Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. The harvests are small in number this time of year but much appreciated. We have surely been enjoying the lettuce, and I made several cuttings last week that cleared out the cold frame bed. It’s the dark red mini romaine Rosaine plus the spotted Pele in the below harvest.
Pele and Rosaine lettuce
And on Saturday I cut the last of the Simpson Elite and Red Sails for a wilted lettuce salad my wife made yesterday. I have more lettuce growing in the greenhouse but it will not be ready for another couple of weeks.
Simpson Elite and Red Sails lettuce
I’ve all but given up on most of the fall cabbage plants. I cut three of the Tiara that were starting to look bad after all the freezing weather. All three weighed barely two pounds total, enough for a quart of sauerkraut.
Tiara cabbage
The fall planted kale is doing much better though. I made a cutting of Dazzling Blue kale for a batch of Kale and Sweet Potato Hash last week.
Dazzling Blue kale
The radishes are still doing well, and more are sizing up. I pulled these Sweet Baby radishes with hopes of starting a batch of radish kimchi (kkakdugi) this week.
Sweet Baby radishes
And the mizuna is unfazed by the cold weather too. I made another cutting of it, requested by my wife for a frittata she made for lunch yesterday. I believe some will be going in a pot of soup here soon as well.
green mizuna
We have had quite a few woodpeckers visiting our suet feeders lately. I caught this Red-bellied Woodpecker one day outside my ‘office’ window. We also have quite a few of the smaller Downy Woodpeckers at the feeders. And I saw a Cooper’s Hawk swoop in one day near the feeders and catch an unidentified small bird for a meal. I chose not to capture any images of that encounter. The feeders were empty for a few hours after that, but eventually the birds came back and I haven’t seen the hawk since.
Red-bellied Woodpecker
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!
That’s a beautiful woodpecker. We don’t have one like that here. We haven’t done well with lettuce this year for some reason.
Oh, I did miss having a good lettuce harvest this year – was just looking over the numbers and they were truly dismal with the rabbits enjoying it much more than we did. We have harvested lettuce into December a few times in the past so can fully appreciate how much you are enjoying the harvest! Good to know that mizuna holds up well to the cold weather – must keep that in mind when I do a fall lettuce bed in the future.
I am missing having lettuce right now since I didn’t do a very good job of getting late fall and winter salad greens going. There’s some arugula in the garden and that’s about it.
Great shot of the woodpecker. They used to come by and raid the seed feeders that I put up for other birds but I don’t put up seed feeders anymore because they attracted too many rodents. Maybe I should put up a suet feeder, the rats probably won’t be able to get to those.
The tree rats (aka squirrels) have been getting in our seed feeders. So I bought a hot sauce treatment to put on the sunflower seeds. The birds love it, but mammals don’t. Earlier this year I had raccoons taking the suet off, feeder and all! I started putting out a hot pepper suet and that stopped them too.
Your kale leaves are huge compared with mine, lovely. And I did harvest some mizuna too, which Jan made into a frittata, hurray (no photo evidence unfortunately!).
Your photo of the woodpecker is amazing, what beautiful detail. I haven’t seen one close up for ages.
I’ve been fortunate to see the woodpecker(s) almost daily. The feeder is just outside my window.
Your lettuces look incredible and I like the shape of your radishes. It’s too bad that the freezes have been so hard on your cabbages. None of my radishes have headed up yet and they’ve been in the ground almost 2 months, probably not enough sun.
I’m trying to grow kale for the first time after seeing them do so well in your garden, they’re all in the baby leaf stage at this point though.
What a beautiful woodpecker! Quite different to the ones we have here. Interesting that hot sauce deters squirrels etc, so maybe chilli powder will keep mice off our beetroots and carrots next year. Hope so!
Your lettuce harvests are wonderful