7/4 Harvest - Red, White... and Orange!

We pulled a few carrots this weekend to see how they were sizing up.  I sowed these carrot seeds in early April, so theoretically they should have had enough time to reach full size after three months, but root crops always seem to take longer to size up in our garden.  These carrots were still too small, but I'm hopeful that the carrots will grow much bigger and better in our new garden this year compared to our pitiful carrots from last year.

This year, in addition to the same carrots from last year (Short 'n Sweet variety), we're growing a Kaleidoscope Mix of Imperator carrots.  After a quick taste test, we decided that the colorful carrots don't taste much better than "normal" carrots, but the variety of colors is always fun, and one of the advantages of growing vegetables at home is being able to grow things that you can't normally get from the grocery store.

This is over seven pounds of turnip.  The turnips ranged in size from toothpick (the ones that didn't size up for whatever reason) to racquetball (slightly smaller than a tennis ball).  Keith has a theory that whatever he does not want to eat from the garden, like turnip, grows really well effortlessly, and whatever he does like to eat takes a lot of effort to grow.  So far, it seems to be true!  He has a coworker who actually likes turnips, including green tops, so he will be the lucky recipient of 7 pounds of organic homegrown turnip, complete with flea beetle holes on the leaves, on Tuesday.

This was our last head of spring-planted China Choy.  We really enjoyed our asian greens this spring.  I direct sowed a few more seeds in the garden to see if they would grow at all over the summer, but I'm not holding my breath.  I'll probably do a large fall planting and hope that they survive the cabbage worm attack.  Those nasty green worms seem to be much more active in the fall than in the spring.

Sugar snap peas and Mammoth Melting Snow peas.  I was surprised that the pea vines were still producing, but as long as we get a couple of servings of fresh peas a week, I'm a happy gardener.

Here is our first green bean harvest of the year - golden wax bean and some other variety whose name escapes me right now.  Just a handful this week, but I'm hoping that the yield improves as the weeks go by.  The beans aren't looking very healthy at the moment in the garden.  They had a rough start this year with something eating holes in their leaves.  Then they recovered and grew a few more healthy green leaves, but now many of the plants have yellow or lime-green leaves.  I'm not sure what's ailing them so early in the season.

A bit of dill and parsley to mix in with our salad.  We love the flavor of a variety of fresh herbs mixed in salad.  Well, I love it, Keith probably just tolerates it.

I harvested ten bulbs of garlic, which is about half of our garlic.  I braided the green tops and let them hang to dry in the garage, because we don't have a shed or a basement.  Keith walked in there today and said it smelled like the garage had bad garlic breath. 

Happy Fourth of July and Harvest Monday!

• Asian Greens 5.55 oz
• Green Onions 5.20 oz 
• Garlic 1.30 oz  (one bulb of fresh garlic; remaining harvest will be weighed after curing)
• Peas 8.60 oz 
• Carrots 1.75 oz
• Turnips 113.50 oz
• Green beans 2.80 oz
• Herbs 1.10 oz
• Weekly Total 139.80 oz, or 8.73 lbs
• 2011 Total 23.44 lbs

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

6/20 Harvest - Not so Grand Debut of Turnip Greens

We spent a large part of this weekend building our tomato trellis structure with 10-foot electrical conduits, and spent half that time waiting for the rain and lightning to pass so we could actually work outside.  It took a lot of time, effort and muscles (more Keith's than mine), but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I'll post some pictures of it later this week, but for now, it's Harvest Monday time!

 

Our cayenne pepper plant that we overwintered indoors last winter is still growing happily indoors.  It's basically a self-sufficient houseplant at this point and it continues to produce a few peppers every month or so.  Since I actually remembered to harvest them this weekend, I even took a few green ones.

Swiss chard, Red Russian kale, and one red onion harvested as green onion

Mammoth Melting snow peas.  These and sugar snap peas have been my favorite spring vegetables so far.  They are super delicious just lightly stir-fried.  For Sunday lunch, I put them in the same cast iron griddle with some mahi mahi filets, and they cooked up beautifully on the hot griddle without even stirring.  Unfortunately, the pea vines are looking even worse now than they did last week.  I'm afraid they won't last much longer in the heat.

This is our first year growing and tasting turnip, and quite possibly our last year.  Since the roots are still very small, there wasn't much to eat of them, but I steamed the green tops after finding out that they are edible.  Well, "edible" may be a subjective term, because Keith made the most pathetic "I'm never eating this again" face.  I didn't think it tasted good, but it also wasn't all that bad. Okay, maybe medium-bad.  But it's probably not something that I would choose to buy to cook for myself.  So it goes into the category of "I'm only eating this because I grew it."

Sadly, our lettuce is starting to get bitter.  I harvested some Prizehead, Red Romaine, and Quattro Stagioni (seeds shared by Robin).  Although he rejected the turnip greens, Keith did eat two large salads made with this semi-bitter lettuce, so all was not lost with the harvesting of greens this weekend.

• Lettuce Mix 13.0 oz
• Swiss Chard 6.5 oz
• Red Russian Kale 1.5 oz
• Turnips 9.0 oz
• Green Onions 1.6 oz
• Peas (sugar snap and snow) 5.1 oz
• Hot Peppers 0.65 oz
• Weekly Total 37.35 oz, or 2.34 lbs
• 2011 Total 9.37 lbs

6/13 Harvest - Greens and Peas

It's been almost a week since our return back home, and I'm still not as organized as I would like to be in the garden, at home and with married life in general.  This last name changing business is even more tedious than I had thought!  And going back to work this week means going back to my weekly commute to Texas, which means even less time at home to get things done.  But I couldn't miss yet another Harvest Monday, so here are some pictures of our harvest from last week. 

This was Sunday's harvest, consisting of a bowlful of china choy (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener), some green onions, a handful of sugar snap and snow peas (some seeds shared by Prairie Cat), and some red romaine lettuce.

Here's a closeup of one of the red romaine lettuce leaves.  It's not quite as productive as some of the other lettuces in the garden, and it doesn't seem to tolerate heat very well, but I do like it for the color variety it adds to the sea of greens in the garden at the moment.

This was my first sizable pea harvest (both sugar snap peas and snow peas) this season, harvested last Tuesday evening.  I had such a hard time growing peas last year, both in the spring and fall, so I'm really glad to have better luck with peas this spring.  Finally, I can harvest fresh peas right off the vines and enjoy them raw or stir-fried just minutes later in the kitchen.  I was amazed that most of these pea vines survived the brutal heat wave over the last few weeks.  I'm not sure how much longer they will survive, though, as the lower half of most of the vines are starting to look brown and dry.  But I will certainly keep enjoying these homegrown peas for as long as they last.

 

I also harvested some chard - Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard and Ruby Red Chard.  The red ones are growing much slower than the white ones, and both will probably grow bigger with time, but I was impatient and wanted to try some last week.  I'm glad I harvested some of these young chard, because they made for a very tasty wilted chard salad!

I have a lot of onions growing in the garden and I harvest some as green onions whenever I want to use them for cooking.  It's little conveniences like this that keeps me gardening!  This year, I planted red, white and yellow onions, and I think the red ones look so pretty harvested as green onions.  I know that if I just snip these off above ground and leave the roots in the soil, they will probably sprout more green onions, but I really like seeing the red part and there are plenty more still growing in the garden, so I harvest most of these red ones whole.  Ahh, little luxuries.

I also snipped some flat leaf parsley to toss in salads and pasta.  These were grown from seeds saved from last year's parsley.  The cilantro that I planted in spring have all bolted during our long absence, but parsley seems to be holding up okay.  Like green onions, I really like being able to snip a bit of parsley here and there as needed, instead of having to buy a big bundle from the grocery store and feeling rushed to use them all before they wilt in the fridge.

One of several new vegetables for me this year is mizuna.  According to the seed packet, they are supposed to grow up to 12 inches tall, but I harvested my first batch at maybe half that size just to try out the flavor.  But things don't always go as planned, and these are still sitting in the fridge because we've just had too much greens to eat this week, and I figured these will probably last longer than lettuce in the fridge. 

Finally, here is another harvest picture from sometime last week.  I harvested a colander full of lettuce, another full of swiss chard, sugar snap peas, snow peas, turnip greens, and a bit more mizuna.  This might just be the largest single day harvest we've had yet from our garden!

I probably missed a few harvest pictures, but all in all, we harvested the following from the garden last week:

• Lettuce Mix 1.38 lbs
• Swiss Chard 0.32 lbs
• Asian Greens 2.39 lbs
• Turnips 0.22 lbs
• Radish 1.0 oz
• Green Onions 0.67 lbs
• Peas (sugar snap and snow) 1.93 lbs
• Parsley 1.0 oz
• Weekly Total 7.03 lbs

While this seems like a lot of harvest for one week, I have to remember that this is what we got after three weeks of not harvesting anything during our absence.  But for now, looking at these numbers and just knowing how much fresh homegrown vegetables we were able to enjoy this week makes me downright giddy!

4/25 Harvest - Pea Shoots

Our peas are growing well enough that I felt that it would be safe to harvest some young pea shoots this weekend.  This would have been totally unthinkable last year, when what few pea seedlings I had constantly struggled against the hot weather (in both spring and fall!), cutworms and bunny attacks. 

Since this was my first time harvesting pea shoots, I wanted to be careful, just in case it somehow negatively affected the future growth of these plants.  I am, after all, growing them more for peas and not for shoots.  For this trial run, I snipped off the top 3-4 inches of just a few plants.  I'll go back and inspect the cut plants next week and see if they are still continuing to grow and branching off from leaf nodes below the cut tip, like they are supposed to.

I also snipped off some overwintered basil to make pizza and breadsticks (garlic basil).  Basil grew fast and furious in our garden last year to a point where I got tired of harvesting and processing it.  But having (far) less of it this winter has made me appreciate it more in the kitchen. 

I forgot to take pictures of the finished products, but here is one picture of my first attempt at garlic basil breadsticks just before they were popped in the oven.  They turned out pretty tasty, although I think I will try upping the amount of both garlic and basil next time.

Check out Harvest Monday to see what other gardeners are harvesting!

4/18 Harvest - Overwintered Indiana Veggies

A few of the Red Russian Kale, tatsoi and bok choy plants actually survived the Indiana winter in our side garden without being protected at all .  Actually, they were more like abandoned and forgotten, but the important thing is that they survived!  Unfortunately, this "survival" was very short lived, since there were only about 2-3 weeks between my noticing the new growth on the stumps of plants leftover from last fall and my discovery this weekend that they were all bolting.

I harvested most of them (there were not that many to begin with), except for a few that I'm going to leave alone in my attempt to collect seeds from them.  The bok choy and tatsoi looked like their leaves were changing shape (became more elongated).

I told Keith that I wanted to toss them in the salad, to which he scrunched up his face and said "can't we just have normal salad like normal people?"  Ha.  Not if you're going to marry a newbie gardener who wants to eat everything that will grow in the vegetable garden!  I think he was scared by the flowers.

This was the flowering bok choy (or tatsoi, I couldn't really tell with the elongated leaves).

Here's the Red Russian Kale bolting.  Only two plants survived in the side garden, so I harvested one and left the other one alone to go to seed.

I washed and trimmed all the edible leaves (some of the outer leaf stems were starting to look a little squishy).  I didn't weigh the harvest, but I would guess they totaled a few ounces.  Instead of tossing them in the salad, I made a quick stir fry with some olive oil, a dash of soy sauce and some garlic powder (we didn't have any garlic).  There was barely enough for us to each have a few bites as a snack, but at least we got to eat something tasty that we grew this week, and it made me happy.

Oh, here is a little handful of overwintered parsley and cilantro that also came from the side garden. I meant to toss these in the salad, too, but in the process of discovering and dealing with the bolted hardy greens, the salad making plans got forgotten.

Tomorrow, I will post some pictures from our main garden.  With all the rain we had last week, the peas are really starting to take off.  I have 12 feet of peas and more peas growing!

Happy Harvest Monday!

1/3 Harvest - Daikon Radish

Happy New Year to everyone! 

I really want to shout out "Let the new gardening year begin!" but ironically enough, this first post of the new year presents my very last harvest of 2010.

After waiting for what seemed like forever for these daikon radishes to size up, I, uh, forgot to harvest them before a ton of snow started falling in December.  Yeah, blame it on the snow, right?  The side garden where these radishes were planted was covered with over a foot of snow and looked like this (see below) for the most part of December.

I was a bit worried that the daikons wouldn't survive a whole month of snow and bitter cold temperatures.  But the weather finally warmed up a bit while we were out of town during the last week of December, and I had one day window of opportunity to pull the daikon radishes out of the ground on December 31.

The green tops looked pretty wilted and some of the stems were rather squishy, so I didn't know if the radishes themselves would be any good.  But I harvested them anyway and was pleasantly surprised to see that some of them actually looked edible.

Somehow I was under the (false?) impression that daikon radishes would get really big, like the size of my arm, but these were only on par with small/medium carrots.  Many of these daikon radishes had really long taproots, though, so I wonder if they would grow bigger in better soil that's not as clayey like the soil in this side garden.

Anyway, these radishes had a slight spicy kick to them but they still tasted fresh and crunchy.  Even the green tops were still edible after I trimmed off all the wilty and squishy ones.  Keith and I are not big fans of eating them raw, so I chopped them up (both green tops and the radish roots) and tossed them in a stir fry with some chicken and broccoli.  They were good!

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday to see if what other winter gardeners are still harvesting.

11/8/10 Harvest After The First Snow

We had our first snow on Friday, although it didn't stick.  Temperatures dipped down to the mid-twenties on Friday night, but I'm happy to report that what little left of the asian greens in the garden (with emphasis on little) survived the cold night.

These are the survivors, including a lone radish.  First, they survived the relentless attack of the cabbage worms (but not without battle scars consisting of big holes and missing chunks of leaves), and now they have survived their frost and snow.  I stir-fried these greens for lunch.  They were really tasty, but so little in quantity to just barely whet our appetites.  I really need to figure out a way to grow these better and to protect them from pests next year!

Also surviving frost and snow are some volunteer parsley that have been growing for the last two months.  They seem really hardy and healthy in the outdoor garden.

I supplemented this week's garden harvest with some cilantro and basil from our indoor grow box.  A single Jelly Bean tomato (also from the grow box) somehow made its way onto the harvest plate, too.  I chopped up the cilantro and mixed it in with some freshly cooked brown rice.  They added a nice flavor to the rice!

I also picked the last handful of green beans from the grow box.  While it was kind of cool to find out that we could grow green beans (bush variety) in our grow box, I have to admit that they were still very cramped in there and did not grow to their full potential.  I'm not sure if I'll grow them again in the grow box.

The harvests are definitely getting smaller, but we really appreciate every little bite that makes its way into our kitchen.

Check out Daphne's Harvest Monday to see who else is still harvesting in November!

11/1/10 harvest - Fall Salad

With the temperature rapidly dropping in Indiana, the garden offering seems to be shrinking.  This week, I barely managed to harvest enough lettuce, parsley, Jelly Bean tomatoes, and one radish to make two dinner salads. 

The salads were topped with some home-grown alfalfa sprouts.  Although the harvest was small, I did have a proud gardener moment when I realized that everything on these plates came from our organic home garden (pat myself on the back).  After taking this picture, I further dressed the salads with some sunflower seeds, golden raisins, slivers of goat cheese and a drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette.

Head on over to Daphne's Harvest Monday for more fall harvests from other gardeners!

P.S.  During my first year of vegetable gardening this year, I have learned my lesson that a part - okay, MOST - of the effort of keeping an organic home garden is dealing with a huge variety of garden pests.  Even after the arrival of the first frost late last week, I'm still seeing yucky pests in the garden.  I picked off (effective) several cabbage worms on my asian greens and rolled my eyes at (not effective) the aphids on my lettuce.  At this point, I've pretty much given up on the battle against the garden pests, at least for this year.  I'll be better prepared next year with row covers and a variety of different organic pesticides like Bt.  Enjoy it while you can, bugs!

10/25 Harvest - Indiana Carrots and Alfalfa Sprouts

These are the last of my Indiana carrots.  Due to their super slow growth and my impatience, it's been about two months since I pulled all the carrots in my square foot gardening beds except for one square foot, and these came from the last square foot.  These carrots have grown more in the last two months, but they are still pretty small compared to my California carrots - all the carrots you see here added up to 11.2 oz, and the biggest carrot from my last California harvest weighed 13 oz all by itself.  Oh well, I'm not complaining too much, though, because something is better than nothing!

I also got my first sprout harvest using the 3-Tray Kitchen Sprouter that I recently won in a giveaway on the Cheap Vegetable Gardener's blog.  This sprouter was pretty easy to use, and I got about 2-3 cups of organic alfalfa sprouts from the first test drive.  Keith and I enjoyed our first taste of these home-grown sprouts on our sandwiches this weekend.

Apparently there are lots of different kinds of seeds that you can buy online to grow different types and flavors of sprouts, including sprouts from seeds that I hadn't thought of like broccoli, kale and mustard.  I'm excited to try some new and interesting sprouts besides the typical alfalfa.  If any experienced sprouters have any suggestions or recommendations, please let me know!

10/18/10 Harvest Still Trickling In

We're only a couple of days away from the average first frost date in Indianapolis, but it looks like we may be lucky enough get through the rest of October without seeing any frost.  This would make for a very warm October for our area.  The weather was really beautiful this weekend with the daytime highs in the 70s.  Keith and I took advantage of this by taking a Saturday evening walk to the neighborhood liquor store (0.6 miles from the house) to buy some beer (the cashier looked at us a little funny when Keith put the beers in his backpack) and then enjoying a Sunday morning stroll before breakfast to admire various elaborate Halloween decorations around the neighborhood.

In the garden, the warm weather has allowed another handful of Jelly Bean tomatoes to ripen on the vine.  The plants themselves are looking pretty sorry and bare, but as long as the tomatoes stay edible, I won't complain.

In addition to the Jelly Bean tomatoes, this week's harvest included several more ripe cayenne peppers, a few sugar snap peas, one small radish and some green beans (both green and golden).  The green beans were our first harvest from the bush beans currently growing in the indoor grow box, so we were pretty excited to add green beans to the list of our grow box vegetables.

I also harvested two salads' worth of baby lettuce.  I don't know why they look so pale in this picture, but they looked normal in person.

Oh, I also harvested another serving's worth of asian greens.  I might have had two servings' worth, but the cabbage worms took their share before I got there.  I know, because I picked 15 fat and happy cabbage worms off of my greens.  Well, they were probably happy before I picked them off and drowned them in a container of water.

Bok Choy: If this is not rude, I don't know what is.

I also tackled the mass of basil growing in the garden.  Basil is probably the number one thing that grew like weed in the garden this year.  Next year, I will grow fewer plants.

Here's about one pound of basil.  I made a triple batch of pesto, and am currently in the process of air-drying the rest of the basil leaves for future consumption.