The Fall Garden

Broccoli grows extremely well in cool weather. If your spring planted broccoli doesn't seem to succeed, mine hardly ever produces a good head, try growing broccoli primarily in the fall. I have had great success with broccoli I planted in late summer for fall harvest.

We leave our rutabaga in the garden until we need it. Light frosts helps instead of hurting, turning the starches into sugars and creating a sweeter tasting rutabaga. 

The cold frame bed contents for greens in early winter months.

The cold frame bed consists of two different varieities of kale, arugula, romaine, mesclun mix, swiss chard, beets, green onions and rutabaga.

Kale as a cover crop.

Never underestimate the value of green onions in the garden. They take very little room, can be left in the ground all winter and used in the spring and grow super quick without being a heavy feeder.  

Again.

Big ol red onions.

Celery is best stored with it's cut end 'planted' in a bucket of sand or you can simply leave it in the ground and take ribs as you please.

Swiss Chard.

Radish.

More Broccoli.

Fishing for Compost.

Here are a couple pictures I was able to snap of a Fisher eating out of my compost piles yesterday. Fishers are not as harmless as they appear and are known to be quite vicious. Fishers have been known to attack pets, farm animals and even humans. We are lucky all he stole from us was compost as opposed to a chicken or a cat.

Swiss Chard.

Swiss chard will thrive in cool weather even when you have to wear a huge wool sweater out to the garden to pick it. Most greens prefer cool spring and fall weather to intense summer heat. Swiss chard I planted this summer is doing even better now that the temperatures have dipped.

Buddies.

Red Onions.

Radish Roots

Wild Cranberries.

As fresh as it gets, wild cranberries picked minutes from our home. Wild cranberries have an amazing flavour making them ideal for sauces, baking and savoury dishes. For a quick and impressive holiday themed snack stew cranberries with lemon juice, honey/maple syrup/organic sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and a pinch of sea salt until desired consistency. Adjust seasonings to taste and pour smother a piece of goat cheese with the sauce. Serve with sourdough, homemade crackers or other desired medium.  

The End of Our Peppers.

We had several uniform, delicious peppers this summer that were on the larger size. Then we had a bit of a bumper crop of smaller, uniform and delicious peppers. We will use all of our peppers fresh. If you have more peppers than you will use fresh they will freeze really well if sliced into strips. A little trick I learned working in a restaurant is to slice the vegetable or fruit you wish to freeze and arrange in a single layer on a sheet of some sort, then freeze before packaging for storage. Frozen foods should be used quickly in order to maximize obtainment of nutrients.

Borscht for Breakfast.

Radishes like cool weather!

I really miss radishes in the middle of the summer. They grow much better in cool spring and fall weather than the intense heat of mid summer. I read once that the best way to grow a radish is fast. Meaning that growing them in rich soil with lots of organic matter where they will really take off and grow quickly results in a tender and flavourful radish. The method has defiantly worked for me. I constantly plant radishes here and there for a succession of fresh radishes. When I see the last radishes I planted start to push their 'shoulders' out of the soil I will plant some new ones. A fantastic vegetable from the garden to grate into a salad, slice for snacking, add to a coleslaw, soup or casserole.  I never liked radishes I had purchased in the store, however I LOVE radishes from the garden and would be lying if I said I never ate one like an apple.

Onions from seed.

Our first attempt at growing onions from seed was fairly successful. The seedlings were started indoors some time in February. We grew way more than pictured here. The bulbs just filled out completely over the past month and they have been maturing almost in batches.  Last year I had enough onions to last until the chives burst through the snow and am hoping for a similar outcome. The loft in our shop is the perfect place to hang onions, garlic and shallots to dry. The smell of onion has permeated the  loft and I secretly hope it stays.

Fixing Dinner.

Easy enough when you have veggies like these in the backyard. I have carrots, far from perfect parsnips, leeks, garlic and rutabaga ready for stewing.

Gorgeous, albeit dirty, ground cherries. We grow a lot of these bite size and tasty snacks in our garden.

 A member of the nightshade family, each cherry like piece comes in it's very own papery wrapper.

When they have ripened sufficently the ground cherries simply fall from the plant allowing for easy picking with little guess work.

Still Strawberries.

Our 40 some odd strawberry plants are still producing lots of berries. We probably obtain around a pint every few days. My boyfriend and I stand in the patch every afternoon/evening and eat all the ripe berries from that day. I just finished reading the book Atlantic Gardening by Peter J. Scott who insists that strawberries should always be consumed in this fashion.