Greens 1/58 Acre is the Place for Me.
Gray days of steady rain used to find me wringing my hands and popping antidepressants like Tic Tacs.
No longer!
Not since I became a farmer.
I love the plentiful water for my plants but more than that I love a vigorous hoeing made so much easier after a few days of rain.
And that’s what I did yesterday.
A month ago, I planted my seeds.
After a week of rain, no need for a tiller. Soil beggin' to be turnt up. Fall #garden #collards #turnips #canofcorn pic.twitter.com/JE6eIo9x0T
— Jamie Miles (@SouthMainMuse) October 3, 2015
Collard, kale and turnip by seed. I transplanted broccoli and lettuce.
I saw the photo below in the October Southern Living. Bully’s, a Jackson, Mississippi, restaurant has a greens vegetable plate. Looking at the pic, I correctly identified the cooked greens. Turnips/mustards, collards and cabbage.
Can I do it in the garden? Identify the juvenile, as opposed to the preteen, collards from the turnips from the kale. Can you?
Here’s my collards, turnip greens and kale — and a few radishes — after a good hoe.
Well, I can tell one from the other because I planted the rows. Even armed with that knowledge, a few weeks ago I wasn’t sure what was a turnip and what was a weed. Which was nice because I didn’t worry about hoeing. Us farmers know to wait till the vegetable gets big enough to tell whether it’s a weed. You don’t want to decimate a teensy collard thinking it’s a wee dandelion.
Hopefully a month from now my greens — all types — will be mature and ready to simmer with bacon, drop in soups, make into chips or toss in a salad.
The radishes weren’t ready either. I pulled some up today and inspected their progress. Only the size of a healthy English pea, I stuck my finger in the soil making a hole and tucked the red root back in its dirt womb.
Hope that works. Or I just screwed up two of my radishes.
Will write about my affection for radishes later.
Yep. It’s hard to tell one green from another till they get bigger. That’s what I’m waiting on now. Growth.
Should I thin the plants? Probably. Will I?
Don’t know. If I do, it will be the collards.
All this is second hand to us farmers. Probably seems a little confusing to you.
That’s okay. Greens are one of the only things I’m pretty certain about these days.
How do you like to cook greens?
Like put it in a smoothie or something, I bet.
I WISH my summer garden had turned out better. I had thoughts of a fall garden, but this pregnancy has done a toll on me. (I love sauteing greens!)
Yes. So yummy sautéed with a little garlic. Congrats on expecting the newest McKee! Planting is one thing, but another year when you have the time — greens are effortless. They last through most freezes and when the cold hits the weeds slow down too.
Sometimes I play around with becoming a farmer, life off of the grid and time to write.
But something tells me my idea is far different from the reality.
I’ve wondered if I could have been a farmer. The ups and downs. At the mercy of the weather and pests. Maybe landscape architecture a safer bet?