turnips

Our 2026 Garden: winter sowing peas, carrots, turnips and radishes

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After all the rain we had, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to work in the garden today, though today’s weather was supposed to be better. I had to head to the pharmacy, so I figured I would know when I came back.

I ended up in town a lot longer than expected!

My daughter’s prescription, that they did not have in stock yesterday, the main reason to go back to the pharmacy. My husband had ordered refills for delivery, so I figured I would get his bubble packs while I was at it. My daughter wasn’t feeling well enough to come along, unfortunately. I headed out and got to the pharmacy shortly after 11am.

That turned out to be an oops. They don’t get their inventory orders in until the afternoon. Typically around 1pm.

Also, since my husband’s refills were ordered for delivery on Thursday, and today is Tuesday, they weren’t ready yet, either. Those were left for delivery. I asked about my daughter’s meds, as I thought she got a partial refill, but no, she hadn’t gotten any of this one at all, and she needed them.

At first, I was going to head home then come back tomorrow until I remembered I was going into the city tomorrow. So I gave them my cell phone number and told them I would stay in town, and they could call me when the meds were ready.

That left me with quite a bit of time to find something to do, so I ended up doing a lot of walking!

Most places were closed for the season, but I did remember there’s a second hand store, so I went to check that out. I ended up spending a whole dollar when I left…

I already a similar drinking jar at home, but it’s colorless. They had a couple like that, but only one in this green tinted glass, so I got it.

I did enough wandering around that my left hip was starting to talk to me. Not pain – it hasn’t hurt like it used to since I got that injection at the sports injury clinic – but it started feeling like it was about to give out. By then, it was past 1:30, so I went to the pharmacy. I was just going to sit and wait, since they hadn’t called me yet, but they are so on top of their customer service, I had someone asking if I needed help before I had a chance to! It turned out they were working on my daughter’s prescription right then, so I didn’t have long to wait.

From there, I headed home, where my daughters had a late lunch waiting for me. The weather was good and things were relatively warms, so as soon as I finished eating, I decided to go for it, and headed to the garden.

My focus for today was to get winter sowing done, and I decided to do the sowing planned in the main garden area, first. The first thing I needed to do was a lot of raking of leaves! Once I had both the wagon and the wheelbarrow filled, I started at the trellis bed.

This bed already has seed onions planted along the non-trellis side. I chose the Spring Blush peas for the trellis side, and the rainbow mix of carrots in the middle.

The rows I planted in remain marked with stakes and twine. There is room between the carrots and the onions to plant something else. Fresh bulb onion transplants, perhaps, or more carrots.

In the second photo above, you can see the row of peas is shorter! There were only 25 peas in a packet. I should have bought two! I planted a pea every 6 inches or so, but it would have been good to plant the full row and have them more densely planted, in case some don’t germinate. As it is now, in the spring, I can plant something else in the remaining space that can use the trellis.

Once that was done, I covered the whole thing with a deep mulch of leaves. I actually ran out and had to get more.

Then I decided to finally use that pile of cardboard that I’ve had set aside for the entire season! I used it to cover where the next trellis bed will be built, as well as the path, to kill off the grass below. If I’d had enough, I would have put cardboard on the other paths, before I put wood chips on them as a mulch. The dandelions in particular had no problem growing through the mulch, and you can barely even tell the wood chips are there anymore. *sigh*

There was still enough time and light to work on the next bed.

The only problem was, that bed had turned into a pool!

I removed everything that was holding the plastic down and just started rolling it up. The piece of wood I used to roll up the excess is long enough to rest on both sides of the bed, so there was space below. Rolling it up meant pushing the water further and further to the end before it could finally overflow the plastic. Which meant that only the very end of the bed got an extra watering.

I left that to drain while I went to rake up more leaves.

In the next photo, you can see where I planted the Daikon radish and White Egg turnip. Those went on the outsides of the bed, leaving the middle for a spring sowing of probably pole beans. I’m planning to plant bush beans in the high raised bed.

In the last photo, the bed is mulched with leaves. Once again, the stakes and twine were left to mark where things were planted.

By this time, it was getting quite dark and it was time to stop for the day. The beds that I have winter sowing planned for in the main garden area are now done. In this area, there are still two beds that need to be cleaned up but, if necessary, that can wait until spring.

I did move my supplies over to the east garden beds. Two of those beds will get winter sowing, hopefully tomorrow afternoon, after I get back from the city. That will be the warmest part of the day. Those beds will get kohlrabi and cabbage sown into them, as those beds will be easier to cover with insect netting to protect from flea beetles and cabbage moths.

After that, I have one bed in the old kitchen garden that still needs to be harvested of alliums and Swiss Chard, and then I will be doing winter sowing in there and the wattle weave bed. The only other area that needs to be cleaned for winter sowing is the square bed off to the side of the main garden area that I’d grown the Albion Everbearing strawberries in, last year. The survivors got transplanted along the new asparagus bed, and I’ve decided the space may as well be used as a permanent poppy bed, since I expect those to self seed readily, and it can be treated as a perennial bed. However, if I run out of time to winter sow those, they can still be done very early in the spring.

So there we have it! Four more things winter sown for next year.

From the predictions I’m seeing, it’s supposed to be a mild winter, but other sources say a harsh winter. We shall see! Hopefully, the winter sowing will survive and we’ll have a head start to next year’s garden!

With how short our growing season is (I’m not counting on the newly revised averages yet), every little bit will help.

One of these years, I hope to get enough to actually can or freeze again! The last two years have been pretty brutal. If we depended on the garden for food at this point, we’d starve! :-D

Little by little, it’s getting done, and I’m feeling pretty good about it so far!

As long as the weather holds…

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: carrots, turnips and beets

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Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

This year was quite a mixed bag, when it came to our root vegetables!

Let’s start with the ones we had more success with. Carrots.

We planted 4 varieties of carrots in 2022. Two varieties were seeds left over from the year before, and one was included in a seed order as our free gift. The older seed got planted between tomatoes and onions/shallots in the low raised bed by the chain link fence. The new seeds were planted in a low raised bed in the main garden area, along with a couple of varieties of turnips.

The Results:

The old seed – Kyoto Red and Napoli – seemed to start out well enough, but like so many other things planted in this bed, they were affected by the flooding. Especially at the end near the vehicle gate, which is the lowest area.

Still, we did manage to get a small harvest of both. A couple of Kyoto Red (the darker carrots on the right) bolted, so I left them to go to seed, but they never finished blooming before it got too cold.

Then there were the Uzbek Golden carrots (the free seeds) and the Black Nebula carrots.

It’s hard to tell in the above photo, but we got a lot of Black Nebula carrots – and a surprising amount of Uzbek Golden carrots! The free seeds didn’t have a lot in the packages, so I was pleasantly surprised by the quantity that we harvested.

As you can also see in the above photo, the turnips didn’t do so well!

We planted three varieties of turnips. Gold Ball, Purple Prince and Tokyo Silky Sweet. One variety we got as free seeds, Gold Ball, were planted near the Uzbek Golden carrots, and then the Purple Prince you see in the photo were planted at the end of the same bed.

More of those, plus the Tokyo Silky Sweet, were planted in other beds, shared with onions, spinach, and peppers.

Those were a total loss!

The Gold Ball turnips germinated quickly – and were just as quickly completely destroyed! Something completely decimated their leaves. The Purple Prince also were badly eaten, but enough survived to get that tiny little crop you see in the picture.

In the other beds, I know I saw some start to germinate but they, too, promptly disappeared! A total and complete fail.

Finally, there were the beets. We had four varieties to plant. They went into a small bed in the old kitchen garden, protected by netting.

They, too, were a complete loss!

The Results:

They had a decent germination rate, but that’s about it. They barely grew at all. Eventually, we took the netting off and pretty much abandoned the bed, other than watering them and occasionally weeding out the mint that kept trying to take the bed over again.

When it was time to clean up the bed for next year, however, we did find a tiny, sad little crop!

That’s all we got.

This is the third year we’ve grown beets and have never had a really good crop, but this was by far the worst year. We can’t even blame it on things like deer and groundhogs eating them! Nor can we blame the flooding we had, because this garden is next to the house, and slightly elevated. There was no flooding in that garden, even with the sump pump’s hose ejecting into one of the paths. Everything drains away from the house. Even one of the bottom corners, which was near where water collected and formed a moat around the storage house, is elevated enough to not be affected by the flooding.

Conclusion:

With the carrots, things went pretty good, all things considered. For 2023, we will be trying a different variety of orange carrot, mostly because of how much the Napoli carrot seeds increased in cost. We enjoyed the flavour of all the carrots we grew, and I’ve ordered more Uzbek Golden carrots as well. I really like their nice, crisp texture.

As for the Black Nebula carrots, they are good, and I’m glad we tried them, but we won’t be growing them again; at least not any time soon. These are a very long carrot, and our soil compacts very quickly, which made thinning by harvesting pretty much impossible to do. When cooked on their own, their colour is very dramatic, but when cooked with something else, like in a soup or stew, their intense colour can make things look very… unappetizing! We still have lots, stored in a bin in a chilled location, and have discovered they very quickly become white, with capillary roots! It makes them look moldy. 😄 This isn’t a bad thing. Those little roots are collecting just enough moisture to keep the carrots firm and crisp, but they have SO MANY of these little roots, it actually makes it hard to clean the carrots in preparation for cooking.

So for 2023, we will still be growing carrots, but just two varieties.

As for the turnips… I don’t know that we’ll bother growing them again in 2023. When we do try them again, we will have to make sure that they are under floating row covers, as soon as the seeds have been sown. Turnip greens are supposed to be good for salads, too, but we never had a chance to find out if we liked them or not. I would have loved to try the Gold Ball variety. The main reason we wanted to grow turnips in the first place is because their bulbs are a good storage crop, making them something we want to include in our goals of self sufficiency. So we will definitely be trying them again. Just maybe not in 2023.

Finally, there are the beets.

I don’t know what went wrong with those. They should have done well, where they were. My daughters like beets, however, so we did order one variety to grow in 2023. I think we’ll have to be more selective on where we plant them.

Root vegetables are definitely going to continue to be a challenge for us, given what the soil it like here. It will take time – and more raised beds! – for us to amend the soil until root vegetables can reach their full potential. Which is something we’ve already been working on, and have long term plans for.

The Re-Farmer