An excellent spinach for overwintering. Winter flavor is sweet & candy-like. Spring leaves can grow quite large. This is an open-pollinated variety.

A September 2011 planting provided some harvestable yield in each month from November through the following April. Growth habit in the winter requires tedious leaf-by-leaf harvest, as the leaves are positioned parallel to the ground. In spring, growth habit becomes more upright and it is easier to harvest by knife.

Seed source: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Honey locusts are especially common here in former, now overgrown, pastures. The vicious thorns are the most obvious identifying characteristic of this tree, and they help to deter herbivores from nibbling on the branches or bark. Some trees have only a few, while others are armored along nearly every inch of trunk. Lower branches often die back and drop thorns onto the ground, posing a hazard for boots, tires, and goat hooves. In the fall, the trees produce long pods which have a sweet, slightly fruity smell when broken open. Goats are quite fond of the pods, which are probably reasonably nutritious given that the honey locust is a member of the legume family. Honey locust wood is dense and an excellent source of firewood if you can manage the thorns.

Deadnettle is a common weed that blooms in early spring.

Henbit is a common weed that blooms in early spring. The flowers are quite pretty when inspected closely, a visual treat hidden in plain view.

A pretty domestic flower that provides a useful marker for the progress of spring; see the blooming dates listed below.

First recorded date of bloom:

2007: March 21
2008: March 31
2009: March 25
2010: March 28
2011: March 21
2012: March 7

This tree’s name is self-explanatory. Nuts from the shagbark hickory are tasty, but they are a rare treat since they require significant effort to open and clean. In any case, the squirrels usually get there first. The high density of the wood makes hickory an excellent firewood, though it’s usually not suitable for shiitake mushroom cultivation due to the flakiness of the bark.

Sparkle is a strawberry variety that has superb flavor and sweetness, short shelf life, and small- to medium-sized berries. The short shelf life means that they are unsuitable for most marketing, but once they make it to the hands of the eater there’s little worry that any will be left around long enough to go bad.

Plants flower in April. Our first tend to ripen around the middle of May and they are usually done by early-to-mid June. We generally pick daily during the peak of production. We’ve found that protection from racoons is critical; a few low-strung lines of portable electric wire fence has worked for us.

The plants are rather difficult to manage because they runner aggressively, but produce plenty of material for expanded plantings. The biggest berries are produced on plants that are well spaced, a result that we’ve found is more easily achieved by establishing a new planting than by thinning an old one, which tends to fill itself in again quickly.

Though it may look like a hot pepper, Jimmy Nardello’s Italian Pepper is actually a very sweet, flavorful pepper. The flesh is relatively thin. They’re great raw, cooked, or dried for later use. We quite often eat these straight off the plants in late summer when we’re hungry and need a snack. This is Eric’s favorite sweet pepper.

This is an open-pollinated, heirloom variety that the Slow Food organization has recognized as being exceptional by including it on the Ark of Taste list.

Organic seed source: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

A relatively short, pointy variety that does well in heavy soils. Very sweet in cold weather (fall/winter harvests). Spring plantings also have good flavor. Our standard carrot.

Organic seed sources: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange; High Mowing Organic Seeds.