Harvest Monday March 5, 2018

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!