Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. I’m happy to have a few fresh harvests from last week I can share. I’ve been prepping the cold frame beds for planting, which means I need to clear out whatever is growing in them now, ready or not. I pulled overwintered kale from one bed. This is Meadowlark, a curly leaf type I grew for the first time last year. The leaves are tender and tasty, but as my wife noted the curly types are harder to clean than some of the others I grow. I’ll factor that in for planning and planting this year. Thankfully it was relatively clean of aphids.
harvest of Meadowlark kale
Another cold frame bed had overwintered lettuce. It’s a mix of varieties, and I recognize Red Sails, Jester and Pele in there. It’s been nice having lettuce again for salads.
overwintered lettuce
And I pulled more kale plus a bit of green garlic from another bed. The green garlic volunteered from some I grew the year before, while the kale was from several plants that overwintered in that cold frame. These harvests cleared the way for me to replant two cold frame beds with kohlrabi and lettuce. Another bed will get kale and other greens once they are ready to plant. That leaves one more bed to plant and I haven’t yet decided what will go in it.
kale and green garlic
It’s not a harvest, but I baked up a loaf of naturally-leavened sourdough bread in the clay baker this week. It was a whole wheat loaf using fresh-ground Red Fife wheat, and we enjoyed it in a number of ways including crostini and toast. I want to make this bread in a loaf pan and see how it does that way. I mixed up the dough last night and I will bake it sometime this morning, and I will let you know how it turned out. I don’t yet have a good sourdough sandwich loaf recipe and I’m hoping this will be the one.
whole wheat sourdough loaf
And last but not least I want to share some news from nature. It appears we have a nesting pair of bluebirds using one of the PVC nest boxes. We’ve had bluebirds hanging around all winter, and we see them at the suet feeders fairly often. This pair is off to an early start on nesting, and I hope the weather stays favorable for the eggs to hatch. I’ll be keeping a close eye on them for sure!
bluebird nest with 5 eggs
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!
We sowed some lettuce seed but the slugs took a fancy to the seedlings. If slugs were brighter they would let the seeds grow as they would then produce more to eat and we could share.
I have no harvests to show this week, Dave. Last week I picked so much PSB that it has lasted us all week – and in any case I dare not show a harvest of only PSB 3 weeks in a row! Our herbs are coming up strong now, especially Mint and Chives, and we have used a bit of those, but I don’t have any photos. Your sourdough loaf look great! I would like to be able to get bigger air holes in my loaves, to produce a more open texture of crumb. What do you think determines that?
Hi Mark,
One thing that makes for bigger holes in the crumb is a wetter dough. The sourdough bread in the photo was made with 75% hydration (12 oz water/16 oz flour). It makes the dough a bit harder to work with, but does make for that lighter, airy interior.
Thanks, I’ll experiment with that. So far I have mostly followed recipes (which usually give water in millilitres), but I feel ready to go solo…
This blog has been such an inspiration to me in my first year of growing! I cleared my cold frames last month and they are growing on nicely now. I did a video tour of my all year round allotment that might be of interest to other harvesters and another video that shows a typical day’s crop, taken yesterday.
Ahh, nature – those bird eggs are beautiful! And I’ll say the same for the bread, yum! Don’t have much going on here yet but nice to see what others have going on.
Your garden is so far ahead compare to mine and weare supposed to be in the same plating zone. Will be awhile before I harvest green garlic.
Good luck to the bluebirds! What fun it must be to see those beautiful eggs.
The Meadowlark kale looks like a less frilly version of the Lark’s Tongue kale that I tried a few times. That was a lovely and tasty kale but I gave up on it because it always got to be super infested with aphids, bleah.
Beautiful loaf of bread.
Gorgeous photos…wow the bread and bluebird eggs…cool.
I’ve been clearing beds too and getting the last harvests of some crops…making way for new veggies, hello springtime.
Wow, you’re clearing out your cold frames already. Spring is always so busy busy. Your lettuces and greens look pretty amazing for having overwintered. And the crust on that loaf looks lovely.
I spent the day potting up seedlings into individual containers, a very satisfying few hours spent.
Oh, I totally agree on how much more difficult curly kale is to clean. I left the netting off the bed for a couple of weeks late last fall thinking the cabbage whites were gone and the number of caterpillars I found when I washed it – yuck! I’m still growing some but I’ll not be taking that net off this year! And how exciting with the bluebirds!
My kale has been decimated by a combo of tiny white moth (I assume white cabbage moth), and slugs/snails. Your kale looks lovely. I do like seeing your baking experiments. I haven’t had any luck with the sourdough starter (killed two), and even when I did bake, I made a very good rock.
The bluebird eggs are such a luminous blue colour, I don’t think we have them in Australia. I’ve only seen the superb fairy wren (male), but I don’t know what colour the eggs are!
Hi – a lettuce question: do you grow both Winter Marvel and Winter Density (I see both mentioned on your site)? If so, which of the two would be your preferred recommendation for overwintering? I’m in zone 5b.
Thank you!
Hi Susan, despite the name Winter Density does not usually overwinter for me here. Winter Marvel does well though, and has overwintered the last two winters in a cold frame bed. I got my seed from Fedco.
Hi Dave – thanks for the reply! (the reason for my confusion was that Winter Density is listed in your annual vegetable lists, and Winter Marvel in your harvest posts)
It looks like I need to update my veggie list! Thanks for catching that. I found some other omissions too.