Harvest Monday: June 1, 2015

This is my submission for Daphne's Dandelions wonderful weekly review of how gardeners are working it around the globe.

It is still a slow week as I'm sure it will be for a while.  But the harvests are coming in bit by bit.  First are radishes.  The pictures above and below are of Easter Egg variety radish from William Dam.  I have a terrible problem with not thinning so I don't have much.  In fact, I only grew radishes this year (after not doing so for a few years) to see if I even still liked them.  Not sure I do.  I really love them in my family's potato salad recipe and maybe the odd salad with radish but that's about it.  Probably my last year.  This week, I harvested 115 grams of radish (after removing greens).  Based on some foreshadowing on Margaret's blog, I suspect she is more successful with her growing techniques (which I admittedly have none to speak of).

Early last week I decided to clean up around the garlic and pulled out this Music garlic plant where the greens were not growing properly.

After cutting out the brown parts, I cut it up and used it in this pasta dish with tomatoes and feta.

And before I get to the finale ... here are a few wild strawberries.  My yard is filled with wild strawberry plants but they are usually throughout the lawn and tend to get mowed over.  This one plant was found growing in the gravel driveway (but nowhere that my car goes).

The most interesting harvest I have this week is the arugula.  Not much by weight (120 grams) but I'm finally starting to get some good greens coming up (I also had 4 small spinach leaves which I didn't bother to weigh).  The arugula was sauteed with garlic and shrimp and tossed with pasta and my arugula pesto recipe (found a jar in the freezer).

My camera somehow got set on "illustration" mode, so this picture looks cartoonish.

End of May Garden Review

It's been raining since last night and it was still drizzling as I took these photos.  But I wasn't sure if it would improve at all and I really wanted to get a snapshot of the garden for the end of the month.  I often want to compare year over year and realize that I don't always take photos of the entire view.  So for the sake of my own documentation, and if you are at all interested, here is what's going on in my yard today.

I haven't bothered capturing the fruit trees, fruit bushes or flowers (other than when they are interplanted) - perhaps another day soon.  I really just wanted to get photos of the vegetable, herb and greens gardens.  To avoid making this comment on every single picture, I'll just say it once now ... many of them are terribly overgrown with weeds, but also with grass that is growing up through the soil.  I'll pull out what I can over the coming weeks but will have to do a really good turnover of the garden in the fall to try to eliminate as much of the grass as I can.

So onto the photos ... lots of photos (maybe 30?!) so I'll just use the caption field to identify what's going on rather than lengthy descriptions.

Top to Bottom: asparagus, lavender
(just planted so not visible), rhubarb

Asparagus ferns staked up

Old 3 sisters garden, slow to grow: ruby red chard,
italian salad blend, beets, curly kale, tsoi sim

Jerusalem artichokes

1 of 30+ potato plants (I still have a bit of cleanup
to do of frost-bitten leaves from last weekend)

2 of 6 squash or pumpkin plants in year old straw bales

Mouse melon in year old straw bales

Tarragon at the back end, arugula at front
 and various greens in between

Garlic at top end of picture,
then various greens

3 kinds of bush beans: black turtle,
 delinel and royal burgundy

Gypsy broccoli, jade cross brussels sprouts
(front: perennial flowers)

Red Russian Garlic

Red Russian Garlic

Messy bed of parsnips

Strawberries and more Red Russian garlic

Strawberry

Nutri-red carrots and rainbow blend of carrots
surrounded by onion sets

Sugar Ann Snap Peas

Just planted: tarbais and scarlet runner beans,
 nantes carrots, merlin beets (marigolds in front)

Hard to tell but this is a tomato patch (that's one of my pallet
shelves  turned on its side for a tomato 'cage'

Tomato plant

Messy bed of various onions

New Egyptian walking onions

Music garlic

new hay bales with cukes & summer squash

New 3 sisters garden

Golden Bantam corn

Various winter squash

Various sweet and hot peppers to remain in pots

Tomatoes in greenhouse (one pepper plant in front centre)

one of several pepper plants in greenhouse

Bed in greenhouse - leftover greens and newly
planted flowers at bottom

new garden bed w/ calla lilies in back,
 then kohlrabi and endives

Outdoor Tomato Versus Greenhouse Tomato

I realize it's early days now, but I thought I'd share these pictures.  It's not a perfect comparison because these may not be the same variety.  But all tomatoes in the following pictures came from the same packet of seedlings ... "Park Seeds Heirloom Rainbow Blend which includes a mix of Aunt Ruby's German Green, Dixie Golden Giant, Black from Tula, Brandywine Red, Big Rainbow, and Cherokee Purple". 

And, more importantly, they were all seeded at the same time!  Seeds were sowed March 11th and here is the post showing them 6 days later.  First are pictures of these puny looking plants that were planted in the garden about a week ago.  They survived the recent frost!  But to be honest, these are pretty average looking for what I'm used to at this time of the year.

And ta da ... here are plants from that same seedling batch that I potted up and put in the greenhouse two weeks ago.  Wahoo!

And for another comparison.  This is the black trifele tomato plant when I bought it at the plant sale on May 16 (admittedly not too bad for a seedling) versus today (I potted it only a few days ago into the greenhouse!).

I'm going to cram as many tomatoes and peppers as I can into the greenhouse now that the seedlings are mostly out!!!