Homestead Update 12/13/18: Just All the Orange Vegetables

Well, the garden season is (almost) over, and in the middle of the hectic atmosphere of my Christmas job, I’m left with a few moments to reflect on the past few months of finishing up the garden. 

Stuff that’s been going on in our homestead...

The Monster Orange Vegetable Harvest.

Zach and I officially have enough orange vegetables stored away to give us Vitamin A poisoning by the end of winter. Our butternut squash plants, despite being attacked by hordes of white squash bugs and every disease known to mankind, produced over a hundred pounds. Zach and I also learned that sweet potatoes are an AMAZING crop for the St. Louis area. Even when it hardly rained and was stupidly hot for weeks on end, I barely watered them. They just grew like weeds. We planted some very late in the season (late June), and they still grew huge tubers. The bugs hardly touched them. Weeds couldn’t compete with them. It was magic! Between the 4x10 bed in the front yard and a few random plantings around, we picked 120 pounds of sweet potatoes before the first frost.

This is one of the big rules of lazy gardening: find what grows well in your area, and grow a lot of it. I thought we were doomed to zucchini, but it turns out that sweet potatoes loooove hot, humid weather. So they’re perfect.

Monster harvests of other crops.

Daikon radish, tomatoes, beans, sweet potatoes

In the last few weeks of summer/early autumn, we raked in tons of food in addition to the “Vitamin A crops,” most notably tomatoes (I was making new batches of tomato sauce every day for a while). For days I spent a ton of time boiling down almost-ripe tomatoes, harvesting daikon radishes and beans, drying herbs, and trying to protect the hardy greens (kale, parsley, chard) from the worst of the weather (the kale is still alive and kicking!). I currently have a single red tomato sitting on my counter that ripened from a green tomato I picked in October. Who says you can’t eat a “fresh” garden tomato in December?

The Great Chickie Molt.

In early November, our chickens started losing their feathers, in response to the shortening days and the onset of winter. They looked incredibly scruffy for several weeks, but now they’re fluffily svelte again (except Izbushka, who is still pretty scraggly). They aren’t laying eggs at the moment, but I’m hoping they’ll lay at least a few more during the winter.

Pumpkin Pie.

And finally... drumroll, please... I made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving out of the pumpkins I grew in my own yard. I feel like my homesteading cred raised a solid point just for that. Sadly, the pumpkins weren’t as prolific as other orange veggies... but you can bet that there’s a lot of butternut squash and sweet potato pie in our future!

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