How About Green Friday?
Harris Model Parsnip in bloom. June 17, 2011
I don’t know about you, but I miss my garden, well, actually my summer garden. Going through the photo archives for my Thanksgiving menu post, made me long for those summer days of dirty knees, and sweat running down my back. These days it’s full rain gear for garden harvesting and the conditions do not want to make me linger in the garden any longer than necessary.
I have been poring over my garden and harvest notes and making plans. I know, I must be crazy, but seed catalogs have already been coming in, so I did what any obsessive gardener would do…I’ve already started ordering seeds!
I’m not much of a shopper, especially the Black Friday hype type of stuff. Now if the feedstore had a sale tomorrow I might consider going to town, but otherwise forget it. But I have a quiet plea, all you budding (pun intended) gardeners/farmsteaders out there. Think green (as in gardening) tomorrow and start planning your garden and peruse some online seed catalogs if your mailbox hasn’t yielded any hard copies yet.
What I dream think about for my garden next year:
Did we eat what I grew?
Did it grow well? If it didn’t, was it my fault, the seed quality, weather, or a plant not suited to my climate or skill set.
Did I grow too much, not enough?
What new things do I want to try?
I can’t wait for spring!
And here’s what I’m listening to while dreaming of my garden, sorry Aerosmith, but you have to admit this is pretty cool.
Throwback at Trapper Creek 
Talk about obsessive: I’ve been planning and thinking about my garden for weeks now. My seeds are ordered and my next year’s garden planting schedule and layout are nearly finished. I know I’ll keep thinking about it over the winter which is why I’m also planning a local seed swap in February for any late minute add-ins 😉
I had to laugh, because my feed store DOES have a sale today, and it’s the only shopping on my list!
Tis the mud season here. I am wondering if the weather of the past couple of years is what we should be expecting for the next few years? I think I will look at shorter season crops for next year. We have not been seeing much spring and the fall rains have been moving in a bit early here in the gorge.
Oh yeah, great music, I have been listening to Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo.
Nice interpretation of a good song. Thanks!
Really enjoyed listening to David Garrett can understand how you would like to listen to him while working in the garden. This is the first time I heard of David Garrett and will go buy the C.D.
This black friday hype has been driving me nuts, just listening to people talk about their spendings but then I sit back and think about how I found about 150 dollars worth of seeds I wanted to buy for next year and then I kind of stop myself from verbally verifying they are nuts! Instead of standing in line last night, I was able to come out into my village full of pots and look at my mini-garden! I live in Arizona so my growing season is still extended so I’m watching my tomatoes grow ever so slowly but they’re beautiful and will be so worth the wait!
It’s so nice to think of black friday as green friday! I’ll now dub my friday after Thanksgiving green friday.
We didn’t do much of a garden this year because I was pregnant with twins (we lost them in August), and looking back I kind of regret not going bigger. We came home last night to find our greenhouse kit (plastic, lots of velcro, over a metal tube frame) came unpinned and rolled across the yard in the wind. Even with pinning it down, I awoke this morning to find it cattywampus in the garden, on its side. It’s time to take it down, clean it for next year, and start planning a better garden harvest!
Amy, so sorry to hear about the babes 😦
I hear you on planning for next year, I’m just hoping for a mild winter, at this point I don’t even care if it rains all the time, I just don’t want snow!
I miss last year’s garden, which was great, not this year’s which sucked. I neglected it in order to get a chicken coop frantically built (who knew New Hampshire Reds were bred for early maturity? Not me!). Then the day after I finished the coop and got the pullets in there, I started a new job after being unemployed for almost two years. Then all the pullets turned out to be cockerels, every last darn one of them, so they went down to Colton to live for another six weeks before they got turned into dinners. Then this fall all my bees died. Not sure why, but I think it might be that they starved to death because there was zero honey in the hive.
So no garden, no hens, and no bees. Not a great homesteading year. Next year has to be better.
how did your parsnip seed turn out? whats your take on the lancer or cobham varieties?
Ben, it turned out great, I grew out Harris model and it does really well here. I’m working on Turga now, it has big shoulders and it seems to put on more parsnip than the slim store type varieties. I’m after fodder for the milk cow, so a bigger shouldered root is fine with me, easier to dig too. They taste fine and aren’t punky at all, so I think it is just one of the those produce aisle mental images we have been trained to see as “bad.” There is a commercial vegetable farm not too far from here, between us and Gresham, and you should see the mountains of cull parsnips in their fields, not uniform so they just get turned into fertilizer. Sad commentary when people are hungry.
I was thinking of trying Lancer, even though I know better, those long slim roots are attractive 🙂
where was your original seed from?
Ben, Fedco for the Harris Model, and I have Turga from Seeds of Change and Turtle Tree.