi, but I got some as Free Seed from Baker Creek and it looked like a vegetable grown on an alien planet.  We cooked it up and really enjoyed it.  I'll wait until this one's a little bigger and we'll feast on it.

We're also getting ready for planting.  My onion sets came in from Dixondale Farms, so some time this week or next, I'll be planting about 200 onions.  We harvested some Irish potatoes that came up volunteer from some that I guess we didn't find when we harvested back in early summer.  To that bed I'll be adding about four inches of mulch.  We'll be planting Irish Potatoes around Valentine's Day.

Tricia's New Favorite Vegetable

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, in addition to having a seed catalog that could double as a coffee table book because the photos in it are so stunning, gives you a FREE packet of seeds with every order of five or ten packets (I forget which one).  The free seeds are mystery seeds and usually something you've never heard of and certainly not planted before.  A couple years ago, the free seed was Purple Kohlrabi.

I had never eaten kohlrabi before and certainly not a purple one, but I'm game for adventure, so I planted them.  They thrived.  I had no idea when they were ripe.  We had no idea how to prepare and cook this thing and didn't even know if we'd like it or not.  But it was FREE and I had a little space.  We ended up really liking this vegetable and it has become a staple in our fall garden.  They are also called a German turnip or a Turnip Cabbage.

We have been harvesting them and eating them and we have two remaining in the garden.  I need to pick them, along with the rest of the cabbage to make room for the rows of okra that I'll soon be planting.  Here is a nice purple kohlrabi that I just pulled.  The leaves are edible by humans like other brassica leaves, but I clip them and feed the cows and goats.  They seem to enjoy them.

It is a plump, healthy vegetable that just looks weird.

Once the leaves were snipped off, it fits perfectly in your hand and is exactly the size of those Nerf footballs that my brother and I would throw to each other in the yard when we were growing up.  However, I'm not throwing this thing anywhere but in the skillet.  

The way to prepare it is to cut the hard, woody part off that's near the base.  Then, I take a sharp knife and "skin" it until you are looking at a greenish-white bulbous thing.  Then, I slice it into disks and cube it by putting it into our vegetable chopper.  The cubes emerge as 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch sized squares.  These little cubes are seasoned and sautéed in a cast iron skillet.

I think kohlrabi has turned out to be my wife's favorite vegetable.  We would have likely not discovered this without Baker Creek Seeds (rareseeds.com) free seed promotion.  Although kohlrabi is indeed a top-shelf vegetable, I would say that mine is still fresh-picked snap beans (Italian Roma variety) cooked with new potatoes cut in half with plenty of butter.

Would You Eat Year-Old Vegetables?

This year we didn't quite know what the fall garden was going to look like.  With a drought that rivals anything that we've seen since we've lived here twenty-something odd years, we didn't even think we were going to get a fall garden in.  Couple that with Benjamin's accident that occurred at the beginning of September where we were in the hospital every day and night for over a month and well, the prospects of a fall garden was on shaky ground.

But we got it in.  The only crop that we missed the deadline on and didn't plant was Irish Potatoes.  We generally try to get a fall crop in, but not this year.  If you drift past the September 15th last planting day, you really risk it.  An early freeze will wipe them out.  That's experience speaking, ha ha.

The question that the title of this post asks is a little misleading.  I'll clarify.  I've learned to overplant seeds in the event that germination isn't good.  If your germination isn't good, you end up with enough plants to get a stand and achieve a good yield.  On the other hand, if they ALL come up, you can gently pull out some of the seedlings to get the proper spacing and either give the seedlings to family members and friends or replant them in another area of the garden.

Sometimes, however, I don't get around to doing that.  What ends up happening is that some of the seedlings are 'shaded out' by their larger counterparts.  They are still alive, but they are stunted in the undergrowth and never mature.  This year a funny thing happened.  After we harvested the ripe kohlrabi and broccoli in the spring of 2023 from the fall crop, some of the stunted seedlings lived on.  They lived on through the heat of summer and the drought.  Miraculously, we are harvesting some year-old vegetables right now.

Here is a purple kohlrabi.  It is a weird plant, but tastes delicious!

If one would ask me to envision what vegetables would look like that grew on Mars, the purple kohlrabi would be my answer.

We fed all of the leaves to the cows.  Then we harvested a bunch of florets off of the year-old broccoli and have been eating year-old vegetables for the past several days.

Later this week or perhaps the next, I'll show you another year-old vegetable that we're going to harvest.  The fall garden is really producing right now.  Lots of lettuce, radishes, sugar snap peas, snap beans, kale, bok choy, etc.  Most of those were just planted this fall.  That's expected.  It's the ones we're harvesting now that were planted LAST fall that are something different from what we've ever seen before.

Harvesting and Cooking a New Vegetable From our Garden: Kohlrabi - A Review

As I've mentioned before, ordering seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds at www.rareseeds.com is great for several reasons.  One of those reasons is the FREE SEED they send you with your order.  It is always a seed or a variety of seed that you've never grown.  It is a good way to get you to expand your horizons and broaden your experiences.  I like free stuff.  I like fun stuff.  I like trying new stuff.  It reminds me of many years ago, we'd order our baby chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery.  They ran a promotion in which they'd throw in a "mystery chick" with your order.  As the chick would grow, you would try to guess the mystery bird by comparing it to photos of chicken varieties.  Fun!  But I digress, back to our mystery seed.

We got a packet of Early Purple Vienna Kohlrabi.  I had never grown nor eaten kohlrabi.  It is in the brassica family and is a pre-1860 heirloom.  I was eager to try them so we planted them this fall.  Today, we decided to harvest the biggest and give it a try.  We figured at worst, if we didn't like it, we could feed it to the cows.  Here is the ripened Purple Kohlrabi in all its purple glory:

Isn't that the strangest thing?  Tricia said it reminded her of a UFO.  I told her I thought the same thing - that if aliens grew vegetables on Mars, this would be what it would look like.

I pulled all the leaves off of the "bulb" and fed them to the cows and then brought the bizarre brassica inside.  It was as a sign from God that this was going to be a good experience.  The late afternoon rays of sun filtered through the western window, giving the kohlrabi a halo of sorts as I cut it in half.

I peeled the purple skin off of it by slicing it carefully with a butcher's knife.  The bulb was about the size of a softball.  I was a little concerned that it would be too big and would be hard and "woody," but it didn't seem like that as I was cutting it.

I quickly cut it into 1 inch cubes.  I found a recipe for Roasted Kohlrabi with Parmesan.  We preheated the oven to 450 degrees.

I drizzled olive oil over the top and then kosher salt and then followed up with a dusting of Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning.

Then I put it in the oven for 30 minutes.  Every ten minutes, I would open the oven and turn the kohlrabi with a spatula to ensure it was roasting evenly.  At the end of 30 minutes, the kohlrabi cubes were golden brown and looking pretty doggone good.  I pulled them out and grated some fresh parmesan cheese over them.  The recipe called for sprinkling fresh parsley, but I didn't want to walk out to the garden and get some when we had fresh cilantro in the fridge.  That'll do instead, right?

Here is the "money" shot.  That looks good, doesn't it?

But things can look good and taste bad.  Time to give it the taste test.  DELICIOUS!  These won't be getting fed to the cows.  In fact, Tricia and I almost ate the entire dish.  Tricia asked how many more we have in the garden and I told her 6 or 8, so we'll be eating more of these.  What do they taste like?  The best description is one I read:  "It has the consistency of a turnip, but the taste of broccoli."  I think that is an accurate description.  We'll put Purple Kohlrabi into our winter garden rotation from here on out.  Highly recommended.