Harvest Monday May 9, 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!