Harvesting – Beautiful Chaos

When we came back from our holiday we had snow and it was cold. I was worried that my red beets (which I did not manage to harvest all before we left) would freeze and I could not use them any more. Therefore the first thing I did was harvest all of the red beets and processed them with the pressure canner to shelf stable soup.

Next thing was to pull out all of the carrots, root celery, root parsley and leeks. Harvesting is fun, so I had 3 little helpers.

Besides using some of the vegetables fresh I also pressure canned vegetable soup (all vegetables from my owm garden). I filled up the glasses with beef broth, which I am cooking almost daily to use up the bones in my freezer.

I am going back and forth between cooking broth and using it to pressure can soup or goulash and pressure canning meat on its own.

Also the broth on its own gets canned for later usage in lasagne or some thing else. I hope to reduce what is in the freezer to what will fit into one freezer and I can turn one freezer of. My shelf is getting filled nicely by now.

Some where in between I managed to plant the garlic for next year’s harvest. Just on time before the big frost came and froze the soil. Only my flower bulbs are still in storage. Hopefully we will have a mild period before we leave, so I can also plant these and enjoy the flowers next spring when we get back from our journey.

The garlic harvest was not as satisfying as I hoped it would be, but therefore I am very happy with our onions. We had 4 raised beds filled with onion sets and harvested around 25 kg of onions from these.

I had different varieties and all did Ok. In every bed there where smaller and bigger onions. Only with the variety Snowball there where a hand full of onions already going bad, but I do not know what the problem was. It could just be that I harvested them to late, or that they where to moist underneath all of the straw. I think I should not mulch the onions so thickly next year.

I had my husband hang all of the onions under the sealing to cure and hopefully they will store a long time this way. We will see how long they will last us. With some of the onions the leaves broke of and I can not hang these, so we store these on an egg tray. This way I hope they will store long enough until I can use them up.

Of course there is more to harvest in the garden at this time of year. We already have eaten a lot of potatoes harvesting them as we use them. And there is nothing like home grown potatoes. There is no store-bought potato that tastes so good. With the early potatoes the plants all have died back already, but it is to warm that I can store them. I just leave them in the ground and hope we have eaten trough them before the mice find them and before the potatoes sprout again. They will need to endure for a few more weeks before I can think of harvesting them for storage.

And then there are the green beans and peas to harvest. Luckily the kids help with cleaning them and we have eaten a few and froze a few for meals in the winter time.

We already ate a few zucchini and have many more to come. What can I do with all these zucchini? I still have so many glasses of pickled zucchini from last year, so I am not making any this year.

Despite the fact that the one pumpkin I planted in the wrong spot I am very happy with all the small pumpkins it seems to be producing. And they are growing bigger. I have a few more pumpkins on another spot of the garden, but this one seems to be doing best.

I also have some herbs and also have harvested some of them and dried them hanging underneath the sealing. These are dry and jarred. Ready to use in the kitchen.

I totally forgot to take pictures while harvesting the strawberries and the raspberries, but they where very good and the kids loved them. They where very excided to go and search for some new berries every day. Coming up soon are the blackberries.

We have eaten lettuce and, the kids have no patience, we have pulled still very small carrots to snack upon. Also we harvested our first cucumber.

The tomato plants are growing and growing and growing. I missed out on pruning them and now it is a small tomato forest and I have no idea what to do with them. Therefore I decided to just let them be. I merely gave a few outer stems some support by winding a thick rope around them that is knotted to a small bar above. I hope this will do and the tomato plants will not break off do to the wait of the tomatoes that should be growing on them soon. There are already tomatoes growing, but no changing colour jet.

And then the last thing I wanted to mention in this post is that apparently with one bed with cabbage I was too late to cover with some netting. The cabbage white beat me to this bed. Luckily I found the caterpillars before to much damage was done and I cleaned out the caterpillars and damaged leaves. I will have to keep an eye on this bed just in case I have overlooked some.

And I almost forgot about the red beets. We love red beets and have already harvested a few for soup and as a side. Also I have pickled some for the first time. We can hardly wait to try them.