Monday Recap: Out With The Old, In With The New

For the last couple of weeks it seems like I have been replanting a lot. It started in the blackberry patch. My wife and I decided we wanted to get rid of some of the older blackberries to make room for gooseberries and rhubarb. I have a couple of rhubarb plants already but they are not in a great location and not doing as well as they should. So we dug up the old (blackberries) and planted four plants each of gooseberry and rhubarb. We have Amish Red, Hinnomaki Red, Captivator and Invicta gooseberries. And we have one Canada Red Rhubarb while the rest are Green Victoria. I left the old rhubarb plants so we can harvest them until the new ones get established.

Other replanting has involved harvesting. As I harvest lettuce in the greenhouse, I have been replanting with leaf amaranth. The amaranth should hold up to the summer heat in the greenhouse better than most greens. The variety in the below photo is Miriah, and it has red veined leaves that can be eaten raw or cooked. I have another red-leafed variety called Polish that I will be planting later for the greens.

As the spinach has bolted, I have been harvesting it and replanting too. I set out cucumbers in the greenhouse bed, and I have been planting celery in one of the coldframe beds. The celery was started back in early March and the plants are nice sized now. The rest of the spinach will be replaced by basil when those plants are ready. It’s been too cold to set out basil yet.

My wife made a Spinach Pie with some of the spinach I harvested. She usually uses some of the frozen spinach when she makes it throughout the year, but this time we had fresh. I love this dish, and it was one of the many great recipes she brought to our partnership. As I said when I posted the recipe, it’s not exactly a quiche, and not exactly a tarte, so we just call it spinach pie! There was enough spinach in the colander in the below photo for the pie plus some for the freezer.

The asparagus bed certainly isn’t going to be replanted anytime soon. It’s alive and well and still in the prime of its life. My wife has been harvesting spears daily, and we’ve hauled in 13 pounds of it so far this year during the first four weeks of harvesting. I roasted some the other night, drizzled with some olive oil and sprinkled with kosher salt and some dried herbs.

We’ve been enjoying sweet potatoes from storage. They are still sweet and tasty, and even the one in the below photo (Beauregard) with considerable vole damage was still in great shape some seven months after digging. It was one of the bigger ones, weighing in at a little over two pounds. I had a hard time getting all of it in the photo! It will soon be time to plant this years crop, and I have slips ready to go when the soil warms up a bit.

I know some folks might be thinking “are they really going to eat that rodent-damaged sweet potato?” And of course the answer is a resounding YESSSSS! We ate it with gusto, after I trimmed away the bad spots. Actually we ate it roasted with a little olive oil and rosemary, and it was good to the last bite. If you look closely in the below photo you can see the teeth marks from the vole. I am just happy they didn’t eat the whole thing, because sometimes there’s nothing left to harvest.

Not ready for harvest yet are blueberries, but the bushes are loaded with little blueberries. I am really looking forward to fresh ones, probably beginning next month.

I’ll close with some images of something else that’s new and blue, and not quite ready for prime time. These baby bluebirds hatched last week. The below photo was taken on Tuesday, when they were just hatching out. One egg hadn’t even hatched at that time. Notice the empty space in the nest around them.

I got the next image yesterday, five days later. The babies have really grown in that time, starting to fill up the nest, and you can see the beginnings of feathers. The eyes are still closed, but they should begin opening in the next day or so. They grow up so fast! I have been putting up boxes and watching baby bluebirds for close to thirty years now, and I will never cease to be amazed at watching the miracle of life unfold in a little nest box.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing a bit of what’s going on here about now. I’ll be back soon with more happenings from HA!