In which our Thanksgiving dinner happens mostly in our own backyard

Thanksgiving is special here at Haiku Farm. 

Almost everything on the plate is home-grown

There are only a few ingredients we don't/can't grow here.  

The veg that we roasted for the feast:  apples, garlic, parsnips, butternut squash, carrots, leeks, sweet potatoes (purple and orange) and a few baby brussels sprouts.

We don't currently grow sweet potatoes, for example, but I'm signed up for a class in January that will teach the skills so I can try!  It's likely that my favorite Korean purple sweet potatoes will always be an exotic.  And the wheat flour for the bread, though grown and milled locally, is probably not a crop I will ever pursue.

However, the vast majority of stuff on the table is stuff we grow here.  I figured that today, while I'm still replete from a few days of feasting, I would make a planting and harvesting calendar of our ingredients.

Plant in Fall:

Garlic.  I've already written about growing garlic in a post HERE.  I try (not always successfully) to plant the garlic around Hallowe'en each year, but as our fall weather gets increasingly warm, I notice that my planting date is getting later and later each year.  Garlic is a very slow-growing crop:  I plant in October or November and usually harvest in July.  Then the curing of the bulbs takes another month or two--although you can absolutely eat the un-cured fresh garlic and we absolutely always do!

The garlic curing makes the greenhouse smell like an Italian restaurant

Onions can be planted in fall (as sets, not seed) but I usually prefer to buy onion sets for spring planting.  I haven't (yet) been successful growing onions from seed, but I might try that next year.  

Plant in Winter:

Brussels sprouts - my seeds were planted indoors on February 3rd.  We didn't have a super-hot summer this year, which can cause Brussels sprouts and other brassicas to bolt, but I might try planting them directly into the garden in late summer next year as a follow-on crop after something that finishes early, like peas or spinach, just to avoid that issue. 

I'm not a huge fan of Brussels sprouts but my mom loves them
and it's nice to make a treat for her on Thanksgiving.  

Leeks  -  my records say that I planted leek seeds into plug trays indoors on February 3rd.  In theory, they transplant out when they are about pencil-size, but in reality I put them out into the garden in mid-April no matter what. As I recall, the plants were more thread-like than pencil-like, and they grew just fine.

Leeks are left in the garden until we're ready to eat them starting in October.

Plant in Spring:

Beans - This year I tried starting bean plants indoors to see if I could get an earlier crop, and found very little difference.  Planting them directly in mid-May is fine, no need to faff around and make extra work!  Each spring I wonder if growing green beans to can and dried beans for soup is worth the extra effort, and then we eat them in the middle of winter and the answer is yes.

Truthfully, the electronic pressure-canner I bought in 2021 takes most 
of the work out of canning beans.

Parsnips - These (even more than carrots) are a bugger to get germinating, and the seed must be VERY FRESH.  Two year old parsnip seed is a waste of time.  I planted mine in early April, and I leave them in the ground until the day I want to cook them--getting a good strong frost will convert the starches to sugar and make them very sweet, so we eat parsnips starting in November.

They are not all this monstrous. 

Potatoes  -  I'm underwhelmed with the harvests I usually get from red, white, and brown conventional potatoes, but I'm thrilled with the productivity of my Makah Ozette potatoes.  Fingerling potatoes in general tend to be prolific, but these grow especially well--and they make amazing mashed potatoes, especially when cooked and mashed together with parsnip.

Unlike most fingerling-type potatoes, this variety keeps really well in a cool dry place

Plant in Summer:

Butternut squash -I This year I planted "Honeynut" a stable cultivar of butternut, and it was SO SLOW.  I was afraid I wouldn't get any squash at all.  The flowering was late, and baby squashes didn't start appearing until the end of August and I had to harvest before most had developed a rind so they won't keep for months.  I'm going to try a different variety next year.  

This photo from October shows carrots and an (unripe) squash before we made them
into a very delicious soup.

Carrots - Conventional wisdom (and the seed packet) says to plant carrots in Spring.  However, after years of failure-to-germinate crops, I discovered that the secret to growing carrots here in my Swamp is to wait to plant until the soil is actually warm.  This year I planted carrots in July, using the ground freed-up when I pulled out the finished pea plants.  The carrots germinated promptly, and now I go pull out a few whenever I want some.  They will grow slowly now that the ground is cold again.

Perennials:

Apples for pie or roast veg dishes grow on the trees that (mostly) came with the house.  In recent years we've added a few new fruit trees including a memorial apple tree for Roo.  

We don't know the real variety name for this apple.  We call it the AQT tree
because the apples are usually ugly but are Actually Quite Tasty.

Cranberries & Lingonberries - I haven't harvested more than a few cranberries from our plants so far because they were absolutely not thriving in the spot where I planted them.  This fall I moved them and added more ericaceous (acid) soil amendments, which should make them happier. 

Lingonberries and cranberries like the same conditions as blueberry plants,
and we definitely know how to grow blueberries!

Then of course, there is the star of the show:

The turkey.

We get them as 3-day old poults in May, and raise them
to maturity in a specially-built pen.

We don't want to grow much meat here on our farm. 

Each year we buy 1/4 of a cow (butchered, wrapped and frozen) from our friend Ryan's family in Eastern Washington.  We buy salmon from locals out on the Tulalip reservation or out of the back of trucks parked by the side of the road (this is legit how I was raised to buy fish).  

We will occasionally harvest a Bad Rooster.

This guy was a bully and a sexual predator...and he was delicious.

Growing turkeys is a PITA.  

They aren't cheap to feed, are so dumb that they need their own pen that has everything but padded walls to keep them safe and alive, and the Broad-Breasted White variety (all that was available to raise this year because of bird flu losses at hatcheries) are so prone to heart problems that you cannot delay the harvest date because they will suffer needlessly if left alive too long.

But since Thanksgiving meals are special, I guess we'll keep growing a few birds each year.  

They are, after all, delicious.