It’s a terribly dreary day here as we get our biggest snowfall of the season so far, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to bring a littler greenery back…
Gardening season is long over, although for a while there our parsley seemed to be trying its darndest to prove its resiliency through the increasingly cold weather. We managed to pick another handful before the snowfall. You may recall a bit of rant where I detailed how my wonderful husband rescued most of our produce. After that he was hard at work clearing the roughage and leaving us with a blank slate if and when the opportunity comes to plant again next spring. He left it looking nice and clean out there.
We had initially left carrots and beets in the ground and were slowly harvesting as the need arose, but once we started getting some pretty low temps at night, we picked it clean. Luckily this was just before the first bits of snow fell too.
Since then, we’ve stored all the carrots in our fridge wherever we can find room (seriously, there’s hardly room in there for anything else now), and we’ve peeled and frozen the beets – I’ve never done that before so I hope it works, otherwise I’ll be one unhappy camper!
Meanwhile, we have piles of squash and lots of herbs hanging/drying in random places. It’s a lovely sight, especially on days like today.
We also have one of the two giant zucchinis pictured below still on our counter, and it’s practically begging to become chocolate zucchini cake! Yumm…
Aside from the fact that a lot of our zucchinis perished with the first frost this season, I think we were incredibly fortunate in our haul this year. Now the challenge is to eat all of the more perishable items before they have a chance to go bad. The darn cucumbers were especially bad for doing that even while sitting in our fridge. Ew.
I feel incredibly fortunate that I’ve been able to dabble in this thing called gardening. Being my fourth season, I feel I’ve grown a lot as a gardener already, but I know there’s still LOTS to learn. And no matter where we end up next spring, I’m sure I’ll think of some way to keep my thumbs green.
S
Great results in your garden! By the way, I’m sure I heard Monty Don (Gardeners’ World, UK) say something about keeping carrots. Apparently you can also store them (for months, apparently) by layering them in a box filled with earth and keeping them in a dark cool place. So you’d almost pretend they’re still unharvested – but lying flat. Worth looking up? After all, carrots don’t keep forever in the fridge.
Interesting! That’s the same reasoning we had for not picking them until we had to, so it sounds like it would work.
Look it up though – I do seem to remember you need to take the leaves off for this type of storage. But I can’t be sure.