morning-glory-garden

IN PRAISE OF ROOTS AND GREENS

Turnips are pretty much a perfect vegetable, delicious, easy to grow, and you can eat both the bottoms and the tops. I harvested the last of this year's crop yesterday after work and we had the greens for dinner, along with pasta with Joe's wonderful red sauce (and Italian sausage that for some reason had no fennel in it - it tasted good but not properly Italian). We'll have the turnip bulbs themselves in a few days.
      Some of the pak choi is about to go to seed, the broccoli rabe is over (but we loved it while it lasted), the kale is nearly ready for another cutting, as are the cut-and-come-again mesclun and arugula. The rainbow chard will go on for quite some time until it gets too hot, probably in June. I love greens. Everyone in the family loves greens except my daughter's seven-year-old, who's picked up some of his dad's unfortunate food preferences, but hopefully he'll outgrow them.

       It's a good year for root vegetables in general, except for the radishes, which were inexpicably disappointing, though I'm going to plant some more - there's still time before it gets too warm. I love the winter garden here in the desert southwest. The carrots and beets are good and the parsnips are nearly ready to begin harvesting them - it's the first time I've grown parsnips. I planted them in a wine barrel so they'd have good, soft, deep dirt. But right now I'm excited about rutabagas, another first for our garden!

Here are our first two rutabagas, with a kohlrabi in the middle - it's about the size of a softball! The first planting of kohlrabi didn't germinate very well so when I thinned the rutabagas I replanted the ones I thinned out into the kohlrabi row - we now have lots of rutabagas! And that's just fine.