Re-planting Carrots or Beets for Seed

Early to mid-winter is the time to re-plant bulb/root crops to grow seed crops. Beets, carrots and onions are biennials. This means they produce seeds in their second year and then die.

Below are pictures of beets (left) that have wintered over and are beginning to sprout leaves and root hairs. These we plant into pots with soil or directly in raised beds in our grow-tunnels. On the right is a picture of a row of potted root crops that are developing enough roots and sprouts to then be planted again in the ground so they can mature and set seeds. Note: seed-saving can only be done with heirloom/non-hybrid varieties.

 

 

 

 

 

Because our ground can be so wet and cold through the winter, we often dig up these root crops in mid to late fall. At harvest time we cut the greens off but leave the crowns so they'll re-sprout. We then store them in a plastic bag or clam-shell container with dried leaves or straw so they stay moist (but not too moist) till we're ready to replant them. A plastic container in the fridge also works well (below).

Those pictured above were harvested in late September and re-planted in late December. In previous years we have waited till January or February for replanting but noticed the beet in the lower right corner was developing mold in its crown so decided it was best to get it in the ground before the mold progressed.

 Here are some Imperator carrots we grew in 2024. You have to have deep, loose soil to grow them. They're not as sweet as the Scarlet Nantes (our other favorite ) but because they're so long, we get more pounds of carrots per bed.

Chris, planting carrots.

Almost done. We bring soil up to, but not covering the crowns. Then we water them well to settle the soil. 

Nantes carrots, 11 days after planting. The greens are already growing! Once the greens get taller, we will put a cage around them to support the greens and flower stalks (see below).  Depending on when one starts re-growing these root-crops, seeds will be ready to harvest in mid to late summer.

Caging: Seed crops can get quite top-heavy and will require caging and staking. Image: Waltham broccoli going to seed. We made a cage out of 4'-tall fencing material and drove stakes deep into the ground.

Caging: For crops with lighter seed-heads (lettuce, above) a simple stake driven in the ground with strips of cotton-sheeting to hold it up will do.

Note: Carrots will cross with wild Queen Anne's Lace (pictured above) and can produce woody, bitter carrots from any crossed seed. To prevent this, we try to time our carrots' flowering to precede that of QAL (which usually happens later in the summer). If you see these growing near your gardens, it's best to cut off the flowers or dig the plant out entirely. This will greatly diminish chances of cross pollination. Image credit: https://white-rock-lake.blogspot.com/2012/05/queen-annes-lace-intrigueing-wildflower.html

Other ways to reduce the risk of cross-pollination: Grow out the seed-crop under cover (grow-tunnel). Carrots can be hand-pollinated by breaking off a flower and tapping it gently on other flowers to spread the pollen (make the flowers 'kiss'). For extra security, cover your flowering carrots with re-may cloth/white row-cover (after hand-pollinating). Image: Imperator carrots, summer 2024, grown from our own, saved seed!

Seed crops often create beautiful 'sprays' of seed heads. Here's Chris with a 'bouquet' of kale seed.

Note: Beets will cross with other varieties of beets as well as CHARD (same family) so keep them isolated from each other if saving multiple varieties of beets, or beets and chard in the same year. Image: Jim, harvesting whole branches of beet seed for processing. Beet flowers have a very sweet scent like Alyssum flowers (or even a mild cotton candy smell!).

Winnowing beet seed. (See these other posts for more info on winnowing seed: Saving and Storing Kale Seed Small-Scale, Grain Production and Processing)

Beet seed after winnowing.

...and the cycle starts again!

Kids who help grow their food are more likely to want to eat it! Here are Bella and Adri with a handful of fresh-dug carrots.

Free woodchips for our town!

We are so grateful to M.R. Tree for delivering wood-chips to the parking lot we share with Heritage Hall for the free use of anyone in the Monroe area. (The Sharing Gardens - 664 Orchard St.)

Here are a few guidelines to make this work for the whole community:

-Take from the front of the pile (closest to Orchard St.). Then, when the Tree-people drop off more, there's room at the front for them to drop their load.
- Share with your neighbors. If you take a large load, wait a few days before coming for another load so that people who have busy schedules have a chance to get some too. If the pile doesn't get any smaller after a week, feel free to come back for more.

Sticks: If there are un-chipped sticks in the pile and you don't wish to take them, please make a neat pile to one side or the other that will make it easy for us to dispose of them. 

Thank you for your cooperation. With your help we can make this program sustainable for the community to enjoy for a long time.

Though our initial purpose for forming the Sharing Gardens was to provide free fruits and vegetables to food charities, we've always wanted our project to be helpful and relevant to other folks in our community who don't shop at the Food Pantry. In the last few years, we found a way.

A free wood-chip pick-up and drop-off site!

We share a large parking lot with the S. Benton Food Pantry which provides easy access both for the chip-trucks and neighbors with trailers to turn around in.

The Sharing Gardens shares a large parking lot with the Community Center/Food Pantry next door.

This program has benefits for everyone involved: it saves the tree companies the time to drive an extra 25 miles to the closest municipal-scale composting facility, and the money they charge for yard-waste deposits ($70/load!). And our neighbors have a reliable source of free wood-chips at an easily accessible site.

Tree companies are able to easily drop off a load of wood chips and our neighbors also can get close for loading.

Sandra and Jenny help Jim load wood chips onto his trailer.

We hope the program can continue indefinitely!

Autumn Pleasures: Recipes and Tips for Stocking-Up

Recipes for: Pumpkin Pie, Crumb-free Cornbread, Amazing Quince and 'Nooks and Crannies' Hot Cereal

Autumn is a time for enjoying the bounty of the garden. Every bite of cucumber or tomato takes on special pleasure knowing the season is almost at an end. We enjoy preserving foods for later consumption; whether through canning, dehydration or freezing. It's also a time for seasonal favorites like pumpkin pie from scratch. Here is a collection of relevant posts to expand your autumn pleasure and help you squirrel away some of the season's bounty for leaner, winter times. Enjoy!

Stocking up: Whether your motivation is to ride out a short-term power-outage, make less frequent trips to the grocery store, hedge your bets against the rising cost of food by taking advantage of sales or just to avert that sinking feeling when you go to your cupboards and there's nothing you really want to eat, this Tips for Maintaining a Well-Stocked Pantry offers many simple ideas and habits to keep your pantry 'topped off'. Note: the link will take you to All Things Sharing, our blog about positive things happening in the world.

Autumn at the Sharing Gardens; a time of beauty and bounty!

Amazing Quince! - Sugar-free Recipe (LINK): Many people are unfamiliar with quince though it's becoming more popular. Its tart apple flavor has undertones of pears and rose oil. It can be cooked into homemade applesauce, dehydrated for fruit leather or be baked as a stand-alone autumn treat. Be sure to read the full post and comments to read about other recipes and improvements we made on our methods of preparation. Nutritional benefits of quince. (image LT: www.modernfarmer.com)

Making Pumpkin Pie from Scratch - Recipe (LINK)

Pumpkin Pie recipe: Though it's a lot easier just to open a can of pumpkin puree to make your favorite pumpkin pie recipe, there's nothing that compares with the satisfaction of growing your own (or buying from a local farmer) and making enough puree as a base for pies all throughout the fall and winter. This post will help you avoid making common mistakes: Making Pumpkin Pie from Scratch - Recipe. (image RT: Llyn's niece, Jesse during her first autumn harvest, 4 months old).

Mix up a big batch of the dry ingredients for Crumb-Free, Whole-Grain Cornbread Recipe and you'll always have it on hand for a quick baked treat.

Cornbread recipe: We make large batches of the dry ingredients for this delicious Crumb-Free, Whole-Grain Cornbread Recipe. This makes it easy to just add the eggs, oil and other liquids, pop it in the oven and have a comfort-food snack or side dish for a larger meal, a quick dish to take to a last-minute pot-luck invitation or unexpected guests.

We grow two kinds of corn for our hot cereal. Hooker's Blue (left) and Golden Bantam (right). Though we've tried to keep the strains pure, corn is notorious for cross-pollinating, hence the variety in color. Grow your own Sorghum for grain and flour (LINK)

'Nooks and Crannies' hot breakfast cereal RECIPE (LINK): This recipe for hot cereal starts with the basics: mixed grains,nuts and dried fruit but it goes much further, offering suggestions for toppings that will make this a delicious power-house of nutrition that provides energy all morning long. Though we've been fortunate these past few years to grow enough of many of the ingredients ourselves, you'll find almost everything you need in a well-stocked bulk-foods section. Remember to buy organically grown ingredients: better for your health and better for the Earth. (RT: Tiffaney removing corn from the cobs using a homemade tool.)

And lastly, though not part of the main topics of this post, here is some really inspiring news about a river in England that was encouraged to return to its original meandering course. Not only did this encourage many kinds of wildlife to return but the new river's pathway and the subsequent wetlands this created served to mitigate flooding of the downstream towns and villages during record-breaking wet years of rainfall. (Note: the link will take you to All Things Sharing, our blog about positive things happening in the world.) LINK: What happens when you set a river free?

Double-rainbow seen to the north of our land.

Tips for Maintaining a Well-Stocked Pantry

The autumn season always brings out the 'inner squirrel' in me! Time to clean out our pantries and use up or pass along to others anything getting close to its 'best by' date (or, if past that, compost or toss it out). Once clean and organized, I love restocking our pantries with the many foods we've harvested and preserved over the summer.

But even if you don't have a lot of food you've grown or preserved yourself, autumn is a great time to take refresh your pantry. Seasonally, it just 'feels right' and at least in the U.S. there are lots of holiday sales on food you can take advantage of.

Regardless of the season, whether you’re concerned about preparing for a natural disaster or economic hard times, or just tired of opening your cupboards and not having a variety of tasty, nutritious items to choose from, it’s always a good idea to get in the habit of stocking and maintaining one’s pantry. Here are some tips to help: Tips for Maintaining a Well-Stocked Pantry

How we grow...Veganic Community-based gardening

The Sharing Gardens is based on the concept of mutual generosity; building relationships through the sharing of time and resources. One of the ways we demonstrate this is through our process of building fertility in our soils.

Since 2020 we have grown all our food "veganically" and without the use of commercial fertilizers. This means we use no livestock manures (cow, chicken, sheep etc) and no animal by-products (blood or bone meal etc) or any products mined or shipped from distant lands (gypsum, bat guano etc.). Being vegetarian, and committed to deriving our food from local sources whenever possible, this way of growing food just makes sense to us!

Most of our garden's fertility comes from leaves...

Our system is simple: the majority of our soil's fertility comes from leaves and grass which we compost in large wooden bins or in the paths of our greenhouses. 

...and grass clippings.

The challenge is in gathering enough materials. Here's where the mutual generosity comes in! We provide a drop-off site for our neighbors and yard-maintenance companies to bring their leaves and grass. This means they don't have to pay to have these valuable materials hauled away in trash cans, or deposited at the closest municipal-scale composting site (25 miles away). We receive these materials in abundance and are able to extensively mulch and compost our garden beds, create our own potting mix and have enough compost to share with the volunteers in our gardens who have small gardens of their own.

Besides composting yard waste in large wooden bins, we spread it in layers in the paths of our greenhouses which turns to compost beneath our feet. Donn: spreading grass clippings in the SunShip greenhouse.

Compost is scooped up from the paths in the autumn, sifted and bagged for use throughout the coming season.

Craig, sifting compost.

When people drop off their yard waste in plastic lawn/leaf bags, we hang them to dry on clotheslines in our greenhouses. Once dry, we roll them into bunches of 5-6 bags, twist-tie them together and put them in a covered barrel at the drop-off site for our neighbors to take for free and use for future loads. This helps reduce our community's use of plastic.

Llyn, folding leaf bags for re-use.

We place a sandwich-board sign out on the street, inviting neighbors to bring us their  leaves and grass. Touching up the paint is a winter task...

Barrel on the left holds free bags that have been dried and rolled in bundles for people to re-use. We ask people to leave the bags untied and to turn them upside-down to prevent rain from getting in.

To read a detailed post about our veganic soil-making methods, CLICK HERE.

A small percentage of our soil  fertility also comes from coffee grounds collected from coffee shops by friends of the Gardens and wood ash (left), a by-product of how we heat our home. Here is a LINK explaining the benefits of these free resources.

We're so very grateful to all our neighbors who have participated in this program this year.

 

Amazing Quince! - Sugar-free Recipe

Update - Oct. 2024: We've been continuing with our experiments with quince recipes and learned a few things. Rather than re-write the post, we've added an addendum at the end. Also, please read the comments for info offered by fellow readers. Enjoy!

Hi folks - We've just made an amazing discovery. We love quince! When prepared as the recipe outlines below, quince tastes like a pear/lemon fruit with a hint of peach and rose-oil! Ambrosia!

This has been one of our most beautiful autumn seasons on memory! Pictured is the back of our 1875 Farmhouse, the yellow, shag-bark hickory tree (on the right) and a rainbow in-between. (October 2019)

Every year, about this time, one of the Monroe "locals" drops off two or three HUGE boxes of quince at our local Food Pantry. The quince usually sit on the shelves, for a month or more, with a sign that says "Take as many as you as you can use," but very few people take any, including us. Eventually the Pantry folks get tired of looking at them and they end up in the Sharing Gardens compost pile.

Quince after harvest. Photo credit: LINK

We've been reluctant to try them because they're so darn hard to cut open which makes them seem like a real pain to prepare. Also, they are very tart when they're raw and every recipe we'd heard of called for lots of sugar. We're always trying to find ways to limit our sugar intake, not add to it! So, until we discovered the joys of quince, we just figured our compost piles were going to have a nice big influx of worm-food in a month or two.

That is, until I (Llyn) looked up their nutritional content and Chris and I were pretty impressed - particularly as a good source of zinc and copper. Minerals are often the most difficult nutrients to get enough of in our modern diets. Most farm soils are increasingly depleted and, unless you're getting your food from an organic farmer who replenishes those minerals in natural ways that the plants can absorb, (like wood ash - LINK) it may be difficult to get enough minerals from your diet without taking any vitamin supplements (which we don't). Quince are also low-calorie, high in anti-oxidants and great for digestion (their natural pectin is soothing to the gut!). Who knew? LINK

While I was browsing for more general info about the quince, I found a recipe that suggested boiling them for 8-10 min before baking them and then my cooking creativity kicked in and I came up with the recipe below. I've made it twice so I'm still fine-tuning it (so check back for updates!) But the best thing is, this recipe calls for no refined cane sugar (just maple-syrup, and not much of that) and is easy to prepare.

Pears (on left). Whole, boiled quince (in bowl). Quartered quince (below) - this picture was taken before I figured out how to cut fruit away from core (see below).

The Recipe:

4-6 medium-sized quince (about 5 cups)
4-5 medium yellow pears (about 3 cups) (or sweet apples)
1/3 cup maple syrup (about 1 TBSP maple syrup per cup of quince)
1 TBSP lemon juice (don't over-do the lemon, as quince is plenty tart already!)
1 tsp cinnamon

Choose uniformly yellow, fully ripe fruit without bruises or other damage. It helps if they are a uniform size (for boiling phase).

Bring a pan of water to boil - deep enough to mostly cover the quince.
Using your bare hands, run the quince under water and rub as much of the fuzz off as you can (don't worry if you miss some).

Place in boiling water for 8-10 minutes, depending on size. I think I over-did it the second time I made this. I was trying to soften the fruit all the way through but the core remained quite hard, even with longer boiling and the second time the outer fruit got rather mushy.

Lift the quince out of the boiling water and allow to cool.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a baking dish with coconut oil or butter.
Combine ingredients for sauce in a measuring cup with a lip for pouring.

Once cool, using a cutting board, cut off any brown spots or other blemishes on the fruit.
Slice the remaining fruit away from the core in as big pieces as possible (see picture). Your knife won't want to go through the core at all. It's super-hard! Just keep shaving off pieces all the way around the core till you've gotten as much as is easy.

Cut fruit away from the hard core.

Cut the fruit into bite-sized pieces.
Wash and core the pears. Cut into bite-sized pieces.
Mix the fruit together by layering it into the baking pan.
Drizzle the sauce over top of the fruit. Gently stir the fruit and sauce together to spread sauce evenly.

Quince, pears and sauce - before baking.

Use a pan with a lid, or cover with aluminum-foil.
Bake for forty-minutes covered (or until juices are boiling).
Take out, gently fold the fruit and sauce together so the fruit at the top gets re-sauced.
Leave cover off and bake for 10 more minutes to lightly caramelize the top.

After baking. Yum!

We like ours chilled with a scoop of organic low-fat, plain yogurt and some organic, lightly sweetened shredded-wheat cereal crushed on top.
We'll keep experimenting...seems like raisins or date-pieces would be good raw or cooked in with the fruit. Also, some crushed walnuts or granola might be good too.

A Quince Essential Fruit - here's a fun post that gives more details about this unique fruit including growing tips.

Let us know of your discoveries/variations in the comments below.

Addendum: We've discovered that, at least with our quince, we can skip the boiling stage of the recipe. The core of quince is so hard that even boiling doesn't soften it but by shaving pieces off and then cutting these pieces into bite-sized pieces, we've found we can skip the boiling phase of the recipe outlined above. Don't know if all varieties of quince are soft enough to do this...