Winters Past

The neighbor’s sheep have been getting into our trees across the creek for a couple of weeks now. They don’t seem to be causing any trouble, but the last thing I need right now is a bunch of sheep deciding to go across the creek and getting into the vegetables. This week, I finally got tired of waiting for the neighbor to fix the hole they have worn in the fence, and climbed over a different fence and jumped across the creek to see what it would take to make the needed repairs. The problem, of course, is in an inaccessible, rocky, and brushy part of the fenceline, so it won’t be particularly easy; then again, neither will dealing with sheep in my vegetables, so we’ll get it done.

The neighbor’s sheep live on the “other” eighty acres that made up the original 160-acre homestead that included our farm. When the Kjome family moved here back in the mid-1800’s, they got here too late to build a house, and lived under a rock outcropping that first winter.

It all got me to thinking about how things have changed since then, especially (of course) when it comes to the food we eat in the winter. Of course, Nils Kjome couldn’t have imagined that someday it might be possible to get raspberries from Chile for the Christmas feast, but some of the other changes are more subtle.

Most – if not all – of the root crops that we eat today came from the Old World. (Potatoes, which come from the New World, are not, technically, a root crop.) Compared to the Old World grain crops like oats, wheat, and barley, roots like turnips and beets were relatively easy to harvest, especially on a calorie-for-calorie basis. Without mechanical harvesters, harvesting small grains required mowing with a scythe, binding and shocking to dry, and threshing by hand; in comparison, a beet could be pulled out of the ground, the greens chopped off, and the harvest work was done. Of course, the-bigger-the-better was the rule when it came to roots in those days; after all, why pick up four beets that weighed a quarter pound each when you could pick up one that weighed a pound?

Size also mattered because larger crops had a greater surface area to volume ratio. In general, whether you consider cabbages or rutabagas, rot starts on the outside and works its way in. We still store some crops for our own homestead use on the farm that turn slimy on the outside, but when we peel past the gross outside leaves, the remaining core still provides good taste and nutrition.

Many of the crops we store for human consumption now were also valued as a source of livestock feed. In the mid-1990’s, when I helped oversee the receipt of thousands of vegetable varieties from Eastern Europe at Seed Savers Exchange, we were surprised at the number highly-variable and not-very-tasty selections that we received, until we realized that many of these were actually used as fodder crops. Pumpkins and squash developed into important fodder crops in Europe when they arrived from the New World in the 1600’s. Interestingly,

Storage presented its own challenges. Root crops continue to give off heat as they slowly respire, so they tend to warm up any space where you store them. Root cellars insulate against winter’s cold and summer’s heat, but their temperature tends to be slightly too warm for optimal root storage, and they cool down in the fall considerably more slowly than the weather outside, being buffered by the relatively steady temperature of the ground. Having used a root cellar in the past, I can attest to the juggling act that went into timing the fall harvest so that the storage area was cool enough, but that we still had enough time to finish the harvest.

Now, we value root crops that come in smaller packages, and cabbages that actually fit in the refrigerator; and that’s okay. For the most part, modern farmers don’t feed root crops to their livestock, although turnips are gaining in popularity as a fall grazing crop. And, recent research has shown that pumpkin seeds have compounds that kill off internal parasites; now, many organic hog farmers feed their sows heavily on pumpkins in the fall, to flush out any parasites before they move the sows inside for the winter. Some things change, and some change back again. We’ll still keep an eye out for fairy-tale sized rutabagas, but we probably won’t try to fit them in a CSA box.