Taking a Peek

June 14th photo

Labyrinth Location: 2nd border arc, 11 o'clock
Vegetable: Rutabagas (Swede Turnip)
Seed/Transplant Date: May 21 or 22 (?)
Soil Preparation: Existing garden, rototilled with well-rotted manure tilled in.

Have you been wondering what's under the white stuff? All my cabbage-family plants. Mom gave me the floating row covers, and I stitched two lengths together side by side to make a wide enough cover for my three-foot-wide beds.

I was forewarned to leave quite a bit of slack in the cover so the plants don't push it up and lift the buried edges free of the soil. The wind moves the cover around quite a bit, so there are often layers of folded material lying over the plants, but they don't seem to mind. I've been watching the dim green lumps get larger, and itching to get a good look at this vigorous growth...

At first I didn't have enough row cover, so I left about six rows of turnips exposed. Mom found some more cover stashed away, and I headed for the garden, armed with a needle and thread to hand-sew the new piece onto the end of the old.

The flea beetles were there ahead of me.

I put the needle and thread away, and got out the battery-powered vacuum cleaner. Up and down the bed I went, sucking up the tiny blue-black beetles wherever I saw them, back and forth until I didn't see any more. Then I put the new row cover on, but instead of attaching it to the first piece, I buried the edges separately (as you can see above). I didn't want to release any beetles I'd missed into my original covered bed. It meant disturbing the soil rather close to the roots between two rows of turnips, but I had to take one chance or the other.

Well, it looks like I cleaned out the flea beetles pretty well; either that or the plants were almost beyond being vulnerable. They grew vigorously with very little further damage. Today I decided to unearth the row-cover edges from between those two rows, while I could still do it without too much root disturbance. Hand-stitching the edges together was a more gruelling task than I'd anticipated. In hindsight, I might have just dug the whole thing up and taken it in to the sewing machine, but then again, I did see a white butterfly flitting around the edges of the garden as I worked. Bending over, reaching, trying to hold the layers straight and taut by putting my toe on one spot and gripping another, and then trying not to catch extra folds with the needle . . . I didn't have the patience to make a fine seam. I hope the flea beetles or cabbage butterflies (or whatever it is I'm keeping out) aren't too persistent at looking for a gap.


Ah, the suspense. Yes, I did pull the cover loose all the way up one side of the bed to do some weeding and thinning. Wow! I've never grown such a blanket of turnips. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever successfully grown a turnip at all.


But I didn't dare leave them like that. I've been trying to convince myself to leave things thicker, and thin them gradually just enough to keep them looking happy. Under the row cover, though, I can't really see what's going on, and with the fuss of uncovering and re-covering, I just might procrastinate too much.

So I thinned them.


Now, who is going to eat all those greens?

What does one do with turnip greens? "...country as a turnip green..." - I know the song, but I don't know what it means. Somehow in all the excitement of learning how to garden, I overlooked the importance of learning how to cook.