Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. I am again seeing some new veggies in the harvest basket, and they are welcome additions indeed! We got our first ripe tomatoes of the year, not surprisingly from Sungold. These first ones wound up on a salad. It was just a handful, but it looks like there’s more to come soon.
Sungold tomatoes
And I got the first snap beans of the season. I only planted a short row of Derby to give us an early taste of beans before the pole beans come on. Some of the pole beans are showing blossoms, so it won’t be too much longer before they start setting on beans. These first beans wound up getting skillet roasted, and they were tasty and tender cooked that way.
Derby green beans
I pulled some of the spring onions that were bulbing up into full sized ones. I don’t think many of them are going to get real big this year, but that’s okay. I’m still learning how to grow onions, though I think I have found three varieties that do well here in our climate. This year I planted Candy, Superstar/Sierra Blanca and Red of Tropea, and it’s the sweet Candy in the below photo. Since we rarely use a whole full-sized onion at once, I have to say these are really a good usable size.
young Candy onions
Blackberries are still coming on, with Apache joining the Natchez berries. We’ve been enjoying eating them fresh, and freezing what we don’t eat. I really appreciate the thornless canes which makes picking them painless.
Apache and Natchez blackberries
And the greenhouse cucumbers are still coming on too. We’ve mostly been enjoying them made into refrigerator pickles, though one wound up in a batch of gazpacho I made for lunch one day last week. The big ones are Corinto and the smaller pickler is Harmonie.
greenhouse cucumbers
I cut another big head of Emerald Jewel broccoli last week. The spring planted broccoli has turned out better than I expected. I didn’t get those perfectly rounded crowns like you see in the seed catalogs, but the broccoli was tasty and tender and plentiful. This one weighed almost two pounds, though some of that was a big stem that we didn’t eat.
Emerald Jewel broccoli
I cut another head of cabbage last week too, this time one called Tiara I’m growing for the first time. Johnny’s Selected Seeds says it is a replacement for Gonzalez, which is a cabbage that never did that well for me here. Tiara did great though, and made a big head that weighed over three pounds. In the below photo it’s hanging out with Sunstripe, White Scallop and Clarimore summer squashes. The squash plants have been producing too, and if they took a little break I wouldn’t mind!
cabbage and summer squash
I don’t photograph everything we bring in from the garden. I harvested a couple more of the giant Kossak kohlrabies, bringing our total haul to over 50 pounds so far this spring. I made another batch of kimchi with one of them, and we’ve been roasting them almost daily for a side dish. I had about 2.5 pounds of kohlrabi before I brined it, and it was enough to make a quart and a pint jar of the kimchi. I have some more daikon radishes ready to pull and some of them will likely wind up fermented for kimchi. I have really come to like both the kohlrabi and radish kimchi, and it makes for a crunchy and spicy side dish. I had some of the radish kimchi for dinner last night, and the Sweet Baby radishes I used for that batch turned a pinkish purple color and were crunchy, tart and spicy.
kohlrabi kimchi
I’m continuing my experiments with using Kamut grain for bread. I bought some more of the whole grains so I am now well stocked for baking. Last week I made a Golden Kamut Bread that featured a bit more than 50% of freshly ground Kamut flour. Mine got considerably more loft than the photo on the King Arthur website, which is a good thing since I was afraid it might be dense. When I make it again I want to try using the White Kamut Flour I got from Breadtopia to replace the KA all-purpose flour in the recipe. I’m working my way up to baking the 60% Kamut Bread recipe in Chad Robertson’s Tartine Book No. 3.
Golden Kamut Bread
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!
Great and varied harvest as usual. Over 50 pounds of kohlrabi so far, that’s a lot of kohlrabi. Besides roasting and making kimchi what else do you do with the harvest? Do the roasted kohlrabi freeze well?
I’ve never tried freezing the kohhrabi. They do keep well fresh though.
Congrats on first tomatoes and beans. I wanted to take the Sungold right out of the photograph and pop them into my mouth! Who cares about perfectly rounded broccoli heads; cut up they look and taste the same, right? And I love those colorful summer squash pictures you make. Those onions do look to be the perfect size for individual use.
We had broccoli and cabbage but there the similarities end. We will have to,wait for our Sungold but we did have some firsts.
Great harvests! Way too hot here for broccoli right now. I’ll seed some in August when it starts cooling off a little. Same with cabbage. right now more greens, carrots and beets to go in as soon as we get a little rain.
I’m regretting not planting some Tropea onions this year, they are just the right size for a vegetable stir fry, and the storage onions are not ready yet. Nice blackberries and tomatoes. I like the flavor of Gonzalez cabbage but the heads have always been a little small here, looks like Tiara may be a good substitute.
Enviable harvests! You’re way ahead of my San Diego garden. Limited in space, I have to wait for the winter crops (beets, carrots, celery, garlic) to finish their long run. Nice to see how well the thornless blackberry varieties do for you. Good strategy to do the bush beans along with the pole beans to get an early harvest.
Your harvests are so generous now, such a great variety of veggies to enjoy. I usually let my broccoli get to be a bit more loose headed than the commercial growers do. I’ve found that I prefer them that way. The first ripe tomato is still a long way off here.
I wish I could grow broccoli like that. ‘Heading’ types of brassica don’t do very well for me so I’ve realised its best to focus on leafy types.
Those are big cucumbers! The one I’m going to pick tomorrow is tiny in comparison. I have a couple of tomatoes to pick too, not as many as your lovely sungold.
I love this time of year with so many varieties of crop coming up all at once; makes for some interesting meals. Fantastic harvest this week, Dave!
That’s amazing you’re still picking broccoli even with all this heat and your cabbages are doing so well. I love seeing all your cucumbers and squashes. I had to work through the weekend and today so couldn’t post till late.
We have tons of kohlrabi to pick as well, but I’m hoping they’ll keep in the ground. I’ll have to do a bit of canning before I can get to them.
Yes, the tomatoes, that means it’s definitely summer! I hope to harvest some this week or next week!
That many kohlrabi, haha, you could feed an orphanage with those. You must really like them!
Some celebration worthy firsts, especially those yummy tomatoes!! I’m excited that I have some tomatoes developing on the vines now after the VERY slow start this year with our cool spring but it will be a while yet until we see any ripe ones. And that bread looks delish!