Friday 22 December 2017

Another Train, Some Harvesting and the Winter Solstice

The milder weather has arrived although it hasn't brought much sunshine with it. However, even though it was dull and rather damp we set off on Wednesday morning to photograph the last of this year's steam hauled trains bound for York. I don't think there's another York bound steam hauled charter train until the beginning of March next year.
LNER A4 Class 4-6-2 no 60009 Union of South Africa at Colton Junction with the Christmas White Rose
In the afternoon we thought we'd make the most of the mild weather and have a trip down to the plot to harvest a few fresh vegetables. It all looks a bit desolate now but we did manage to find a few things to harvest. 
We made the decision to harvest the biggest of our red cabbages. It's a bit of a monster tipping the scales at 5.2kg.
Cabbage - Red Lodero
Whilst I'm on the subject of monster vegetables one of the parsnips we dug up on Wednesday afternoon also fell into the same category.
Parsnip - Gladiator
We've two generations of parsnips growing. A few are from our first sowing of the year but most are from a later sowing made when the first batch either didn't germinate or got eaten by slugs and snails. My money is on the latter. Anyway, I think the one I dug up on Wednesday afternoon came from the first sowing. I didn't manage to get deep enough to get out the full length of the parsnip but there's plenty of edible root in the part I did manage to get out of the ground.

Thursday was the winter solstice so our hours of daylight each day should be increasing. Thursday was a really dull and drizzly sort of a day in perfect keeping with the short daylight hours. It didn't make much effort to get light all day. It's nice to know that our daylight is getting longer each day now as winter progresses. However, January and February are usually our worst winter months.

I've added a little bit of video below showing our harvesting antics on the plot on Wednesday afternoon.


4 comments:

  1. Not bad at all. What a delightful meal (or several meals) those colorful vegetables will make: Roasted carrots and parsnips, braised spiced cabbage, sauteed b-sprouts and sliced tomato salad.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We’ve still got some home grown potatoes as well.

      Delete
  2. Impressive parsnip and red cabbage. (I have to admit I bought a red cabbage today after reviewing ours. Sssh)

    ReplyDelete

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