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.