Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. Hard to believe it is March already! Ace and I both have birthdays coming up this month, so it’s always a festive time around here, at least for me. I managed to get a couple of small, micro harvests last week. I made another cutting from the Petite Snap Greens I have growing indoors under lights. After snipping I moved them out to the greenhouse where I’m hoping to get another cutting. It’s my first time growing them so we shall see what happens. I also want to plant a few in the ground this spring. It’s just about time to get those seeds going, and I plan on starting them indoors in paper pots.
Petite Snap Greens
I also pulled a few of the I’itoi multiplier onions. They are quite small at this point, more like chives really but very flavorful. I’ve got these growing in several places, including a patch in the greenhouse bed and another group growing outside. The unprotected patch outside made it through our brutal winter unscathed, and are showing quite a bit of green already. I am convinced they are completely hardy in our Zone 6 area, and they are a great addition to the allium lineup here. It looks like the garlic, shallots and potato onions made it through the winter too, and I’ll try and do an update on that later in the month. This batch of onions and the pea shoots went into a stir fry my wife made one night for dinner.
I’itoi onions
We’re continuing to enjoy the sweet potatoes from storage. I baked up one of the Grand Asia potatoes one day for my lunch, to go along with a salmon burger. Grand Asia has a reddish purple skin and sweet, fairly dry white flesh, and is very similar to the Red Japanese cultivar. I usually eat these skin and all, so I am counting it as both a purple and a white vegetable for nutritional purposes! The salmon burger is hanging out on one of my dark rye buns.
baked Grand Asia sweet potato
I baked up a batch of those Dark Rye Potato Buns last week. The recipe calls for cocoa and molasses to give them that dark color. I only made 10 of them (instead of 12) so they would be a tad taller for sandwich use. That was easier than scaling the recipe up, which I may do someday.
Dark Rye Potato Buns
One other homegrown thing we enjoyed last week is some pepitas. I had forgotten we had a few left in the pantry, so I toasted them up to put on a salad yesterday. These came from the Pepitas variety I grew last year, a naked-seeded type which make it easy to process the seeds since they have no hulls. Of course it would be even easier to buy them, but I do enjoying eating things I knew and grew personally!
Pepitas
And last but certainly not least, it’s beginning to look a bit like spring around here. The hellebores are starting to blossom, and the early daffodils are almost in full flower. Nothing says spring to me more than their cheery yellow blooms!
early daffodils blooming
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!
Your petite snap greens live up to their name. The ones I grew in the garden got to be quite large but were still quite good. I ended up trimming the stems away from the leafy parts because they were a bit tough to eat raw but the leafy parts of the tendrils were a nice addition to salads.
I found some purple skinned white fleshed sweet potatoes at the farmer’s market. Wow, are they sweet! I hope the grower has them again next year.
Narcissus is reliable here – nothing eats it! But mine are schizo, some bloom in the fall, some in winter, and others are blooming now, and they are all the same double paper whites.
Some of the stems on the pea greens I cut were beginning to get tough. That will be something to watch when I grow them outdoors this spring.
Multiplier onions are definitely on my wish list for this year!
They are so useful! Mine didn’t get as big as advertised but that’s ok. I rarely use all of a big onion anyway and these are perfect for cooking and seasoning.
Those naked seeded pumpkins are so useful giving us pepitas… one of our favourites and we always include a couple. Even nicer is finding one you had forgoetten about in the store!!
One of the things I love about your blog Dave is the unusual (to me) veg that you grow. I had never heard of pepitas before and now I am going to look for some. Many thanks.
Those daffodils certainly are cheery – love them! That sweet potato looks yum – I’ve decided that I’m going to give them another go this year & have actually ordered slips from a grower out east. We’ll see if I have better luck this time round (and I’ll be taking your advice on not adding any amendments to the soil!)
Mmm the sweet potato looks good – I love eating the skins too. And the rolls sound really nice, I’ve been getting into molasses recently.
Our flowers have emerged from under their blanket of snow and thankfully look, for the most part, reasonably unscathed