Though temperatures are often below freezing here in mid-November,
there's still a lot to harvest from our zone 5 garden.
Today I'd like to invite you to join me as I gather today's harvest.
Today I'm planning on making a mixed green salad with beets and goat cheese
and a vegetable pot pie made mostly with root crops from the garden.
Let's get started with our greens harvest with some Red Kitten Spinach.
spinach is one of the easiest cool weather crops to grow here in winter in zone 5.
We harvest it all winter long under just one layer of cover.
The fact that you don't have to use two layers makes it a great choice for beginning gardeners.
I'm just going to harvest a little bit today and save the rest for later.
We've got a lot of other greens to harvest as well.
Okay, that should be enough.
Before moving on, if you notice the leaves here behind me along the fence,
we gather leaves every fall
and we use them as mulch throughout the year.
and they're really part of the reason our soil is so fertile and friable.
I'll be talking more about our use of leaves in a video soon.
Now let's harvest some sunchokes.
sunchokes tastes best after a frost, so we've waited until now before harvesting.
Let's see what we get here.
There's a tiny little start.
So, what I'll do today is I'll just harvest enough for our vegetable pie
and then maybe enough for a soup later this week.
And we'll leave the rest of the sunchokes in the ground.
This is the best place to store them.
Over the winter, I'll just keep all the sunchokes here in this bed.
I'll cover the bed with storm windows to keep the soil from freezing
so that I can continue to harvest through the winter.
All right, just a little bit more and I think we'll have enough.
Hey, buddy. Do you want to get in the shot?
Oscar is here. He's just being a little bashful today.
There he goes.
Okay, so I'll just return the soil, and there's a look at today's sunchoke harvest.
Now let's harvest some giant red mustard greens to give a little spice to our salad
These giant red mustards are coming up right in the middle of her carrot patch.
So, I thought I'd cut them back just to give our carrots a little more space.
These mustards have a very strong mustard flavor to them
and they can be a bit much if eaten on their own.
But they taste great when mixed with a variety of more mild tasting greens.
All right, there's our mustard green harvest.
Okay, now let's harvest some carrots.
We're growing carrots here in this low tunnel,
but before harvesting them, I want to harvest the carrots here in this blueberry bed
because those carrots won't be covered during the winter.
And I want to harvest them before they're covered with snow.
We've been interplanting carrots with our blueberries here for a number of years now
and they do well in the low pH soil.
We also have strawberries growing in here.
So, it's a good way to grow a lot of different crops at the same time.
These are really small varieties. These are Paris market carrots.
There's a nice size Paris market.
The reason we grow such small ones here is because under the blueberries it's very shaded
and small varieties do better.
There's a little Paris market carrot.
There's a few more little Paris Markets.
Okay, I think I've harvested enough carrots for today's dinner.
Next I'll harvest some dinosaur kale.
We have kale growing in the hoop house and some of our low tunnels
but today I want to focus on harvesting kale that's unprotected
because this kale isn't likely to survive the winter in the shady location it's in.
This kale has been here since, I think, March or April.
And it's produced a lot for us even though it's had a hard time with cabbage worms this year.
One of the good things about the cold is that it kills back all the cabbage worms
and slugs if you have those.
Fortunately, we haven't had much of a problem with slugs in the last few years.
All right, that's enough dinosaur kale for today.
Now let's see what I have here in this bed.
Okay, we have some beautiful purple and green curly kale, a variety of lettuces,
and perpetual spinach.
I think I'll leave the lettuce alone and just harvest a little bit of this purple kale,
and some of this kale as well. Just a little bit.
Leave the rest for later.
Okay, next I'll harvest from underneath this double layered hinged low tunnel.
Today I'll harvest two crops that probably won't make it through the winter
even though they're under double cover -
Swiss chard and beets.
Okay, these Swiss chard leaves are pretty big,
so I'll only need to harvest a couple today.
We still have plenty of time to harvest them before the cold kills them off.
There's a beauty.
All right, now let's have some beets.
These are the last of our fall beets and they're pretty well picked over.
But it looks like we have some decent sized beets still and some little ones.
They'll be good on our salad tonight.
Of course, we'll eat the greens too.
Now that I'm freeing up this a little bit of space here in this bed,
I may transplant out some kale.
Okay, most of these are pretty small but I'm happy with it.
It 's enough for our salad tonight.
Okay. Oh, careful Oscar! Geez! I almost scrunched you. You've got to be more careful, buddy.
Garden safety. Safety first.
All right, I still have two more root crops to harvest.
Let's start with Tokyo Market Turnips right up here in the next bed.
Be careful.
Okay, these turnips are currently doing very well under single cover,
but this part the garden is already mostly in the shade and by December it will be completely shaded.
So, I want to harvest most of these turnips in November.
They don't have a very good chance of surviving the winter here.
Again, these are Tokyo Market Turnips, and they're small little turnips that grow very fast.
They're very sweet and tasty for turnips.
Okay, let's see what this one looks like.
One more little one.
Okay, that should be enough for today's veggie pot pie.
Okay, the last thing I'll harvest today from the backyard garden
is some red lettuce from this low tunnel.
I'll harvest this lettuce fairly aggressively
because this part of the garden is already almost completely shaded
and it's not likely to last much longer.
Though it looks really good right now.
I love the different colors of lettuce.
This one is very pretty.
Just one more. We've got a bunch more lettuce out front.
Ah, one more.
Now, let's finish today's harvest by picking lettuce and maybe some Swiss chard from the front yard garden.
But before doing that, I think I'll have to stop and get another bowl.
Here in the front yard garden we're growing kale, lettuce, and Swiss chard.
I think today I'll only harvest some lettuce.
This Hungarian Pink Winter Lettuce has bolted. It probably bolted some time ago when it was warm,
and I think I'll just harvest the whole plant.
Some people don't like lettuce after it bolts, but my wife and I don't really mind.
I think I'll leave everything else alone.
And here's a look at today's final harvest.
I hope to be back with more harvest videos through the winter.
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on how to grow a lot of food on a little land
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