Harvested a Few Things This Weekend

If the ground was dry it would be the perfect time to work up some ground with my hoe and plant some beans and corn.  However, there's more freezing weather coming and the rains keep falling.  That's okay.  We'll be patient and wait.  There's still plenty of things to do in the garden while we wait.  We can do a little harvesting.  While some of the carrots still have some growing to do, some are the PERFECT size.  In the wet soil, it's easy to tell which carrots are ready.  You simply run your fingers around the top of the carrot root to see if they are mature and ready to pull. 

Here is a nice cosmic purple carrot.  I don't know if the size and symmetry could be more perfect.  Cosmic Purple carrots are strange looking, but when you slice them open, they are orange just like a normal carrot.  They taste like a normal carrot, too. 

While the cosmic purple carrot may be the show off on the carrot row, the plain-jane, boring carrot on the row is the simple, white carrot.  It isn't a parsnip.  It is just a white carrot.  The cosmic purple carrot sports a flashy purple jacket, but inside it is orange just like any other carrot.  The white carrot is solid white through and through.  It may just be my mind playing tricks on me wanting something to be special about the boring white carrot, but I think it tastes sweeter than the purple or orange carrots.

You may recall that a very wet fall spelled doom for my cole crops.  The overwhelming majority of my cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli crop that I had nurtured from seedlings succumbed to a watery grave.  I enjoy growing things from seeds, but I wasn't going to let disaster keep me from enjoying eating the bounty from the winter garden.  There's always a "Plan B."  The local hardware store had seedlings for me to buy and plant.  The broccoli and cauliflower have all been eaten and now the cabbage are coming in.  Big, nice heads of cabbage there for the pickin'.

I picked out the biggest one to pick and we'll leave the others to continue to grow.  We love to eat cabbage - just cooking it down in a cast iron skillet, making a simple cole slaw, or chopping it up and making homemade egg rolls...  We may even make sauer kraut again this year.

Of course we always share the bottom leaves with the cows.  They LOVE cabbage!

That's how the cow ate the cabbage!

It's the best of both worlds.  Colorful and delicious!

With Rosie and her little bull calf (Aussie) looking on, I moved to the sugar snap peas.  These are growing on a trellis and they are now over eight feet tall and still growing.  I don't know how I'm going to reach the peas on the top.  The weight of the peas coupled with high winds we had a couple of weeks ago caused some of the tendrils to break free from the trellis, but they are mostly still attached and growing.

The blooms are abundant...

And each day new pods fill out and develop.  We're picking every third day...

They taste so good and sweet.  Many times I just stand by the trellis and eat them right off the vine.

The pods are crisp, but tender and sweet.  I like to pop them open sometimes and admire the perfection of a pod of peas before popping them in my mouth.

Tricia was making a pan of homemade corn bread, so I picked a mess of mustard greens.  Cornbread is mustard green's best companion.  This will be the end of the mustard greens.  tThey are not young and tender anymore and have a stronger taste than earlier in the season, but I'll enjoy them this one last time.

That's enough for the day's harvest.  Perhaps next weekend it will dry up enough to begin planting the spring garden.  garde