Harvest Monday

homegrown salad!

Well now another Harvest Monday rolls around; gosh some weeks just seem to be flying by and I'm not always taking a picture of every harvest. Linking up to our hostess, Daphne's Dandelions, hop on over and visit with gardeners from around the world.

Of course I harvested salad this week, although the lettuce harvest is a bit light, there being a slight gap between the old lettuce getting too bitter to eat and the new baby lettuce being big enough to pick. Besides lettuce there is sorrel, lambs quarters, chives, radish and viola blossoms.

first strawberries

The straw mulch helped keep these strawberries from rotting, but some kind of bug or maybe a small bird was tasting them. However they were ever so sweet and delicious. Can't wait until I have more plants and can get more than a taste!









Besides these of course there were eggs, some greens for cooking (red mustard, lambs quarters, chard) and lots of peas now that the bed of Mammoth Melting Sugar are producing.

storm damage

And the storm we had a week or so ago caused some shredding of the plastic on the greenhouse.  You can see the Dwarf Grey Sugar peas here. They are even more pathetic looking now. I've been picking off yellowing seed pods and when I've got most of them then I'll feed the vines to the rabbits and chickens and plant something else in the tubs.

You can see more stuff going on around the garden in my post from Saturday and the one from Wednesday.

Also, I've gotten my harvest totals, feed totals and chicken page all caught up. A quick scan of this month's harvests tells me that we are likely going to be at about half of what we had in March. I think this is mostly because I don't have my lettuce succession down yet, so will need to work on that.

Harvest Monday

Salad mix Jan. 30, 2012

Welcome to Harvest Monday, a lovely blog hop sponsored by Daphne at Daphne's Dandelions. Stop by and check out what gardener's all around the world are harvesting.

I harvested some lovely salads this week. The large 24" pots of Salad Bowl lettuce in the green house are getting big enough to pick, (4 oz from one picking) the chickweed is starting to take off and the Lamb's Quarters are also picking up.

This weeks salads have contained lettuce, red mustard, chickweed, Lamb's Quarters, cilantro, sorrel, violas, violets, spinach, chard, arugula and radishes.

baby carrots

I picked another small batch of baby carrots as well.  The totals for January were 7.84 lbs of produce with a  retail value of $29.36

In another experiment I have been trying to cut some clover, edible weeds, bolting arugula, even apple tree trimmings, each day to feed to the rabbits. Sometimes there isn't much and sometimes my work schedule keeps me from being able to do this. I've been recording the results in the tab up top about animal feed harvested.


Interesting that feeding less than 30 pounds wet weight of fresh feed resulted in a savings of 56 pounds of purchased feed...... Perhaps fresh organic feed is more satisfying. I will continue to experiment and record the results. I do intend to breed one or two of the does to kindle in March, if I can get their cages fixed. So we'll see how that pans out with the fresh feeding.

*edit* I've realized that there is a terrible typo in my figures. There are only 4 rabbits, not five so the feed savings is 25 pounds of feed.... 

Tally Ho! November 2, 2009

Tally Ho!

November 2, 2009 at 3:41 am

Well, here’s the numbers for October:
Eggs, 107
Produce, 45.19 pounds. Mostly beans, squash with some pepper, tomato, eggplant and sweet potato. Also our Bloody Butcher corn. Still have to shell out and test our popcorn.
Since there’s been so much trouble with the wildlife there won’t be much to harvest for awhile, need to get busy planting.

Tally HO! And in the Kitchen August 1, 2009

Tally HO! And in the Kitchen

August 1, 2009 at 2:20 pm

WOWSERS! The tally for July is in and a big surprise!
Eggs, 102, which is down a bit from previous months. That isn’t really a surprise, since it has been so hot, the hens have been in a bit of a moult, which always lowers production.
alfalfa & comfrey, which I grow for the rabbits and chickens: 4.8 pounds
Produce: 101.75 That is the big surprise. The bulk of the poundage has been potatoes, tomatoes and onions, but includes strawberries, several kinds of beans, swiss chard, tomatillos, peppers, cucumbers, Tromboccino squash, eggplant, basil, apples, watermelon, mesquite beans [which will be ground into a flour when really crispy dry,  high in protien with a sweet lemon taste] and baby corn.
And there is more to come. It has been too hot for the lima beans to set pods, but as soon as it cools off a bit I think we’ll have lots, the cukes and yard long beans are just now hitting their stride. The baby corn is just coming in, to the girls delight [they've been waiting all summer for baby corn and are eating it raw!] The Kabocha squash will probably tote up a lot of poundage, there’s the yellow Moon & Stars and the Jubilee watermelons, the cantaloupes, a couple of kinds of pole beans, peppers and eggplants, to say nothing of the fact that there are still potatoes in their pots.  While it’s been too hot for the large paste tomatoes to set new fruit, once the daytime temps stay under 90, they should set a lot.
So it is quite possible for Aug and Sept to show even more poundage than July.
Each time I go to the grocery store my list gets shorter and shorter, partly due to the produce coming in from the garden. Part of it is because I am making more and more things from scratch at home. For instance milk was very cheap when I went shopping yesterday so I picked up an extra gallon and it is ‘ripening’ right now to make cottage cheese. I have found a really delicious brand of yogurt and while I am also going to begin making my own, especially when milk is cheap, it was on sale too so I got extra. The extra carton is now draining to make ‘yogurt cheese’. This is a soft and creamy spreadable ‘cheese’ to which I will add fresh herbs and eat on crackers.
Peelings, cores and bruised bits of apples sit in a gallon jar becoming vinegar. The cucumber crop is in various jars becoming fermented dill pickles. Scott eats tons of mayo so that is another one I’ll start making at home. He also loves garlic and I have a garlic mayo recipe to try out on him.
I’ve really been disappointed with BBQ sauce and salad dressings since I started really reading labels. Also with ketchup. They all have tons of corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup in them along with chemicals I can’t pronounce.  This makes most of them way too sweet and of course any non organic corn product is likely to be genetically modified, something I don’t want to eat. So I have been experimenting with making my own sauces. One really good one has been garlic & ginger. When I get it tweaked just right I’ll post it here.

Tally Ho! June 2009 July 13, 2009

Tally Ho! June 2009

July 13, 2009 at 12:26 am

I forgot to post the harvest numbers for June, so here they are:
Eggs: 104
Produce 24.37 pounds, lots of the small fruited tomatoes like Imur Prior Beta, Princepe Borhese, Yellow Marble, Snow White, Red Currant and Yellow Pear, some potatoes, Yukon Gold, Purple Peruvian, Red LaSoda. Green onions, lambs quarters, chard, a pound of wheat, some purple beans, some herbs of different sorts, a couple of Black Beauty eggplants.
Alfalfa & Comfrey for the rabbits and chickens, 2.3 pounds fresh wet weight.
Just a glance at the numbers for July, I think we are already close to the total for June, so the total should be a lot bigger this month. While the small fruited tomatoes continue to come in, the big paste tomatoes are coloring up. I’ve harvested the white storage onions, and they are curing now. There’s more potatoes to come and more little purple and yellow beans coming on. Oh and don’t forget the cukes! They are just getting started.
Even though it’s 100+ degrees this week, it’s time to start thinking about the fall garden and what we want to grow during the cool season. I’ve already made a list and soon it will be time to start the seeds.
So How’s your garden growing? Are you free of the grocery store yet? Beat the high price of food by growing your own!