Harvest on the Feast of St. Isidore the Farmer

The Feast of St. Isidore is a favorite in our family. We are a family that loves to garden.  After dinner tonight the kids went outside. Alina went to work harvesting parsnips that had survived through the winter.  Asher was put on the task of cutting the heads off the parsnips.  For those who are not familiar with parsnips they are much like carrots only white.  When a parsnip makes it through a New England winter it often does not look like the parsnips you see in the stores. It may have many "legs" as the kids call them.  As the plant has been through considerable hardship, at the first bit of warm weather it begins to go to seed thus one loses the vegetable to eat. So the race is on to harvest them before they go to seed. Something else which is special about the parsnips that endure a long winter and survive...they are extra sweet when cooked! 


Our whole family loves to spend time in the garden. With my joint disability it is the kids who do most of the work. I provide the guidance on diagnosis of what is in the garden..weed or plant. But even now the kids are becoming very good at the diagnosis phase in the spring. You see we do something interesting with our garden:  we let nature do a lot of our work.  In the summer when many would remove plants such as lettuce and kale that have gone to seed as the greens turn bitter, we do not. Instead we let the plants mature and drop their seeds in the fall. Thus in the spring at just the right time up pops lettuce and kale. This year we had an abundance of parsnips that had seeded in the fall and managed to survive the winter.  One has to have the eye to know what is a weed and what is a plant worth keeping but it is amazing to see nature at work.  So much of our work is done for us. 

The Feast of St. Isidore is the official date, given to me once by a priest of when it is safe to plant vegetables that cannot withstand a frost in our region. So our family looks forward to the Feast of St. Isidore with anticipation. The cold nights of winter we anticipate are finished and it is time to look forward to summer.  

We also had some good news today. We received an email this morning from a women from the Republic of Panama trying to begin a Children's Rosary in her parish. The Parish she shared with us is named after St. Isidore. Amazing!

Other Posts You May Enjoy (theme is gardening for most of these)
How to Start a Children's Rosary
Whoever Sows bountifully Will Also Reap Bountifully
Finding Answers to Our Spiritual Questions in the Garden

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