Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
Written by Alan Hickman


After last week’s -10 degree overnight lows, the soil at the teaching garden was pretty reluctant to give up the rutabaga, turnip and carrots that I wanted for a chicken stew on Sunday.
As I jumped up and down on the fork to get it through the icy crust, it reminded me of a time during World War II.
In southern England, the ground didn’t usually freeze to any great degree in winter - it was just cold, damp, grey, and bleak, but one terrible year the temperature fell like a new ice age was coming.
The ports, the plumbing, and the farms all froze solid and the supply of food soon ran down.
I remember my mother talking about the Land Girls (Women’s Land Army) spending their days out in the fields using pneumatic drills to get turnips and swedes out of the ground.

Fortunately I didn’t need to resort to a jack hammer.
Four or five inches down, the ice was gone and the surface layer broke into great solid clods of soil with a vegetable top sticking out.
When I got home, each gritty lump went into the microwave to thaw out - we have it all so easy now.

If things follow their usual path, the cold snap will have been just that and the ground will open again for a while before winter sets in for real.
At least things had better warm up a bit because there are all sorts of spring flowering bulbs still to be planted and the rest of the root crops need be dug for the food bank.

This was the first year that rutabagas and turnips had been planted in the teaching garden so it was interesting to see how they responded to the growing conditions.
Although there is a good chance that these particular root crops have never been planted in that particular patch since the forest was first cut down, the family to which rutabagas and turnips belong (Cruciferae or Brassicaceae - the mustard/cabbage family) is huge.
With over 330 genera and 3,700 species, some cultivated but mostly wild, it is almost certain that something closely related has been growing along, quietly nurturing a pool of waiting pests and diseases.

As crop rotation is a first line of defense for growers, the first year of a new crop in a particular plot is likely an indicator of the best that is going to happen using passive pest control.
On a basis of tens or hundreds of acres, it might be possible to starve out a particular pest by planting large monocultures of unpalatable crops, but, when dealing with relatively smaller areas and backyards, pests are sufficiently mobile to follow a desirable crop from place to place.

Almost as soon as the seedlings poked through the soil, the first predation began. Small holes were chewed in the leaves and, as the season progressed, the plants barely seemed to able to grow fast enough to keep up with the demands of the insects.

Remarkably, by late summer there was clearly the makings of a crop. Some of the turnips had managed to get to fist size and among the rutabagas were a few as big as small teapots surmounted by green lace doilies. However, if the leaves were a mess, the underground parts of the plants looked even worse.
Various and sundry worms and grubs had scarred and abraded the roots well beyond the point of commercial acceptability.
Of the two vegetables, the rutabagas seem to have done best. Those roots which grew the biggest had insect damage confined to just below the skin, so they produced a high proportion of good quality flesh.
The turnips were a different story. Borers were much more attracted to their pungent peppery roots, so half or more of each turnip needed to be cut out and thrown away.

One of the great values of the teaching garden is that people get to see what happens to crops when they are grown without the use of active pest control, and, having seen the results, volunteers have some practical basis on which to found their opinions.
There were certainly vegetables for Sunday supper and the food kitchen will be happy to take whatever fresh rutabagas can be supplied - despite the extra trimming - but this is a crop that nobody would pay money for.