Time to make soup!

When you've got a lot of anything to harvest, the easiest thing to do is to make soup.
We have turnips busting out, and tons of collard greens, onions to thin, lots of nettles, parsley, canned pumpkin and green beans from last year, and last but not least a very spicy pepper from a friends garden. Throw in some local spicy sausage meat, locally grown rice some garlic, some New Zealand spinach from the perennial bed and viola, soup! But it is almost too spicy for Jacq.

Nice turnips!

 

That's New Zealand Spinach in the foreground, the plant that took over the world.

We take a tea break Annie gets a play break...from napping.

A pre freeze harvest

This premature harvest was brought on by a forecast for several nights of below freezing temps in our area. Here is good portion of my pre freeze harvest, you can see way too many green tomatoes, a pile of basil, a basket full of radishes w/greens on, a load of green peppers and a few that had time to turn red, and my personal favorite, a bag of nettles, half of which ended up in the evenings chili. I also cut a bunch of parsley, spearmint, lemon balm, lemon grass, and basil for the freezer. I harvested most of the stevia both for the leaves and the hopefully some seed.

That was yesterday, today I snipped all the tomato plants off and chopped them into the compost heap, I then layered a bit of composted horse manure, some topsoil, winter rye grass seed, and some hay mulch over one of the beds. Tomorrow I'll do another nearby bed and add a soaker hose to them both. I've ended up with quite a lot of soaker hose that I found on my scavenging rounds since we arrived in May. I found the hay for the mulch on the side of the road as well. The winter rye is intended to help break down the manure and will create green mulch. We hope to let it grow tall enough to make some hay and possibly give us some grain to experiment with. It is an annual so what we don't harvest will die back when the weather heats up next year.