Fall Harvest

After our first Virginia spring/summer/fall, we learned several lessons about growing fruits and vegetables in this humid subtropical climate zone.

 

First and foremost, bugs. Every single type.

Second, mushy and wet with no drainage.

Third, it gets HOT and sticky.

Fourth, rabbits are not your friends.

Fifth, plant early in the season or start seeds indoors.

 

We pulled up the last of the rainbow carrots. They tasted very woody and starchy, so we cut them up into tiny pieces and froze them for use in stir fry. They turned out to be a good filler ingredient.

 

We had terrible luck with our strawberries. They had great flavor, but they just never produced significant fruit. What little fruit we did get turned out very small and seedy.

 

Finally, on to the yams - the crop that did not yield to bugs, rabbits, heat, or swampy conditions. Let's just say that we reaped way more than we thought was sowed.

My grandfather warned us to be careful of yams, as they might take over if we're not careful. We heeded the warning and only planted two or three little plants.

Little plants became very aggressive and overwhelmingly extensive plants. Yam shoots can be trained, though, as I discovered. If they're going in an undesired direction, simply point them in a new direction, and they will go that direction forever until redirected or killed. As a result of dozens of re-directs, we ended up with the above intermingled mess - which also subsequently yielded a couple dozen yams.

That one looks like a large naked mole.

 

 

Our raised beds were only 8 inches deep, but we found an awfully large set of yams beneath the soil. The one pictured above weighed several pounds.

 

 

 This was only half to two-thirds of the crop, as we went back a week or two later to pull up the rest.

 

 

Once they were washed off, Sarah came in to inspect and QA each one.

 

 

Yams have to sit in a root cellar type of environment for 6-8 weeks after picking in order to become viable as food. Otherwise, the physical and nutritional composition is apparently not very palatable. We thought that our laundry room was an adequate cellar. They should be ready by Thanksgiving.

 

 

We also harvested our peanuts. Thanks, Richard, for the cool idea! One of the plants didn't make it, but the other one yielded 42 genuine Jumbo Virginia peanuts. 42 doesn't seem like a whole lot from the picture, but it is when it's your first time. Man, I felt like George Washington Carver himself!

 

 After drying the peanuts in a mesh laundry bag in our "root cellar" for a few weeks, I oiled, salted, and baked them for half an hour at 350. And wouldn't you know: they tasted like real roasted peanuts! They even looked like real roasted peanuts!

 

Finally, it was time to clear out the overgrowth of yams, etc. and let the Fall garden do whatever it had left to do before winter set in.

 

 To recap-

Forces of good: us.

Forces of evil: bugs and rabbits. And sometimes water.