Grow your own groceries! A bountiful Thanksgiving Day Harvest

Hey, it's Peter with The Garden Family and Hilary and it's Thanksgiving today and we are going to do the last harvest of the year. It's supposed to be in the teens coming up here so pretty much the end of the garden season but we actually have some great vegetables. This is the latest we've had vegetables in the garden so come along on a Thanksgiving harvest. This is our first year growing brussel sprouts and I'm excited because brussel sprouts are one of my favorite side dishes to cook and serve on Thanksgiving so we're actually harvesting these plants on Thanksgiving to serve tonight. It's pretty heavy stuff. I don't think I can do that. Maybe I'll take it. I think it would need a different person a little more strength. All right oh my gosh look how great these look. Wow those look awesome. Let's get the other one. All right here we go. Big reveal. Wow these look so good. These ones are too old so we could have harvested these and just had a smaller harvest but you can see all these are tight kind of like a tight cabbage. They look really good. All right so as far as look how great these look. As far as timing of these I think I started these in June indoors. He planted them out I think late July here and so now it's November 28th. I think we got the timing right. These look so good. These right here are storage number four cabbages. This is the first time we've grown a dedicated storage cabbage. They're longer to maturity than normal cabbage so I planted them when we planted the brussel sprouts so 100 days to maturity. These heads feel really good kind of rock hard. So let's see what these cabbage look like. There's one right there that looks amazing. Get these other out of here too. You can't feel through the video but this cabbage is the hardest cabbage I've ever felt. Hilary come feel how hard this cabbage is. Oh my gosh. I mean I guess that's why they store so well. So we'll see. Supposedly they store for a few months just in the cellar. And we are also going to harvest purple cauliflower, white cauliflower. Purple is of course my favorite. So interesting thing about the cauliflower even though the days to the maturity were about the same as the broccoli these matured a lot later. This one's probably just a little past its prime. If we look right here you can see some of the florets are starting to separate apart but it'll still be great. A few more of these. This one's a little bit smaller probably could use more time but with those temperatures in the teens it's really we just got to get these out of here. These can withstand temperatures kind of mid-20s usually without protection but once it gets into the teens pretty much everything's done. The white variety we grew is amazing is the variety. I've been pretty happy with it. We harvested most of the white cauliflower. You can see one of those things on there. These guys are surprisingly resilient. One of the little cabbage worms. Surprisingly they stay alive even after a frost. So if you can grow cauliflower you're probably also going to have these guys. And then just one last variety. It was quicker to mature so it's kind of past its prime. This is the last variety we grew in the fall. This one was called clementine and again you can see the head starting to pull apart there. So we probably should have harvested this a few weeks ago but it'll still be tasty. Look at the size of these cauliflower. This is the variety lavender by Johnny Seeds. I'm not sure if you can see it compared to my head. These things are heavy. I think we're going to be giving some cauliflower away. But wait there's more. Whoa look how big that is. This is definitely the best fall that we have had. One might be bigger than the other ones. So the broccoli we actually harvested starting about a month ago actually. So if you look in here at this broccoli this was where we harvested the main head of broccoli. And then this is actually just a side shoot. You can see that side shoot's actually a decent head of broccoli. And we also grew fall carrots. We grew spring carrots and didn't really think they turned out very well so we wanted to try round two. So let's see. Look at that perfect little carrot. Those look great. Yeah we harvested, sorry we sowed these somewhere in I think in August but in retrospect we would have done it a few weeks earlier. Those are gonna be great though. I think they're gonna be beautiful especially perfectly roasted with some parsley. Oh look how gorgeous they are. Oh all right let's talk about beets. We actually didn't grow fall beets. We grew spring beets and we didn't eat very many of them. So wait till you see the size of these beets. All right here's one beet. Oh it probably weighs 20 pounds. Oh all right there's a beet right here. It's very heavy probably a little woody. Let's actually cut into it see what it looks like. I don't think we'll eat this one but I'm interested if I can actually cut through it. All right moment of truth here. Whoa wow look how crazy that looks. I do think that area where it's whiter though that that area is probably not quite as good to eat. You can at least try it. Let's see. It actually sounds kind of crispy though. It's actually pretty good. But we got smaller ones we'll probably eat those instead. It's our first year growing celery and I think we probably should have harvested a while ago. We planted it actually this is spring or a little after spring planted celery. But what I found is even though these outer layers if you kind of look in here these outer layers have gone bad as the weather has cooled these inner layers are actually looking really good. So it's almost like it started over. You can see there's almost like a small extra celery coming out of here. So let's see what happens if I. Wow that is crazy look how big this thing is. That's one celery plant. Wow let's just take a closer look at this. So basically there's the original plant in here. Those actually look fine too. Maybe they'll be a little tough you can kind of see that in there. But then it sprouted all of these extra plants off of it. So we've got three of these. If you're in the area and you need celery. For herbs we have this beautiful looking parsley here. Some of these outer leaves you can see they're just starting to get a little older. But what I'll do is I'm just going to bunch up a bunch of leaves in the middle like that. Cut those off. Now we've got some nice parsley. Parsley is pretty hardy but I do think it's probably not going to make it in the teens. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to harvest this as well. I'll leave the plants in the ground and then we'll see. I might cover them with some some leaves there. Here's another great bunch of parsley. Parsley. And here's our dinosaur kale. This year it's done really really well. We've grown it before and it often does very well in the cold like the parsley but we're not sure it's going to last in the teens. So we're going to harvest the outer leaves and keep the plant and see how it fares next week. So the garlic was planted end of October. Hello hello. And we've had such a warm fall that we've had a pretty decent amount of garlic growth. You always get a little bit before it goes to sleep for the winter but this is a pretty decent amount. So I'm actually going to put a row cover on here. You getting cold buddy? I'm going to put a row cover on here and put just a little bit more leaves over these just because it's going from really relatively warm for this time of year all the way quickly to the teens and that in theory could cause the garlic to get some cold damage. Well I hope you enjoyed our Thanksgiving harvest. This is really the end of the 2024 garden and thanks for everyone who's watched our channel. If you're not a subscriber consider subscribing. We've got a lot of work to do. It's Thanksgiving. We've got to start cooking a lot. I need to go cook. All right well happy Thanksgiving everyone and happy gardening.