Growing food here in the North Country isn’t always easy, but after 40 years of trial and error, I’ve figured out a few tricks that are routinely putting more food in our freezer and pantry than ever before.
One of the tricks I’ve learned is that timing is everything when it comes to food production.
And by better planning, I now regularly get two crops a season out of much of my ground. Like most growers around here, I do the bulk of my planting in the spring. Actually, I’m often planting by the first week of March in my greenhouse, first with my hardiest starts, like lettuce, broccoli, and cabbage, followed by the tender stuff which I plant sometime in early April.
But my second major planting season typically starts in my greenhouse in mid-July, which is when I plant starts for my fall crops, which include broccoli, cabbage, and root vegetables like rutabagas and parsnips. I know root vegetables can be an acquired taste for many folks, but when grown and harvested at the right time, I’ve found them to be a fantastic addition to fall and winter dishes. It helps that my wife Jodi is an excellent cook with lots of experience turning our garden produce into fine cuisine. My job, of course, is to produce all that food so she can work her magic in the kitchen.
For years, I had planted rutabagas and parsnips in the spring, and they were typically fully grown by sometime in late August. But then I would have to wait to harvest them, since root vegetables are definitely best after a few frosts. The onset of cold weather causes chemical changes in root vegetables that convert their starches to sugars, so the carrots, rutabagas, and parsnips are that much better after a few good frosts. But given our rapidly lengthening growing season, those hard frosts that used to come in September (or even late August in many parts of the area) 25 years ago, now aren’t coming until October.
Planting root vegetables in the spring now means leaving the mature plants in the garden for months waiting for the chilly weather to arrive. Those months left their roots exposed to root maggots, nematodes, and other chewing insects, which would inevitably start to damage the roots the longer they stayed in the ground.
These days, that’s all changed. My rutabaga and parsnip starts now go in the garden right around Aug. 1. I know these plants can be direct-seeded but I’ve found that they can withstand the plethora of chewing insects in the garden that time of year much better if they’re already 4-5 inches high. It’s obviously more labor intensive, but I’m not a commercial grower (at least not yet!), so I don’t need hundreds of rutabagas or parsnips.
These root vegetables grow incredibly well in late summer and well into the fall and aren’t phased by temperatures that would kill most crops. They reach maturity in mid-to-late October so I can harvest them before the ground starts freezing hard and without having to worry about insect damage.
Some folks in our area just leave their parsnips in the ground and harvest them as needed. Throw some straw over them for insulation and you can continue to pull them well into December, or about the time the gardening catalogs are arriving and you’re working on next season’s growing plan. It’s almost like gardening year-round.
As for my fall broccoli and cabbage, it’s much the same story. While not quite as hardy as the root crops, they can take plenty of cold weather and they also get sweeter after some chilly weather. My fall starts go in the ground right around Aug. 1, just like the root crops, and they grow quickly in the cooler temperatures of late summer and fall. And by September, when they begin to form heads, the cabbage moths and loopers are typically well past their peak time in the garden so I don’t have to worry about the damage they can cause. If the cold weather comes early, it can reduce the size of the heads I’ll be able to harvest, but when the summer warmth lingers, like it’s done this year, the heads grow to full size and provide a very nice addition to our overall harvest. With the winter squash harvested and put away and the pantry shelves full of tomato sauce, salsa, and Jodi’s homemade ketchup (which puts storebought to shame), it’s a busy but fulfilling time of year as we complete our fall harvest and get ready for the winter yet to come.