What’s been going on over the past two months…

Markets! Lots of fall bounty, this photo from mid-October. Our markets are less frequent during the winter months, but we still have a few cold hardy crops coming in!

Praying mantis in the field.

So many carrots. The Purple Haze variety is really a stunner.

And more carrots.

The last of our ginger crop, harvested mid-November. We had our best-ever crop this year.

Which means I also had a lot of ginger to process. I juiced quite a bit and froze it in ice-cube trays. We add these cubes to boiling water and it makes the most wonderful concentrated and potent ginger tea.

Also experimented with ginger refrigerator pickles. Also dried slices of ginger in the dehydrator that can be stored and ground in a spice grinder for adding to recipes. And of course, froze it whole in chunks for adding to recipes that call for fresh ginger.

Cleaning up the turmeric crop. It has so many roots. Unlike the ginger roots, which are less plentiful and more easily removed, these turmeric roots require some serious time and patience to de-root.

De-rooted turmeric. It also seems to be much slower to grow than the ginger.

We continue to have problems with onion maggot on the leeks, which make our attempts to grow this crop, as well as scallions, very frustrating.

Tender baby radishes: D’avignon variety.

Our first crop of hazelnuts, from the slips we planted several years ago. The beginnings of a food forest!!!

Broccoli crop coming in.

What’s left in the field, today! Mostly kale! It’s amazing how dark the red curly kale becomes after the cold.

I mulched the asparagus patch with leaves and grass.

Prepping our garlic beds with compost; early November.

We planted a lot of garlic this year, over 100 lbs, including much of our own saved seed.

Winter projects are gaining momentum. Gavin putting the siding on this shed that was begun several years ago. I think it is finally done now?!

Beginning another huge project. This will be the future site for a new barn/packing area/cooler. First we have to remove the trailer.

Staking out the future building. We don’t have a lot of space to work with but we’ll use what we have available.

We had our plumbing contractor put in over a thousand feet of water lines out to the new fields this fall. As we begin to grow in these areas it will be great to have water in the right place. In the spring we’ll start laying out this area into our permanent growing beds, with vegetative walkways between rows and drip irrigation to each bed.