Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. My harvests are certainly pretty repetitive these days, but I’m not complaining. It’s my wife’s turn to cook, and I always give her a list of what’s ready in the garden. “It’s salad season” I told her, with lots of lettuce to be cut and more sizing up in the garden. The lettuce in the below photo is from the salad boxes in the greenhouse, and I think they wound up in chalupas.
mixed lettuce from greenhouse
I cut the last head of the Winter Marvel butterhead lettuce for a main course salad we had yesterday. Some of the leaves near the ground were deteriorating, and I wanted to save the head before I lost it all. The lettuce I planted last month is about ready to start cutting, and spring rains have it growing quickly.
Winter Marvel lettuce
I also harvested some of the White Russian kale I have growing in one of the cold frame beds. This kale has proven to be one of the best tasting kale varieties I have grown, and it is a prolific grower as well. These plants are just beginning to flower, and I cut a few of the rapini as well as the leaves.
White Russian kale
The kale joined up with our 2015 sweet potatoes to make Kale and Sweet Potato Hash. This is without a doubt our ‘new favorite thing’ and I could eat it practically every day. I don’t want to get burned out on it though, so we limit it to perhaps once every couple of weeks. We made this using some of our 2015 orange, white and purple sweet potatoes from storage.
Kale and Sweet Potato Hash
I pulled the last of the overwintered spinach from the cold frame beds. This one is Viroflay, the last to bolt of the o/p types I usually grow. There was almost two pounds of it, and I blanched and froze it for later use.
harvest of Viroflay spinach
My wife usually harvests the asparagus but she ‘let’ me cut it on Saturday. It turned out to be a bumper harvest, as I found over a pound of it ready. Saturday was a warm day, and the heat really seems to make it pop up, and it grows inches a day. We’ve harvested over 19 pounds of it so far in 2016. We’ve been enjoying it all the usual ways, including stir-fried and grilled.
asparagus harvest
She grilled some to go with Reuben sandwiches we had for lunch yesterday. Hers was meatless, while I added some Prosciutto di Parma on mine. Both were made with a mix of our kohlrabi and cabbage kraut, along with homemade rye bread and Swiss cheese.
Reuben sandwich with grilled asparagus
The largest harvest of the week turned out to be inedible, or at least not edible to me. Plenty of the soil micro-organisms are at work eating it up though. I started digging the first finished compost out of the compost bins I built last year. I’ve been spreading it on the beds as I prep them for planting, and last week I dug six bushels of it out to put on the garden. As you can see in the below photo, there’s still a lot in there.
finished compost in the composter
The right bin is full to the brim with organic material. I need to finished digging the finished compost out of the left bin so I can turn the other one over into it. There’s always lots of organic material this time of year as we do spring cleanup work (aka weed pulling). I’m guessing there’s more finished compost on the bottom of that side. That’s a good thing, since I use a lot of compost this time of year.
compost bin full of organic material
Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to share, add your name and blog link to Mr Linky below. And be sure and check out what everyone is harvesting!
Wow, 19 pounds of asparagus already and the season just started, I am so envious. Only 2 of the 10 asparagus plants I planted last year came back, now sure why the others did not make it.
That is a shame about the asparagus plants. They are normally quite hardy I think, at least mine were when they were young.
That is some nice looking compost – and a mighty fine composter set-up! I’ve got the same chore this coming weekend … move the useable compost elsewhere so I can turnover the other pile.
Busy times in the garden for you. Great composting set up and yes, compost is a “harvest.” Thanks for including. Salad season is always a welcomed time.
Oh joy, 19 pounds of asparagus! As much as I dearly love the summer veggies and pine for them when they aren’t fresh from the garden, there’s something so satisfying about spring greens, they grow so quickly that they are nearly instant gratification. It sounds like asparagus is the same if it can grow inches per day.
Mmm, your meals always look so nice. I wondered what the red cubes were until I saw you have red sweet potato.
I started using up some of my leaf mould this week, to mulch the fruit bushes. I get some funny looks when I’m harvesting the piles of leaves from the streets in autumn, hehe.
I’ve also got to empty the older compost bay (so I can turn over the next one into it)….must be that time of year.
Lettuce is fine but asparagus is divine. What a haul! Wish I gad a permanent garden so I could plant some. And your compost bin is still looking brand new. At the community garden we use pallets to build bins. Turning the piles is one of the spring tasks I usually try to delegate to someone else during our work weekends, but due to low turnout I got stuck with it this year.
It’s a busy time of year and it looks like you’ve been hard at work. Your spinach and lettuce are looking delicious. It’s early in the season and you are eating so well.
I still have 4 long beds to plant and it’s supposed to rain for the next 2 weeks. Ah well, looks like the end of May for the bush beans, peppers, and eggplant till they can get in the garden.
Dave-
Well, it looks like you did a good job harvesting that asparagus your wife “let” you cut 🙂 Your lunch looks amazing and all homegrown or homemade to boot! So funny that we are both in high salad times. We better enjoy it while it is here although if I am not too burned out this Fall I want to try a Fall planting for the first time. Have a great gardening – and cooking – week!
Although Asparagus is readily available in our shops all year round now (mostly shipped in from Peru), there is nothing more satisfying for a home gardener than to be able to pick Asparagus from their own garden! And it tastes so much better when it is dead fresh. I’d dearly love to have 19 pounds of it to play with…