Thankful for cutworms!!..... and turnip lessons

We have a little, insulated building across the drive from the house that we call the Battery House. It houses the solar battery bank in a small alcove at the back, the inverter/charger, as well as the large water pressure tank, and has a propane fired heater, that we light late in the fall. Inside, on the north side, there is a partitioned off room, 2.25 X 3.25 meters, and when we moved up here in 2017, that is the space we organized into a food storage room. The very first construction project Hubby took on was building floor to ceiling shelves for my preserves. On the opposite side of the room, he later added more floor to ceiling shelves for storage, and much later, a big slatted potato bin on castors that fits under those shelves.

2018

 

2018 spuds

The smaller of our two freezers fits in against the end wall. There was just a wide doorway between the storage room and the heated room, so Hubby built and installed a door so we could close it off. We mounted two thermometers in there, one at floor level and one at eye level. It has worked beautifully. Once there is enough snow in the fall, we bank up the outside wall, and the temperature inside holds between 2 and 4 degrees C, which is perfect. On really cold nights, we crack the door open a bit into the heated part of the Battery House.

As the summer progresses, the warmer temperatures permeate into that room, and now as the nights are cooling to the high single digits, we are opening the windows at night and trying to get the inside cooled down to vegetable storing temperatures. There are no windows in the back room, so it is hard to get the cooler air to circulate back there.

This wild and wonderful summer we've been having, with so much rain in late July and through August, the turnips (technically they are rutabagas, but we call them turnips) have been growing like crazy, and are huge. Last August we were in drought conditions, and the turnips, although planted at the same time in the spring as they were this year, were fine left in their garden bed until late October. Not so this year! I am afraid they are either going to be woody and tough, or hollow. So..on Wednesday, I pulled the biggest ones. Thankfully most of the others had to be replanted at random times due to cutworms in the bed. Who'd have thought I'd be grateful for cut worms! The rest of the turnips will be fine in the ground for a while yet.

I trimmed and cleaned them, then got Hubby with a big knife to whack open the weirdest looking one that had cracked a bit. Surprisingly, the interior was beautiful, pale yellow and solid! We cooked it for supper and it was tender with just a hint of bitterness. A bit of brown sugar and butter mashed in would mask that flavour. I wanted a true taste test, so only added salt to the cooking water.

So, even though the turnips are OK, they wouldn't be if left in the soil much longer. Next spring, I'll not be so anxious to get those seeds in early, but will wait until the beginning of June to get them planted, so they can safely stay in the ground until their winter storage facilities cool down!