Wheeling home the harvest
When you have to push the
day's harvest home in the wheelbarrow, you know the homestead is
exceeding expectations.
Now, what to do with all
that bounty? With the exception of the extra cucumbers (which
even Bradley and the chickens have stopped accepting), the rest of the
bounty is bound for harvest
catch-all soup.
Of course, we can't make
a big pot of the soup right now because other important ingredients
aren't quite ready. For example, we'll be slaughtering our second
round of broilers next week, who will provide the stock. Our
green beans are ready, but the sweet corn isn't quite fleshed out, and
the roma tomatoes are just now starting to change color.
While we're waiting for the
tomatoes to ripen up, cabbages and carrots would keep well sitting in a
cool root cellar. Too bad I never put it on the list to dig
the refrigerator root cellar back out of the dirt....
Instead, I'll be
cramming storage vegetables into every nook and cranny of our small fridge. Half the carrots
filled up the crisper drawer, which is all I usually devote to storage
vegetables, and I cleaned off the bottom shelf for the cabbages.
Now, what about those other 15 pounds of roots?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I love the proud smile that accompanies the wheel-barrow-bounty.
It is this happy vibe and the bounty of information you guys so freely give that keep me coming back to your blog.
Thanks, Anna and Mark!
Love the Weekend Homesteader eBooks! Did my first sun-dried tomatoes in the car last week, and ditched the $90/mo. Satellite TV.
I'll post a good review on amazon soon.
hey anna, i thought you might like these chinese wheelbarrows. also, the magazine that article is in is really cool
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html/
Cameron --- We adore our current wheelbarrows, but those Chinese wheelbarrows do look interesting.
J --- Few people grow carrots here either. They're not the easiest crop, but are far from the hardest too, especially if you use raised beds or have light soil.
That said, they're spring and fall crops, so you can't really harvest them between July and around October or so. More of a crop to succession plant so you can eat carrots from October through June.