So far this year the Asian greens have truly been star performers in our garden. I had grossly underestimated the amount of this vegetable we harvested in the last two years. I estimated we got about 10 pounds last year, but it’s only April and already we’ve eaten almost 11 pounds of the tasty greens! I’ll have some planted all summer, and then in Fall it will become another cool season staple for us. They are truly Vegetables For All Seasons – dependable, quick and easy to grow, as well as nutritious.
pac choi and other greens
This week I harvested some Violetta and Mei Qing pac chois, along with some tatsoi and mizuna. I stir-fried the tender, mild mizuna for a solo lunch I had, while the rest went into another stir fry of mixed greens and mushrooms.
We are also harvesting a few spears of asparagus almost each day. We got over a pound of it this week alone. It’s all been grilled so far.
Another big part of the harvest this week was some kale that overwintered in the main vegetable garden. This was late planted, after birds killed all of my earlier fall planting of kale and collard greens. I managed to keep the birds away from about a dozen plants, but we got nothing at all from them last year.
I left them on their own for the winter, and I was surprised to get almost a pound and a half of leaves from the mostly Dwarf Siberian kale. This kale is a good candidate for growing under tunnels next winter. It was showing no signs of bolting yet, but I pulled the plants to make room for other crops.
overwintered kale
I used the kale in a favorite recipe called Carolina Kale from one of my Moosewood cookbooks that features it in a spicy concoction of tomatoes, onions, garlic, cumin and hot peppers. (Note to self: dried serranos are even hotter than fresh ones, and there is NO need to taste them to confirm that fact). The kale was quite tasty, after my mouth recovered from it’s Serrano Encounter.
Speaking of bolting, the spinach in the greenhouse is showing the first sign of bolting. I still managed to get another 25oz of it, which makes almost 8 pounds of it this year. We ate some and I froze another package for use later.
I also got a nice lettuce harvest, picking the first of the many Radichetta lettuces I planted, along with some Ruby and Green Star. The Radichetta will get even bigger than the plant below, but it is still a nice sized lettuce plant. It has an exceptional taste as well. It’s one of my favorite “finds” of recent years.
Radichetta lettuce
So this weeks harvest tally is:
Asian greens(18 oz)
Asparagus(21 oz)
Kale(21 oz)
Spinach(25 oz)
Lettuce and salad greens (22 oz)
Total Harvest 6.7 lbs
To see other gardeners’ harvests, or to add your own, visit Harvest Monday at Daphne’s Dandelions.