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.