The other day, someone asked me what goes into a decision to grow this or that crop. Well the answer to this question is easy, whatever we want! Okay not really, in our case it includes items we love to grow and eat such as tomatoes as well as other items we kind of despise like….turnips. Joy writes and posts a blog called “Dear Farm Journal” to our Facebook page, and here is what she wrote the other day regarding turnips. “I love most vegetables, but I hate white egg turnips, the smell, the taste…”, there is more to the post, but you get the point. Joy isn’t a huge fan of turnips, and well, truth be told neither am I. There I said it, I don’t like turnips. So why grow them? Well see, there was this one turnip I did in fact like (much to my surprise). One season I grew some late turnips which went through some frost, and well they actually tasted… dare I say good. And I’ve been living off the good gastral reactions ever since. Until now, now I’m back in the turnip hating camp once again. What I think is strange is how certain crops made it this far as human food crops. Someone had to enjoy turnips enough to propagate the seed generation after generation until we arrive at our current year. Why hasn’t the lowly turnip gone the way of the dandelion? Once a staple food crop, the dandelion is now a noxious weed in many suburban lawns. A plant distained by the clean lawn folks and fought with copious amounts of nasty chemicals. Often our choice of what crops to grow comes from other sources; our end of the year survey, customer suggestions, or what extra seed we have in our seed storage area. Or in the case of the turnip, from a random YouTube video I happened to watch one winter, which expounded on the virtues of this crop. The video was so convincing that it turned me into a believer. In the video a nice Canadian man talks through his top five favorite crops. Hey I thought why not give it a try and before you know it we had three plantings in the ground. Joy says “no more”, and I agree!

~Farmer Rufus