While I've been Inside...

After snow blanketed the farm a few weeks ago, my outside time has consisted mainly of hauling hay and fresh water to chickens, sheep and horses, skiing the 17-acre pasture with the dogs and walking the quarter-mile to the mailbox.

I needed a change of scenery. 

When the winds died down Sunday morning and temperatures hit 17 degrees, I clipped into my skis. I planned o explore other parts of the farm, the crop fields and woods, and possibly see some wildlife.

My first stop was a farm field planted in a radish cover crop, that apparently doubles as a winter food plot.

The deer unearthed and ate forages. Judging by the number of radishes unearthed, I'm pretty deer don't like radishes. Rabbits, though, love radishes. I found lots of radishes with rabbit tooth marks.

I also found coyote tracks, which didn't surprise me, as I've heard them singing in the pre-dawn hours.

After skiing around a couple of fields, I made my way down the farm lane to the woods, a place I skied the past weekend. I was surprised to see my tracks still there, and so few other tracks.

The woods was proof that wildlife don't spend the winter months binging on Netflix. 

As I skied around the corn field, I marveled at the deer's ability to locate corn cobs under the blanket of snow.

A deer interrupted those thoughts and almost made me lose balance on the skis. She jumped out of the fencerow and into the field about 40 yards from me. Skinny, she was not. Had she been the deer eating corn through the winter?

What I found near the pond, though, really made me scratch my head.

Some critter had dug up and broken apart hedge apples. I'm unsure whether the hedge apples were on the picnic table before the dismembering, or if a critter wanted to have a picnic in style. Upon getting home, I did a little research and concluded this was most likely the work of squirrels who love to eat the seeds, and are apparently okay with leaving a mess behind.

Finally, I skied around the pond. Temperatures haven't been above freezing for two weeks, so I'm sure a thick layer of ice covers the pond. While there are animal tracks around the edges, only one set of deer tracks goes across the pond. Possibly a deer in a hurry?

As I made my way back home, my coat unzipped and my hat off, I thought of something I'd read earlier in the week. If you wait until the weather is perfect, you're going to spend a big chunk of your life waiting. I'm so glad I turned Sunday into a perfect day.

The Radish Hunt

 

I didn't have a ruler, so I used my foot for scale.

When my 10-year-old nephew was bouncing around, I did what good aunts do: I sent him on a radish hunt.

“Go to the field behind the horse pasture and get two radishes,” I said.

As he darted off, I told him they were white and would be several inches long.

An adult standing around the fire muttered something about a snipe hunt.

 “No,” I said. “They’re real.”

After the wheat was harvested this summer, a radish cover crop was planted. Daikon radishes, with white tap roots often a foot long, help reduce soil erosion and also break up compacted soil. They’ll die this winter and decompose, leaving a loamier soil that dries out faster in the spring.

Usually about half the tap root grows above ground and half below ground.

I’ve planted Daikon radishes as a cover crop in my vegetable garden. They grew over summer, suppressing weeds. Over winter, the garden smelled like rotting cabbage as the radishes decomposed. In the spring, I didn’t have to work the soil. It was loamy and ready for planting. This is the first year, though, that they’ve been planted in our crop fields.

Minutes after racing off to the radish field, my nephew and two nieces returned to the campfire with several radishes.

A field of radishes on a snowy morning.

They were unlike your grocery-store radishes. Instead of red orbs the size of golf balls, they were white, cylindrical roots a foot long.

“I wonder how they taste,” my brother said, picking up a broken one and biting into the crisp, white flesh. “Wow, those are pretty good.”

When the Daikon radishes were growing in my garden and in the fields, I never thought to try one. I assumed they would be woody—and either too hot or super bland. So, I picked up one and, avoiding the exterior skin, bit into the flesh. The verdict: mild flavored and pleasantly crunchy.

I’m harvesting a few more before the freezing weather sets in and the decomposition begins.

As I was looking for a ruler, Niki, the Radish Thief, hauled off the radish.