The Un-harvest

While many friends seem to be going on and on about the food they are bringing in from their gardens, ours is just a lot of green leaves with a ton of flowers and only a few little, tiny peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, and a cucumber. It makes me sad.

This reality is why I was so excited to harvest my turnips yesterday to use raw in a salad with granny smith apples. I looked past the leaves to the tops of those beautiful white orbs and my excitement swelled. I pulled up the first one, removing it easily from the soil that had nurtured it and was so stoked to pull the next one. Inspection of that first turnip, though, revealed that there were more than root vegetables being nurtured in that soil.

Little.

White.

Worms.

It seems that there are any number of larvae that feed on root veggies in the ground. Of the 35-40 turnips that I pulled up, exactly one was edible. Well, edible to humans. The little usurpers of garden goodness found the others to be quite delicious, it seems. They are all safely tucked away in the garbage can now.

This was a major blow to my new role as urban homesteader. Thank goodness we aren't actually trying to survive off this little plot of land. We'd be in sad shape. Oh well, now we just need to figure out what to put in that soil that won't be susceptible to the squirmy bits so that we can utilize all of the precious little space we have. We'll see what's next!