Farmer botany! Farming around ice!

Did you know? Carrots and Queen Anne's Lace are the same species, Daucus carota. Beets and chard are the same species, Beta vulgaris. And why do farmers talk about brassicas? Well, check it out: cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards, and brussel sprouts are all the same species, Brassica oleracea. Not to mention Brassica rapa, which is both Chinese cabbage and turnips, and Brassica napus, with canola and rutabega.

People keep asking me what happens on a farm in the winter, and one of the things I've learned is that harvest goes quite late in the year, thanks to the frost hardy crops like brassicas - we've still got brussels sprouts! Starting in October, the temperature began to dip below freezing - at first, just for a few minutes before the dawn sun came to haul the temperature back up. But the frosts got longer and colder. Naturally, these low temperatures freeze plant juices, and some plants can't handle it - tomatoes and eggplant are long gone - but others, like the brassicas, have ways of surviving this freezing.

Although brassicas can survive freezing, harvesting them in between regular frosts is tricky. Frozen solid kale leaves can't just be hacked off the plant as per usual. The water inside the plant expands as it freezes, pushing the plant cells to their breaking point - the stress of touching them can push them over the edge and seriously bruise the plant tissues. So after there's been a frost, we have to wait for the plants to thaw out and wake up before they can be harvested. The brassicas will ultimately die from freezing, reducing to a mass of translucent, wilted leaves - but it takes a while.

And another thing - brussels sprouts are so wack! First, take cabbage, where the leaves form a head that we harvest - I get that. Then you have kale - the leaves grow out from an upright stalk and they're chopped off, I get that too. But brussels sprouts! Their leaf buds are tiny cabbages! We harvest the leaf buds! All the tissues of Brassica oleracea, you'll note, are edible (such as broccoli leaves and stems as well as the flower buds; the roots, I hear, are edible but woody). Anyway, the sizeable leaf scars of brussels sprouts after harvest remind me of palm trees. If my camera battery doesn't freeze when I take it outside, I may be able to provide better pictures.