HARVEST MONDAY

lettuce, chard, sorrel, spinach, radish, chives, violas

Another Harvest Monday rolls around! I love visiting Daphne's Dandelions and hooking up with gardeners around the world!

 Well the lettuce harvest is lightening up again as some patches are turning bitter and preparing to bolt, while the newer patches are not quite up to speed yet. I need to figure out how to get a steadier supply going and not wait so long between plantings, especially now that the weather is warming up I don't expect a planting will give me as many cuts as when it was cooler. And soon it will be too hot and the seeds won't even sprout.

Mammoth Melting  on the left, Dwarf Grey Sugar, right

The peas in the greenhouse are falling all over the place and loaded with seed. I'm going to start drying them off. The Mammoth Melting Sugar peas planted out in the garden are starting to come on now. You can see how much bigger their pods are compared to the Dwarf Grey. I will probably keep growing the Dwarf Grey though, just because they are really pretty.

Of course I got eggs this week, all the girls are laying so I get 2-4 eggs a day.

Greens

I'm eating two or more dinners of greens a week now too. Red Mustard, chard, spinach and lambs quarters, usually mixed together and cooked up with bacon and onions. I have ripped out the last of the spinach and the lambs quarters in much of the yard are beginning to get tough and stringy, but so far the mustard and chard are holding out.

I finally found my calculator and tallied up March's harvests; 25.56 pounds of produce worth over $60. I don't have an exact $ amount yet as there are a couple of prices I need to check on first. I finally got my taxes finished so now I can maybe finish cleaning off my desk and finding my garden receipts so I can catch up my expense page.

Harvest Monday

Baby Lettuce, viola blossoms, mustard, kale, chickweed, yellow marble tomatoes

Happy New Year! Welcome to Harvest Monday, a blog hop hosted by Daphne at Daphne's Dandelions. Stop by her page and visit with gardeners around the world!

This is my wrap up for 2011. Still harvesting baby lettuces, with bits of kale, chickweed, red mustard, arugula and spinach. The violas and violets are still blooming and amazingly enough the yellow marble tomato plant is still ripening fruit.This was my last harvest of 2011. For 2012 I will be ramping up production in all areas. Next fall should see more greens and root crops as well as cauliflower and broccoli in the fall and early winter. As soon as the weather is warmer there will be beans, squash, tomatoes and corn. Considering that I didn't really plant much until September, I think the garden has done very well.

Total poundage harvest in 2011, 24 pounds, worth about $87 at the grocery store. This was harvested from just 86 square feet of garden space. The garden is of course bigger than  that and there is a lot more planted right now, broccoli, cauliflower and peas, especially, but they are not ready to pick yet. This year I will also be trying to keep track of expenses. At the moment I have plenty of seeds from past years and only really needed to order a few larger tomatoes for processing, some sweet corn and cucumbers. I have really restrained myself when it came to ordering seeds! About the only other thing I will be ordering will be seed potatoes as I intend to grow a large amount of potatoes this year.