What are you eating from your garden in December

[featherstick]

Back on-topic. I grew Oca this year for the first time. Easy to grow, no pests, very dense foliage that keeps the weeds down, no trouble at all, lovely big tubers off the plants.

Doesn't taste very nice though and I'm having to disguise it in stews and mashed potato. The flavour is described as "citrus", but it seemed more "cheesy" to me, enough to put the kids off although I dare say I could get used to it.

[Decaff]

Back on-topic. I grew Oca this year for the first time. Easy to grow, no pests, very dense foliage that keeps the weeds down, no trouble at all, lovely big tubers off the plants.

Doesn't taste very nice though and I'm having to disguise it in stews and mashed potato. The flavour is described as "citrus", but it seemed more "cheesy" to me, enough to put the kids off although I dare say I could get used to it.

I haven't heard of this before, just looked it up and the tubers look like pigs in blankets!!

[featherstick]

Back on-topic. I grew Oca this year for the first time. Easy to grow, no pests, very dense foliage that keeps the weeds down, no trouble at all, lovely big tubers off the plants.

Doesn't taste very nice though and I'm having to disguise it in stews and mashed potato. The flavour is described as "citrus", but it seemed more "cheesy" to me, enough to put the kids off although I dare say I could get used to it.

I haven't heard of this before, just looked it up and the tubers look like pigs in blankets!!

I told The Boy they were space aliens and he STILL wouldn't eat them!

[jansman]

It is good to grow new things though. Unless you try, you don't know if you like it.

[featherstick]

Unless you try, you don't know if you like it.

I told him that too.....

I've resorted to hiding them in shepherd's pie and leek-and-"potato" soup : )

[Cernunnos]

No longer December, but I still have a row of sprouts, which grew like the devil this year,but I love sprouts so am well pleased with them. My chickens got into my cabbage when I was out for the whole day,something I rarely do, but they made the most of it and went through the lot.I still have a few jars of honey and various jams.and a few carrots,onions. But I have to admit, if it was a SHTF scenario, I would now be going rather hungry.

[featherstick]

Cernunnos I dubt many people could feed themselves and their family from their garden under present circumstances. My allotment is more of a training ground where I can practice skills, try out certain approaches, and learn about pitfalls. As well as that it represents a potential resource of seeds and tubers for propagation post-Fall. There would still be a very hungry first year after TSHTF until I got the first crop of potatoes out of the ground, and they'd be boring too without all the industrial butter, cheese etc. we are used to putting on them. But I'm happy I have the space and the time. As well as being a prep, it's where I go to "breathe", if you know what I mean.

[jansman]

I agree, I do not think you can feed yourself from a garden. An allotment or two could provide you with enough spuds, beans (dried) and greens. But it does take work. My own efforts can provide some fresh food for one meal per day. Tonight for instance, we had fish in a chilli sauce with rice and salad. The chilli was grown in the Summer and dried, and the salad came from the polytunnel.
A major calorie provider for us is white rice. It is cheap and stores easily and well. One half pint mug of dry rice is more than enough when cooked for three of us. Shtf, rice supplemented with greens and whatever meat or fish you may have(or dried beans) would be a real gameplayer I reckon. After all , rice feeds half the world.
This is why I think a vegetable garden, no matter how small, is so valuable as a preparedness asset.

[featherstick]

I forgot the squash!

We grew onion squash and some Crown Prince this year. We finished the onion squash in December, and some if it was going mouldy. Crown Prince are great keepers though and I have several left from the allotment, plus three that I grew in the back garden away from any other squash. The drawback is that Crown Prince is a hybrid, and to get Crown Prince you need to cross two "parent" squash every year. However the ones in the back garden are F2, the offspring of two F1 parents, and they have bred true, so I will keep them going for a few generations to see whether I get a strain of Crown-Prince-type squash that breeds true, which I can then launch on the seed networks. I would be very happy if I could do that!

[TwoDo]

However the ones in the back garden are F2, the offspring of two F1 parents, and they have bred true.

It is often the case that F1 Hybrids will breed true. The frequent prohibitions to "never save seed from F1 plants" are basically a bit of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) on the part of the seed companies who want you back to buy new seeds every year.

Carole Deppe in her book "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmers Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving" has an extensive discussion of this. Lots of times the F2 generation will breed mostly true and if you rouge them strictly you can have the line entirely true in a few generations. Also lots of times seed companies claim they are F1 hybrids when the actually are not in order to inhibit you from saving the seed. I strongly suspect this is the case for Crown Prince squash which has also bred true in the F1 generation for me.

Also, and this is an important point, why should an amateur grower care if the veggies breed true? It really matters for professional growers - a farmer with 10 acres of squash needs them all identical otherwise he cannot sell them. An amateur grower who consumes their own produce can stand to have a bit of variety and variation in the output - it really doesn't matter that much. In fact you can introduce new varieties at random into the line and if you choose the best varieties from each season to plant in the following year you will eventually develop a locally adapted cultivar - a landrace finely tuned to your soil and climate. A guy called Joseph Lofthouse, who's work I much admire, has this down to a fine art.

Josephs policy is to just plant everything he can find, let them all mix together and then keep breeding from the ones that succeed. In this way he has developed some very robust varieties of crops which will grow in his climate (Utah) where nothing else of that type will. His policy is that, F1 or not, they are all just "genes" and any variety which is sufficiently successful to be sold probably has some good ones he can add to the melting pot.

I have given up worrying about purity and am attempting to produce reliable landraces of various vegetable varieties adapted for my local climate.

Here's some of Joseph's articles it is suggested you sort by the oldest and work your way down.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/search.a ... +Lofthouse