I spend too much time every summer trying to get clear pictures of bumble bees. They love the onion flowers, so it’s a good way to attract them to the garden!

That’s what we pulled today!

I’m hosting a baby shower tomorrow, so the dill went in the potato salad and the radishes are cleaned and ready to eat!

I planted four different varieties of radish. Even with the hot weather earlier this month they aren’t very spicy. A few are a bit too large, and there are a lot more where these came from!

Broccoli and zucchini are next, within the week!

Onions are biennial plants, which means the first year they make bulbs (which you typically eat). If you don’t harvest onions the first year, they will come back the second year and go to seed (flower).

Last year we missed quite a few onions, and I transplanted them into the back of my perennial herb and flower beds. They are now as tall as I am, and just starting to flower!

I think our crawl space is too warm to over-winter potatoes for seeding.

Chris planted them anyway today. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens!

I used up the last of our red cabbage and onions the other week. We still have nearly an entire crisper drawer in the fridge full of carrots, which are surprisingly still crispy – and delicious! We have a grocery bag of them in the garage too – since they are frozen they aren’t good for eating raw, but they do work well in soups. We need to figure out a better storage method for carrots this year. We do have a second refrigerator in the garage, but I don’t know if we’ll have enough extra food to justify turning it on.

We still have quite a few potatoes, but even keeping them covered in the cool crawl space didn’t prevent them from sprouting. Chris is planning on planting them this year, so they won’t be wasted.

We’ve spent much of the weekend outside, working on cleaning up the yard and garden before it snows. I finally picked all of the carrots and onions, and they are stored for winter. The soil at our old house was mostly clay, so we’ve never had much luck with root crops. Now, we live on the “Anoka County Sand Plain” and the the root crops did well this year. The addition of compost helped a lot. We’re considering getting another load year but haven’t decided yet.

I should have picked the onions a while back, as they died off mid-summer and some were starting to grow shoots again. We go through a lot of onions in our house though, so I’m sure we’ll use those before they go bad. These were just the standard red, yellow, and white sets you pick up at any local garden store. One of the things I’d like to do next year is spend some time finding good varieties of onions that store well.

Now that it’s November, we’ve actually been gardening.

Actually, Chris dug up his potatoes the other week, and they are stored for the winter in our crawl space under the steps/pantry. There are two bread racks full – hopefully they will stay cool and dark enough to last through the winter.

He grew red, blue, and white varieties. The red don’t store as long, so we’re using them first.

Today we spent most of the day outside cleaning up the garden for the winter. I pulled a lot of onions and carrots out of the ground, and hope to have time over the next few days to post some more photos.

The carrots are ready!

Just in time for my kitchen remodel, too. Fortunately, I should be able leave these in the ground until it freezes and they will keep on growing, and be just fine. I think carrot soup (in a crock pot) would be an easy meal to make without a kitchen – though that requires a food processor and I’m just not sure if I’m up for washing that in the laundry tub.

We have about one full month without a kitchen sink (or countertops). Cooking is going to get very creative now… and I think I’ll be taking some veggies over to my mom’s house to prepare for freezing!

Flowering Onion (click for a close-up)

We’ve never had much luck growing onions or other root crops.

In Morris, our soil was too heavy, and root crops were leafy at best. We ate a lot of beet greens, actually! When we moved to the “Great Anoka Sand Plain,” I was excited to see how our carrots, onions, and potatoes would turn out.

So I’ve been busy this spring and my garden plot and seedlings aren’t what I pictured before we started this year. But thats ok. You can see the row I’ve had planted for quite a while.