Shallots and Garlics were planted before Thanksgiving! I'm not sure what day it was but I know I got them in the ground. The garlic were from Seed Savers. One package of Elephant Garlic and one of Georgian Fire. The shallots were ones I'd grown last summer and replanted this fall. I also replanted some of this year's garlic. Is it garlic, garlics or garli, I'm not sure.  Microsoft likes garlic so perhaps I'll go with garli. I'm hoping last year's garli and shallots will work. I don't know why they wouldn't except for the fact that nothing ever seems to work when you want it to. I got tons of both of them and kept finding them in the soil when I was trying to put the garden to bed, hence the replanting of both. I got them into the ground just as the sun was setting. It was cold outside and I had to beat the hell out of the mulch to spread it on top because it was half frozen. I also planted the last of the winter rye in the upper lower garden. So we'll see what happens.

 

The root cellar is working out well but I didn't do what I planned with the carrots and beets. I was going to cover them with sand to keep them fresh but I wound up just throwing them in the cellar and letting them fend for themselves. The beets are beginning to look kind of dried up but some of the carrots are okay. We used them in soup the other day.  I pulled out one the multicolored carrots and it looked great, much to my astonishment. The last carrots we sautéed were the purple haze. It seems to be trendy to name carrots after designer drugs. The purple haze have a deep purple red skin and it seemed like the color has soaked into the carrot with the passage of time so when you cook it, it get dark like a beet. That's got to be good for you.

 

The squash (acorn and delicata) were great. We ate the last acorn squash the other night. Just a couple of bones but very sweet. The delicata show no signs of decay. I'm not sure what varieties they are, sadly, because I just scooped them up hither and yon when I picked them but some of the delicata have an incredibly thick skin. It took a monumental effort to open them I almost cut my fingers off in the process and they tasted fine. The delicate, not my fingerfs. The other ones open with no problem. All are pretty small, so it's one delicata per person. By the way, Microsoft doesn't like the word delicata either, it keeps changing it to delicate. I suppose I have to teach it a new word.

 

I never harvested my leeks so my dream of purple potato leek soup may remain a fantasy. But the weather droid says it will be in the 50's F in a couple of days so who knows, maybe I'll grab one.

 

We've had some snow and the temp dropped to ten below zero F the other night but now we seem to be warming up.  It reached a high of 38 F today and the snow is melting away.