6/27 Harvest Monday - First Pinor Noir Pepper and Garlic

We got a lot of rain and the weather cooled down a little bit, and the garden rewarded us with plentiful harvest this week.

The pea vines are still hanging in there, and I harvested small handfuls of snow peas both Saturday and Sunday.  We also harvested our first Pinot Noir sweet pepper.  It was very small because the plant is still too small.  We probably should have pinched the flower to allow the plant to grow bigger before letting a pepper grow, but sometimes we just don't do what we should, for one reason or another.  I'm hoping that now that we harvested this pepper, the plant can recover and grow bigger before having to support more peppers.  The small size aside, this pepper is really beautifully purple.

The wetter and cooler weather was also good for our lettuce harvest.  Somehow they seemed to have gotten less bitter over the last week, if that's possible.  So now, instead of having semi-bitter lettuce, we have quarter-bitter lettuce.  (Actually, I just had a large salad after writing this post, and the lettuce was hardly bitter at all.  Woohoo for lettuce recovery, as temporary as it may be!)

Our first garlic harvest.  I wrote about our first garlic harvest in a bit more detail in yesterday's post. 

Fordhook Giant Chard and Red Russian Kale.  These are both hardy greens (kale more so than chard, I think) that grow well in the garden and taste great cooked lightly, too.

Another small handful of peas harvested on Sunday

This is pretty much the last of China Choy (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener).  The leaves now have tons of pinhead-sized holes from flea beetles (I think that's what they are), but they will still taste good.  These were Keith's favorite vegetables this spring.  They grew really well in the garden this spring without any cabbage looper damage.  I also grew bok choy and tatsoi, but they bolted much earlier than China Choy, so this is definitely our favorite.  I'm letting a few plants bolt (you can see a few yellow flower petals that got stuck to some of the leaves in the picture) and go to seed so I can collect lots of seeds for next season.  Keith would like me to plant a whole bed full of these next year.  Since each of our beds is 12 ft x 4 ft, that would be a LOT of china choy!  I also harvested a bunch of green onions.

Collection of this week's harvest, minus the lettuce from Saturday.

Happy Harvest Monday, everyone!

• Lettuce Mix 40.00 oz
• Swiss Chard 16.60 oz
• Red Russian Kale 5.70 oz
• Asian Greens 9.35 oz
• Green Onions 8.70 oz 
• Garlic 1.75 oz
• Peas 2.60 oz
• Sweet Peppers 0.70 oz
• Weekly Total 85.40 oz, or 5.34 lbs
• 2011 Total 14.71 lbs