Harvest 

Hey! We grow a lot of our produce and when it starts snowing and freezing we get in a hurry to harvest it. The past two days were dedicated to harvesting and it got to freezing temperatures, so we we were glad to get it done. 

Two days ago we harvested our arugula, carrots, beets, kale, rutabagas, cabbage (we already had done our rhubarb). And yesterday we did potatoes and flowers. 

Potatoes are mostly mine, my dad's, and my little sister's job. It's a very cold job so I dressed in leggings with wool socks and pants over them, a short sleeve shirt with sweatshirt, beanie, and work gloves. 

Dad gets the pitchfork and crates and basically he digs around the plants, we lift it up, and dig out the potatoes with our hands. It doesn't take a ton of time, but it gets really cold on your fingers. I mostly dug the potatoes out and handed them to my sister who put them in the crate. We had put the potatoes in a new plot and they didn't do so well because they didn't have a lot of sun. Our reds don't usually do as good as our Yukon's but this year they did a ton better. It was a pretty disappointing harvest. 

With arugula we had to pull it up, pick the leaves off (and some seed pods) and throw the stalks into the wheelbarrow

With the kale, mom would go through and pick the leaves and I would pull up the stalks (which are really tough and big), beets she would pull them up and I would hold them while she cut the stems off, carrots you just pull up, cabbage is basically the same, rutabagas are like potatoes, and flowers mom just does by herself. 

It's a lot of work but great reward. That night mom made Borscht (Russian beet soup) with our extremely fresh beets and it was delicious! 

I will post pictures later!