Winterizing the Garden: Parsnip Harvest & My First Northern Watermelon

Hello there everyone and welcome to Little Mountain Ranch. If you are new here my name is Chelsea and if you've been here before welcome back to the garden. Today we are going to be doing some harvesting. We're going to harvest all of these parsnips that you can see behind me here. I think we're going to also harvest some beets, maybe some kale and a few other things. I'll also show you what I still have growing in my northern garden. We are in the central interior of British Columbia, Canada. We garden in a zone 3b with around 110 frost-free days. Although this year I think we're going to get upwards of 130 frost-free days which is kind of mind-blowing. We didn't have any frost in May. We have not had any frost yet and we are in the middle of September which is pretty unheard of for us. So the garden is looking much better this time of this year than it has in years past this time of year because everything is just still growing so beautifully. I even have green beans which is unbelievable. So anyway one of the other things that we're going to do is prep this bed for winter. So I'm going to show you how I do winter prep on my garden as I'm taking things out of the beds. Now keep in mind I do a no-till garden here so my garden is not getting tilled up in the spring. If you are tilling your garden you might have a different practice for preparing your garden for winter. But what I try to do is get every bed that I clear out ready to plant so that come spring I have very little work to do to be able to start planting right away. Because I don't know about you but here spring is so busy. I always have thousands of seedlings in my little greenhouse that I'm having to care for. All the animals are having babies on the farm. The snow is off the ground so all of a sudden we can get caught up on some of the work that needs to happen on the actual farm with fencing and things like that. So it is crazy busy. So the more work that I can do getting everything prepared in my garden this time of year the easier it is for me in the spring. Hi friends I'm just going to pop in here and share with you that our Ginger Burr Little Mountain Ranch tea towel is now available. I'm so excited about this. This tea towel is inspired by my garden this summer. We have dahlias, zinnia, beautiful squash and pumpkins along with lots of other produce that we have harvested together throughout the summer. All the colors are very autumn-esque and I absolutely love it. It was actually one of you that sent me my first ever Ginger Burr tea towel probably four or five years ago now. I fell in love with them then so to be able to be partnering with them to create a Little Mountain Ranch tea towel is a dream come true. I did want to let you know that last time we launched our tea towel it sold out extremely quickly so if you do want to grab one make sure you click the link below and then use the code AUTUMN10 for 10% off. So we're going to start by getting all of these roots dug out. I did a couple of test pulls on these roots in my last video and they are enormous. The reason that I'm going to pick them now rather than waiting for a couple of frosts is because they are so big and I don't want them to get woody. I did cook the two that I picked and they were perfectly fine but I'm concerned that if I leave them in the garden until we actually have a couple of frosts that they will end up getting woody and then the whole crop will be wasted. The reason that you want to wait till frost with a lot of root vegetables is because the frost signals to the plant to convert the starches into sugars and those sugars for whatever reason, I don't know the chemistry behind it, but help that root last throughout the winter and then be able to come up in the spring again and so it's better to wait until there's frost because then you get to benefit from the sweetness. However, when I ate these they were very plenty sweet, they weren't woody, they were kind of perfect so I've decided to just get this patch pulled out. So let's get started with that. I am going to be using a shovel to dig these out. Now it is recommended to use either a spade or like a garden pitchfork to loosen the soil so that you don't break off the roots. Some of these roots are up to two feet long so they do tend to break off in the soil. I'm not that concerned about it because I only planted enough for my daughter and I to enjoy probably for the next six to eight weeks so even if I break the ends off of these they're going to store down in my root cellar long enough for us to be able to enjoy them. We're the only ones that like parsnip so I'm not that concerned about breaking the ends off although I will try to be careful and dig down as far as I can so that I don't break off those roots but I'm just going to do the best I can and come what may. They are so deep down, oh my gosh. The good news is though is my soil is nice and loose so it's not going to be too hard to get them out. There we go, we got one and that's actually a really nice sized one. That's not nearly as big as the other ones that I picked the other day. One thing to keep in mind with parsnips is there is a chemical in the leaves of a parsnip that can burn your skin if you're handling it too much so I am going to pick all these and what I mean by handling it is if you squish it and then you get the juice all over your skin just touching it like this is fine. So once I get these all picked when I'm going to take the tops off I'll make sure that I put gloves on so I don't get those chemicals on my skin. Something else I'll say about parsnips and I'll show you this in a minute is that I do not recommend letting parsnips go to seed in your garden. Parsnips are biennials which means that they will send up their seed the second year so if I left these roots in the ground they would send up their seed stock next year. They produce thousands of seeds and they are very hardy even in our northern garden as I found out because I decided to learn all about seed saving with biennials and I didn't know that they would be invasive because most things are not invasive in our northern garden and oh shoot I just scraped off the side of that gigantic parsnip darn it. So a couple of years ago, oh my goodness that one is absolutely humongous, I decided to learn all about seed saving so I overwintered parsnips, carrots, beets, and a few other biennial plants. Oops I cut that one off with the shovel and shaved the side off of it. I guess we'll be eating that one today but look at how huge that is. Isn't that massive? I overwintered the root crops in my root cellar, brought them out in the spring, planted them, was very excited when they all sent up their seed. The parsnips were the most prolific shall we say. I've mentioned this quite a few times over the years but there's not a lot of plants that are invasive here in the north so it didn't even occur to me that I should be concerned about the amount of seed that my parsnips were dropping. Well I should have been because my parsnips seeded and I didn't stay on top of it during the next year so I had all these parsnips pop up and I was pretty excited about it. I didn't end up getting any good sized roots out of them so I just let them be and then those ones seeded the ones that had come up from the year before seeded and now I have probably a I don't know a thousand it looks like a thousand parsnips that come up every single year. Come on there buddy there we go. Every single year and well these ones are a little bit smaller so that's good. Every year out in my forest garden and I just weed whack them down because they don't develop into any good roots that I can actually dig up but they're everywhere over there so do be warned if you are going to let your parsnips go to seed in your garden that you make sure that you get all the seeds out and don't just leave them there to spread everywhere because they will. The other plant that I've found to be quite invasive is borage which is an herb I actually eradicated it out of my garden this year but it took six or seven years to actually get it from and it would it's a beautiful plant it's a really nice herb but it will spread everywhere all over the garden so yeah finally got on top of that one this year. There we go we have some really huge ones like this big one here and then we have some smaller ones like these ones in there but like I said it's only my daughter and I that like parsnips so we don't need to have a ton. This is a nice size for a parsnip. I probably could have left these another couple weeks but I really just didn't want to risk it and since the ones that I ate were good they were nice and sweet I think this will be fine. I got my carrots picked most of my carrots picked out of the main bed that's right beside us here yesterday and got three good size boxes out of there so that's really good. Well these are coming out nicely not a lot of issues with the roots breaking so that's awesome. I did make sure to water this bed nice and deeply a few days ago just to make sure that I could soften the soil and they're coming out pretty easy really. Oh got a funky one there. Okay I'm gonna pull these two sunflowers out here because they are pretty much spent and the birds have devoured the seeds on here so we'll get these out of the way. One of our little volunteer pumpkins there. There now we can see what we're doing. Now we are going to reshape this bed get it all raked smooth and then cover it with some weed barrier. The reason that I cover my freshly turned beds with weed barrier is because I have a mama hen and her 15 babies that have been living in the garden for the last three weeks. They're doing well and they're thriving so I don't want to kick them out just yet but if I leave the bed bare they will come and kick all the dirt out of it. So the first thing that we're going to do is cut it out and rake it smooth. I've got a bin that we will load all of those into and bring down to the root cellar but first I am going to finish this bed that I'm working on so that I can get it covered because the chickens have already been scoping it out. Okay so we're just going to snap off the tops throw these right in there and get them into the root cellar. I like adding parsnips into stew but my favorite way to have them is mashed sometimes with turnips sometimes with carrots and then with just some butter and salt and pepper maybe a little garlic they're so good. When you are putting root vegetables into storage try to get as much of the top off of it as you can because if you leave too much you can end up with getting some early sprouting in the late winter. All right I ended up with two nice bins of parsnips for the root cellar. I think what I'm going to do is grab the wheelbarrow to move all of this over to my compost pile because I don't want to be carrying it and getting that juice all over my arms so now I have to drag down my wheelbarrow but first let's run these down to the root cellar and I'll show you the carrots how many carrots we got out of the bed that is right beside this one which I have not winterized yet but here are our parsnips here that we just picked and we also have all of these potatoes in here these are the carrots that I picked yesterday so we got three good sized bins of carrots and some more potatoes over there so we have these three beds over here that have all been winter prepped I need to still cover these too but for whatever reason this was done about a week ago the chicks just haven't been digging around in those ones but I do like to cover soil anyway because the sun actually the uv from the sun can kill off a lot of that good bacteria that's in the top inch or two of the soil so it is better to cover soil if you can better than using the weed barrier is some type of natural mulch like leaf mulch is really ideal grass clippings as long as they don't have a ton of seeds in them is perfect because that also feeds the soil on top of keeping the soil protected I did have someone leave a comment either here on YouTube or over in my membership I can't remember which saying that they saw it recommended somewhere on a video on YouTube somewhere that if you have disease in your soil especially if it's things like powdery mildew or anything that's kind of that is spreads by spores leaving your soil uncovered and clean like this can actually the sun can sterilize the soil and kill off all those microbes the bad microbes that are in the soil so that might be something to consider do some more research into if you do have that kind of those kinds of issues in your soil I don't so it's not something that I worry about I more want to keep all those microbes nice and alive and happy in the soil so keeping it covered when I can is what I like to do there's a few more things that I often get comments on when I'm doing winter prep in my garden that I just wanted to address in the no-till gardening method a lot of people recommend cutting the plants off and leaving those the roots from the plants in the soil so that would be things like broccoli and cauliflower not things like root vegetables because you're obviously pulling those out by virtue of harvesting the root but because all of those roots and the bacteria that is the good bacteria that's around those roots helps to feed the soil and I think that can be good advice for plants that have root systems that would die within a season so things like lettuce what would be another example spinach trying to think about things that have shallow root systems that are fine there's not a lot of them actually that I personally grow most of what I grow like the that were in these three beds have fairly solid root balls and solid stalks so cutting them down it would make planting in that soil the following year fairly difficult because you'd be working around those roots that would take a couple of years I would guess to break down in the soil so that's just not something that I personally do for that reason one other thing that I often hear is to leave some leaf litter in your garden from your plants so that the beneficial the beneficial insects that lay eggs and or overwinter can have a place to do that you've probably seen that when people say don't rake the leaves up in your yard for that same reason I would counter that by saying that there's also a lot of harmful insects that can infiltrate your garden and then overwinter in that foliage if you choose to leave it so it's actually my preference to remove everything that has grown in the garden as much as I can and that it does go into my compost pile so I suppose there's an opportunity for things to overwinter there we don't usually turn our compost pile in the winter time but it's out of my main garden space and that's just my preference on the note of all the foliage and everything that I'm going to be removing out of my garden I'm only putting things in my compost pile that do not have disease so if you have foliage in your garden say powdery mildew would be a good example blight would be another good example you do not want to put that into your compost pile because that stuff can actually last in the soil for a really long time and you're basically inculcating your compost that you're going to put back on your garden in the spring with that disease and so that's not a good thing I don't have any disease in my garden this year I have a tiny little bit of powdery mildew in my high tunnel which just came on over the last couple of weeks but I won't be putting that into my compost pile but everything else that's in my garden is disease and bug free for the most part as I was heading down to the high tunnel to see there was some work that I wanted to do down there I walked past this disaster so this bed is at the end of the garden here and it was kind of hidden by all of the beautiful brassicas that were in front of it it has some beets some rutabagas and some turnips at the end but it also has a ton of weeds and I have a pretty strict rule that I try to abide by and that is to get all of the weeds that are going to go out to seed out of my garden this is mallow and it grows all over my garden it's actually edible parts of it are edible but it spreads like crazy and fortunately this one is just about to flower so it hasn't quite gone to seed yet but there is a ton of it in here I do have a row of weed barrier along the back part and my idea was that it was going to stop the grass from encroaching and it certainly did but I didn't weed the bed at all so it's an absolute mess so I think what we're going to do here is pull these beets out they're massive look at this I let these ones go way too long I never let my beets get this big but this because this bed was kind of hidden in behind out of sight out of mind I have the beets that I'm going to be using for my winter storage beets up in a different part of the garden these were supposed to be for early eating apparently I didn't do that however they are going to be just fine in things like beet borscht which is what I use a lot of my beets for so we will get these pulled out the cut the tops cut off we'll have to manually cut these ones off so we can get low enough down on the root to not have a lot of growth you can see there's all kinds of new growth coming out the side wow left those in way too long oh there are some smaller ones in there so that's good they're not all enormous oh boy oh no definitely let my turnips go too long too so we have turnips in here and over on this end we have rutabagas which are actually fine size-wise they could even stay in here for longer you really want to try to leave your rutabagas in until there's frost because it really does sweeten them up these ones are small enough I can do that but the turnips over here I didn't grow that many we should get these pulled out good grief these flowers are all volunteers in this bed as far as preservation I mostly keep my beets in the root cellar although I do pickle some I used to can them in water but once I got a root cellar it's just so much nicer to have them kind of fresh in soups and things like that so I don't do that anymore what else do I do that's about it so these will all be going into the root cellar although I do need to make myself a batch of borscht my favorite soup of all time is borscht so I'll use some of these bigger ones for that now let's head down to the high tunnel and I'm going to bring a knife with me because I have a watermelon down there that I think might be ripe so if you'll remember a couple weeks ago I picked my big giant watermelon that I had been growing all summer long in my high tunnel and cut into it only to find that it wasn't completely ripe which was really unfortunate I was disappointed but I do think we might have one down there that is ripe so many of you gave me lots of tips and suggestions on how to tell a watermelon's ripe and I think this one fits all of that criteria or most of it anyway it is most definitely time to get into the high tunnel and do some cleaning out a lot of these vines don't even have tomatoes on them it's not been a great year for tomatoes for me so I can start doing a little bit more of a paste clear out of my high tunnel normally what I do is as soon as we know we're going to get a frost I'll come in and pick all the tomatoes off and then pull out all the vines all at once because it looks like we're going to have at least two more weeks without frost which is just crazy that's going to bring us into the beginning of October wild but I can go just rip out everything that is not ready to go and crazy enough we're actually having tomatoes flower this time of year it's just wild but anyway I can just rip out everything here and then leave anything that's that has fruit on it to ripen on the vine I'll probably strip the majority of the leaves off of the plants as well just because they don't need them anymore and look at this I have some pepper plants over here that have decided they're now going to try to produce peppers there's no way they're going to have enough time to do anything so we'll probably go through here and get the majority of the peppers picked as well and then start cleaning out this bed and I basically do exactly the same thing as I do up there with one difference I always compost put a good layer of compost in my high tunnel to cover up the soil and also because this is a space that's not exposed to the air it's not getting rain water there's a lot of things that it's not getting that the soil outside is getting so I artificially feed it with good compost so that's kind of the only difference between the two I used to do compost in my garden both in the fall and in the spring but this last year I just changed it to the spring and my garden did great so I'm going to save myself that extra composting in the fall as well and just do it in the spring I can see I don't know if you guys can see that over there but there's this beautiful tomato that I've been waiting to have ripen all year so too bad I did gave my high tunnel a deep water a couple of days ago and I've been a little negligent with the care of my high tunnel I usually get that way towards the end of the season and it split that's really too bad but I wanted to try this one because I haven't grown this this tomato before and I was curious to see what it tasted like probably could have ripened for a little bit longer that is a delicious tomato wow this is a really acidic tomato and I actually like acidic tomatoes oh that's good I'll put the name of this on the screen for you but that's really tasty my goodness so this is kind of wild I have been harvesting off of the basil that you can see planted down over there I also have another patch over there lots of weeds in there right now too and so what I do when I harvest my basil is I'll go down close to the bottom and I'll harvest it just above where there's two new branches coming and then that causes more growth and in our short season where we don't get these big beautiful basil bushes that they seem to get in the south this is a really great way to get copious amounts of basil without that the advantage of all the heat that produces the big plants but it's been crazy because just now they're starting to bolt into the middle of September and I'm going to be able to do yet another harvest off of this I thought my last harvest would be the last but I'm going to get another entire harvest of basil and that's a good thing because I actually use basil probably more than any other culinary herb yeah just kind of a weird year but in a good way this has definitely been one of the most productive garden years I've ever had outside of the peppers and tomatoes so I'm not complaining my eucalyptus is doing great and it's going to be coming in the house probably in about two weeks time and I'll overwinter it inside we get down to negative 30 degrees sometimes even 40 in the winter time so there's no way that this is going to be able to overwinter in my high tunnel but I'm going to try to get it to overwinter inside all right here we are at my little patch of watermelons I have one watermelon down over here I'm going to leave that one because it's not quite ready but this watermelon that's back here is looking good so the vines are all starting to die back that's one thing that you guys told me is to wait till the vines start dying back to wait until this little curly Q thing that is close to the plant is fully dead when I picked my last one there still was a little bit of green and you guys all told me you wanted to wait until it was completely dry which this one is and then also I was told to pat on it like pat it and if it sounds hollow like that not knock on it like this but actually pat it and if it sounds hollow then it's good and then a lot of people also said wow it's really heavy for this tiny little watermelon and you also told me to not water it for about five to seven days before you pick it I was not able to do that because this is drip irrigation in here and it's all I guess I could have because it's on the end I guess I could have pulled the drip irrigation out but I didn't so it has had water um what was one of the other tips for the large kind of typical watermelons that you see in the grocery store they will develop a white bottom where it rests on the ground this is not one of those kinds of watermelons so I didn't need to watch for that I think that was it for tips so we're gonna cut into this baby and see wish me luck oh it's like cracking apart it's red smells sweet oh my goodness did I successfully grow a watermelon oh shoot one thing I am noticing right away but this could be the variety is that a lot of you said that if the seeds aren't black on the inside then it's not fully ripe these seeds are not they're kind of mixed there's some brown ones and some white ones but I have actually seen that in ripe store-bought watermelon so I don't know if that's entirely true but this feels ripe so let's cut off a piece that is the most delicious watermelon I have ever had in my life that's so awesome I'm not even a big watermelon fan and this is insane and you know what's really nice because it was cold last night this is really cold like it was in the fridge so but my goodness there is a lot of seed in that watermelon I'm definitely going to save the rest of this watermelon so that my family can try it because I'm so proud of it look at this dripping juice it's so good so now I'm wondering though if I should pick this one because it is also very heavy for the size that it is it's hollow sounding the the vines are also dying back but the stem itself wasn't it has a little bit more green on it than the than this one did this one was still green but it was starting to really dry out okay I don't know what to do here I think what I will do is just leave that one because this one is not ripe to the point that it would start rotting I could tell it could stay in here for probably another couple days especially because it's cool um so I'll leave that one we'll just eat this one and then we'll just come to pick this one fresh and eat it these ones were called cal suite by the way as far as the variety of these are but I feel like this is a huge win to have been able to grow watermelon in the north just I'm really excited about it I know the heat that we've had over the last six weeks has definitely helped but I am for sure going to try again I think what I am going to do is end this video on the high note of this amazing watermelon and I am going to do this project this evening when it cools off because it's actually quite warm out right now and quite hot in here and then I'll show you that I'll either bring the camera down and and do it with you or I'll show you in the next video when I have it all done but I think we're going to get a fair bit of food out of here I won't pick the peppers though until we can do that together because I know harvesting after watching me grow these all the way from when we started the seeds back in March till now it's kind of um not really fair if I don't share the actual harvest with you so I'll make sure that I do that but we'll definitely get these tomato plants a lot of these tomato plants hauled out of here