Monday, November 9, 2015

Harvest Monday 9 November 2015


We had another beautiful fall week to do some cleanup and plant the garlic.  I also pulled some of the larger carrots. These I think are Yaya and Cosmic Purple. This is about the best result I have gotten from carrots in years. The usual problem is poor or no germination. The soil in the raised beds dries out quickly at the surface, even with mulching,  and I can not be there to water twice a day. This time I put the seeds down an inch and that seemed to help the germination. In addition, the carrots grew under soil cover so there were no green shoulders. I did this after noticing my neighbor sprinkling a packet of carrot seeds in a trench a couple of inches deep. Given the tiny size of carrot seed, you would think that would not work but they got good germination. Of course they had a lot of thinning to do.

The turnip I am optimistically saving for the batch of kimchee I hope to make from my Soloist cabbages. The cabbages are still looking good and starting to size up nicely. I hope we can avoid another freeze for a week or two. The forecast for the next four days is looking good. The freeze we did have seems have to have killed a lot of the pests. No white butterflies any more.

That’s all that happened in my garden last week. To see what other gardeners around the world are doing, visit Dave’s Our Happy Acres, our host for Harvest Monday.

9 comments:

  1. Nice job on the carrots. I agree it's difficult to keep the seedlings from drying out when planted shallowly. I'm going deeper too.

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    1. I've tried straw mulch and row cover with no luck. Someone suggested covering with a board or cardboard, which I didn't get around to trying.

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  2. I love purple carrots and those look great! I hope you get to make the kimchi. That's one thing I haven't tried making myself yet. Our one freeze seems to have killed a lot of our pests too. It's nice to have the cabbage butterflies gone for the year!

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  3. Those are some beautiful carrots. I'll have to try that deeply planted trick next year - I'm not the best at keeping newly seeded beds moist. It never would have occurred to me that they would come up when planted that deeply - thanks for that tip!

    And that is the benefit of a freeze, which we also had a couple of weeks ago and again last night - I've had my brassicas uncovered for a while now and both I and the plants are enjoying the freedom!

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  4. That's a great idea to grow carrots in a trench. I suppose you can wait to fill it in entirely until the carrots get larger and then you can cover those shoulders. No carrots for me this fall, I never got around to sowing any.

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    1. The trench is nothing new, just the standard Farmer McGregor farming technique. I scoffed when I saw it but the carrots actually came up, which surprised me, given the depth and heavy soil.

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  5. Hmm, I don't know if I'm lucky with carrots or just wasteful ... I usually just dump a bunch of seeds on top of the soil, stir it around a bit, dribble on some water and see what happens. I definitely have to do a lot of thinning, but very little effort.

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  6. They look so colourful and delicious!

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  7. Your carrots looks amazing. And is that a turnip? I ask because the leaves look almost like radish leaves.

    I still have white butterflies flying around and lots and lots of lady bugs.

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