Harvest Monday

lettuce, kale, tatsoi and one lone mache plant

Welcome to Harvest Monday, a great blog hop hosted by Daphne's Dandelions. Stop over there and enjoy visiting with gardeners from around the world!

This week has been warm (for Feb.), dry and very windy. Also very crazy at my work and this week isn't much better. Going on 8 days straight tonight and the past two being graveyard. Looking forward to having 3 days off at the end though. Also looking forward, they are forecasting rain around Wed. and we sure need it badly.

Mostly harvested the usual salad greens this week, many types of lettuce, kale, cilantro, sorrel, chickweed, spinach, along with a couple of tatsoi and one lone mache plant. I did discover that I have mache volunteers in one bed, but they are tiny yet.

Here's a few more pics from inside the greenhouse. You can see some construction details in my post from the other day, Simple Homemade Greenhouse.

Blue bellied lizard

I have several small lizards and a couple of spiders running around in the greenhouse. This lizard fell into one of the big tubs and couldn't get out so I rescued it. It's belly is like electric blue.

The strawberries are beginning to bloom

Salad Bowel lettuce

This 24 inch pot of Salad Bowl lettuce gave me 6 oz in one picking.

tomato blossoms

The crazy Yellow Marble tomato is blooming!




And now I am off to bed; one more night of graveyard....

Harvest Monday & Seed Giveaway Winner

Baby lettuce and edible viola blossoms

Welcome to Harvest Monday! This blog hop is sponsored by Daphne's Dandelions. I do hope you will stop over there and see everyone else's harvests; it is a lot of fun to see fresh homegrown food from around the world!

So a recap of the weeks harvesting, mostly a lot of baby lettuce, which is good considering that Organic Spring Mix is over $5 a pound at the store and I can eat at least two pounds a week.  I've been tossing viola blossoms into the salad mix too. I tried my big purple pansies and they were OK but nothing to brag about. The violas have a slightly sweet taste with a lingering floral essence. They are more bite sized, too.

Baby lettuce and Easter Egg Radishes

Another day there were several Easter Egg Radishes to pull along with the baby lettuces.

Radish, mizuna, spinach, lettuce

On Sunday there was another radish, some mizuna and some baby spinach in addition to the lettuce.  There was also 2 ounces of little tomatoes. I've moved the tomato pot into the greenhouse for more protection. We haven't had a hard freeze yet but when we do I expect the tomatoes will be done for, even in the greenhouse.

Yellow Marble and Princepe Borghese Tomatoes

Harvest Totals Week of November 21-27
Lettuce and other salad greens   2 pounds, 2 oz.
Easter Egg Radish                                     1.5 oz
Tomatoes                                                   2  oz
TOTAL            2 pounds, 4.5 ounces






Now I know everyone wants to know about the seed giveaway! To read more about how I'm doing this you can read this blog post. To read more about this weeks giveaway go to  my very first Seedy Saturday post.  If you want to get in on the action stop in next week for Seedy Saturday. I am trying to get the Mr. Linky thingy so that others with seeds to give away can join in but have been having technical difficulties. I will keep trying but if not I might allow links in the comments for that day.

So now, the Winner is......drumroll please...... BeeGirl! I'll be sending you an email through your profile, but if you don't get it be sure to contact me with your snail mail address so I can send your beet seeds to you! Congratulations!

HARVEST MONDAY

bowl gourds

Every Monday, Daphne of Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday; a nice little blog hop where gardeners show off what they have harvested during the previous week. I don't always remember to take pictures of everything, besides some of it would be boring. After all, one batch of baby lettuce looks a lot like all the others.

So this week there are these three bowl gourds. I was surprised the seeds sprouted at all, they were about 5 years old, one sprouted and grew quite large. The top gourd in the photo was the first to form, before I went on vacation. While I was gone another one came along and then the last one after I got home. I'm pretty sure the first one will be ok, but the other two are still pretty green, so I'm not sure they are going to dry out well enough, since I planted these fairly late in the season.

Drying Nepeta and baby lettuce

Early on in the week I harvested 5 ounces (wet weight) of catmint, aka catnip and Nepeta. This herb is a nice tea mint and of course if you have cats it will make them crazy ;-)  And of course some baby lettuces.

baby lettuce with Easter Egg radishes

Yesterday I was harvesting lettuce and realized I had also planted some Easter Egg radishes in that bed. The plants didn't really look that big, but when I poked in the dirt around them, there were some radishes.

Harvest totals this week:

Catmint  5 ounces
Lettuce  30 ounces (1.875 pounds)
Radish   1/2 ounce

Garden Tour

south side of the house, green house under construction

Here are some pics of the small back garden along with some progress on the green house. The greenhouse is a pretty simple structure, lengths of PVC are attached to a baseboard with the other end stuck in a hole in a 2x4 that is attached to the side of the house right under eave. About 3 feet down from the top a small board is bolted to the pipe for rigidity and the bottom 5 feet is covered with concrete reinforcing mesh. The helps support the plastic and becomes a trellis in the summer. In this first pictured you can see the nearly dead morning glories and the still trying to grow gourd vine. In this picture you can see the first part of the greenhouse which I got done a few years ago. Right now I'm working on carrying it completely along the south side of the house. Because the garden area is about 3 feet higher than the house and the house eaves are just over 6 feet tall the greenhouse is not very wide. But at least it's something.

Backyard Garden

This is an over view of part of the back garden looking towards the east. The junk pile at the front is the last bed that needs to be dug and put into production, the edge of it is where there was a giant tree stump that took forever to dig out of the way.

yellow beets plant Aug.

Broccoli and Cauliflower seedlings

carrots and clover

baby lettuce and clover

lettuce bed after cutting; Bleushokker peas on left

another bed of lettuce

Today's Harvest: lettuce, beet, tomatoes

Harvest 11-11-11, baby lettuce, yellow marble tomatoes, a yellow beet

Today's harvest is small compared to how much food I actually eat, but things will get bigger and better as I go along. I picked 8 ounces of mixed baby lettuce, 4 ounces of Yellow Marble tomatoes and the biggest beet in the patch. The beet & greens together weighed in at 1 pound, 3 ounces. The root alone weighed 5 ounces.

The root really is that bright of a golden yellow. When cooked it loses most of the color and is a very pale yellow, almost white.  The ratty outer leaves and the tough stalks went to the rabbits; the tender leaves were part of tonight's dinner along with the root which is super sweet and not quite as earthy as red beets I grow.

I don't know the name of this beet and I'm not sure but it might even be a cross between a couple of kinds.You see I bought a mixed package of Heritage beets from Bountiful Gardens probably about 8 years ago. There were several really huge white beets in the mix, which I let go to seed. There might have been a yellow one in there too, I really don't remember now. That would have been about 2005. I still have more than half a pint of seeds left, but germination is beginning to drop off a tad. Most of the seeds sprout, but instead of several plants from one seed ball, they are tending more to just one. Which is OK, it means a lot less thinning for me.  I will probably let some of them go to seed next year, just to replenish the supply.

Also I'd like to draw your attention to the tabs across the top of the page. These are extra pages I've added to the blog which I'll be updating from time to time, especially the amounts harvested and worth of produce but also the varieties I'm growing. That page will eventually be in alpha order, but for now it's a little random. The worth of produce is the price I'd have to pay for a comparable product at the local market.

And since I didn't harvest anything else since Friday, I'll list this post for Harvest Monday over at Daphne's Dandelions, a great place to connect with other gardening bloggers and what they are harvesting from their gardens.

Today's Harvest

Yellow Marble & Princepe Borghese tomatoes

Several tomato plants volunteered in this pot, mostly Yellow Marbles, but surprise, also a Princepe Borghese, an Italian drying tomato. I picked about two ounces of them today.

Lettuce mix, baby carrots, Hopi Purple Pod Beans

Since the days are getting shorter and the nights cooler I know it's just a matter of time until ol' Jack Frost runs by and wipes out the bean plants. So today I picked all the beans and pulled the vines out. I need to get more peas planted. Besides tomatoes today's harvest was 6 ounces of baby lettuce, 2 ounces of baby carrots (roots only) and 5 pounds, 14 ounces of beans in their pods. I don't have time to shell them before I go to work but suspect the shelled weight will be somewhere around 2 1/2 pounds.

Each Monday Daphne's Dandelions has a Harvest Monday post, so I'll add my link over there. Happy Growing! 

Harvesting Has Begun ;-)

Shelly beans, lettuce, beets, Oct 21, 2011

Very strange. I know that I wrote this post yesterday, and that I published it, yet it is not showing up on the blog nor is it in my list of posts or showing up as a draft. Just strangely disappeared. So if in the future you see this twice, you will know it is because the original post magically re-appeared somehow! (edit: I have discovered that somehow the missing post has appeared on my art blog. Have no idea at all how I managed to do that!)

Anyway this was my harvest Friday, 2 pounds, 6 ounces of Hopi Purple Pod beans that shelled out to 8 ounces of beans, 3 ounces of mixed baby lettuces and 1 pound 12 ounces of beets & greens, the roots alone were 10 ounces. All of it quite yummy! Oh I love my garden!

Fresh raw Hopi Purple Pod Beans

Some folks are puzzled by the term 'shelly beans'. This refers to eating fresh those beans that otherwise you would eat as dry beans, like pintos, kidneys, black beans, etc. As you can see I picked some pods that weren't as mature as they should have been and the beans are a little small. The pink ones are about right. The ideal time to pick shelly beans is when they have completely filled the pod and the pod walls have thinned out but are not yet beginning to dry up.

FIRST HARVEST!

Misticanza; baby lettuces, first harvest

Woot, a few days ago I made my first harvest of baby lettuces, yummy! I was able to pick about 2 ounces, enough for a salad and a few days later picked about another 2 ounces.

violas

The violas in the tub by the front gate are really doing well. They are edible and I will be adding them to my salads, just because it is fun to eat flowers ;-)

Around the Place

baby lettuce mix

I thought today I'd just give you a few pictures of things happening around here.  The baby lettuces are taking off. Botanical Interests has many varieties of organic lettuce seed for you to try; I love all the colors, flavors and textures available!

Bleushokker Soup Peas

The Bleushokkers were the first peas to go in this year and are doing well. I grew them for the first time a few years ago. You can read a review of them and 5 other peas varieties that I wrote over on Associated Content.  I'm really looking forward to pea season this year with the Bleushokkers, snow peas and green and purple snap peas.

Along the south side of the house

I whacked down some of the weed trees along the south side of the house. I would like to get the greenhouse finished along there but I don't know if that is going to happen before it gets cold this year. Still so many things to do!

Heavenly Blue Morning Glories

The morning glories are still going strong; can you see the white gourd blossoms mingled in with them?

Gourd blossom peeks out from under the morning glories

potatoes growing in a pot

My potatoes growing in pots are doing ok but not the best. The ones I planted in the garden beds basically croaked while I was on vacation, there was a 100+ heat wave while I was gone and they just didn't get enough water. Better luck next year!

planting bed

 







I divided this bed up into sections for planting. In it I planted Bloomsdale longstanding spinach, Golden Globe yellow turnips, Easter Egg radishes, Western Front kale, mixed lettuces, mache, mizuna and chard. The turnips and radishes are planted in the dividing lines. After watering I covered  it with a row cover to keep out the birds.

stone steps in the creek

Last weekend I also worked down in the creek. I'm on the down stream side of the culverts. The July 4th storm washed a lot of dirt out of this area.  Since part of it was washed out anyway and a very steep drop to the bottom I decided to make some steps to make it easier to get up and down. I'm also working on the walls around the culverts.

stone walls in the creek