Awesome Blossoms

Caper blossoms

Pink Caper Blossoms

The plant is covered with them.

The bees love them.

I love them.

Fragrant

Awesome

What a show!

I'm not harvesting any caper buds this year. I'm just finishing the last jar of the 2011 caper harvest and have about 10 jars full of the 2012 harvest in the refrigerator. This year I'm hoping to get a crop of caper berries. The best part of trying for a caper berry harvest is that I get to enjoy the blossoms. When you harvest the caper buds you have to forgo the flower show. My Croatian plants are in full bloom also but I didn't take any photos this morning because I haven't pulled the ugly weeds that are poking up through the plants.

I must propagate more plants from some cuttings from this bush. This pink flower is unusual and the plant is incredibly productive. I grew this from seeds that I got from a Seed Savers Exchange member who lives in Tuscany. I have about a half dozen plants from those seeds but this is the only one with pink flowers. It's also the most floriferous of the bunch and always produces a nice harvest of buds. But that's a project for next year. In the meantime I'll be enjoying the flowers.

Harvest Monday - May 13, 2013

There's a couple of new items in the harvest basket this week, only one of which I got around to photographing. The entire planting of Early Rapini was ready to harvest, seemingly overnight. It went from tiny little seedlings to harvest in less than a month.

Early Rapini

The seedlings were so small back on April 12 that I didn't even bother to take a full on photo of them, you can see the tiny things in the corner of my shot of the napa cabbages. I was not at all optimistic about getting a harvest from this planting, the little seedlings were rather slow growing and stunted in their starter pot but I planted them out anyway. It was such a surprise to get nearly 2 pounds of greens from those little things! I blanched the whole lot and then sauteed them with a chopped up whole head of newly harvested garlic and some bacon, then served it on top of a bowl of "Floriani" whole grain polenta - oh yum, was that good.

I also harvested some nice sized baby carrots that I didn't get around to photographing. Those were perfect for cooking whole, I just trimmed the tops off and lightly scrubbed them. Then I braised them in a mix of butter and home made chicken stock, simmered until the stock and butter mixture reduced to a glaze and the carrots were tender and finished it with a splash of vinegar.

Chioggia beets and Golden beets made it into the basket again this week. The Red Janice garlic was looking really bad, the tops were starting to brown and fall over and I thought that they were sick with something. I pulled a plant and found a nice head! Whoa, these babies were ready to harvest, I was so surprised, I don't usually harvest garlic until June. So I did a little research about this variety and found that it is indeed a very early maturing variety. I pulled the entire lot this weekend but you won't see them in the tally until they've cured.

Red Janice garlic, Chioggia and Golden beets

Also not photographed this week was another head of butterhead lettuce and another big basketful of spinach. I'm really happy with the "Summer Perfection" spinach, it's produced nearly 5 pounds of delicious leaves so far and there's more ready to harvest today. I think it may be showing the first signs of wanting to bolt though, but I'm not surprised, I really wasn't expecting it to hold out this long, especially with the unusually warm weather that we've been enjoying. The temperatures moderated for most of the past week but yesterday it hit 80ºF again.

What I didn't get around to harvesting was the rest of the favas. Both my husband and I were laid low by some nasty bug that left us achy and tired. Neither of us wanted to deal with a big basket of beans so that task has been put off until today.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Chioggia beets - 4.2 oz.
Golden beets - 4.8 oz.
Circus Circus carrots - 2.4 oz.
Deep Purple carrots - 2.4 oz.
Lorz Italian green garlic - 1 oz.
Red Janice garlic - 1.2 oz.
Rhaposdy butterhead lettuce - 7.5 oz.
Early Rapini - 1 lb., 14.4 oz.
Summer Perfection spinach - 1 lb., 5.4 oz.

The total harvests for the past week came to - 4 lb., 11.2 oz.
Which brings all the harvests for the year up to - 89 lb., 1.8 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what garden bloggers from around the world have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - May 6, 2013

It's hard to believe that the first week of May is nearly gone by. I spent a busy week in the garden trimming oak trees, scraggly lavender bushes, and other shrubby plants so the "landscape" (really a former landscape that is becoming a barely contained wildscape) around the house is looking more, um, orderly. I also harvested some lovely spring goodies from the vegetable garden.

Summer Perfection spinach is living up to its name. We had a run of quite warm weather this past week with the warmest day topping out at 90ºF. The spinach just keeps producing and so far it is not showing signs of bolting and it is staying sweet and tender - perfect!

Most of the spinach plants put out big tender leaves. I used them in the first raw spinach salads this week and was very pleased with the sweet taste, tender texture, and minimal fuzziness. Fuzziness meaning a sensation that I get after/while eating raw spinach that leaves my teeth feeling like they have fuzz on them - there was a touch of that but not to the point of being unpleasant, I didn't feel the urge to immediately brush my teeth.

I harvested a perfect looking head of Rhapsody butterhead lettuce. It made a very fine salad with some fresh local Dungeness crab that we got from the community supported fishery from which we purchase a weekly share of seafood.

The fava harvest peaked this week with a big basket of beans. These have been shucked, but after a long hike in the wind and fog in Big Sur yesterday we were too tired to do the peeling as well, so that will be tonight's entertainment. My husband LOVES fava beans, shucked and peeled, and I hate having to do all the shucking and peeling, so I grow them on the condition that he must MUST help with the dirty work. Good man, while I prepared dinner he sat on the couch with the big basket of beans, popping them out of the pods, pop pop pop... I gave him the rest of the night off and he happily volunteered to help with the peeling tonight.

As I mentioned before, the weather this past week got quite warm, the last few weeks the daytime temperatures have been swinging from the mid 60ºFs to the mid to high 80ºFs with the hottest day topping out at 90ºF. And today it's back to maybe a high of 70ºF with a slight chance of rain. The forecast for the week doesn't show another swing into the 80's so perhaps we are getting back to our normal spring/summer weather pattern of cold foggy nights and mild usually sunny days.

So here's the harvests for the past week:

Extra Precocce Violetto fava beans - 15 pounds (5 pounds of shucked beans)
Rhapsody butterhead lettuce, 2 heads - 1 lb., 3.3 oz.
Summer Perfection spinach - 2 lb., 5.8 oz.

The total harvests for the week came out to - 18 lb., 9.7 oz.
Which boosts the total harvest for the year up to - 84 lb., 6.6 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what garden bloggers from around the world have been harvesting lately.

Toasty

It's going to be warm today. Not as warm as originally predicted, there was a heat advisory from the National Weather Service for today but they've revised the forecast for slightly lower highs, we aren't supposed to pass 90ºF after all. The last couple of weeks have been unusually warm, unlike last year when we had months of unending cooler than usual weather. Last year spring lasted until August with persistent coastal fog, cold nights, and sunny but cool days. This year summer seems to have started in April. Go figure. For the most part the vegetable garden has responded by leaping into amazing growth. I'm sure that as soon as I plant out my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant that spring will return with a vengeance.

Check out the greens again, I am utterly amazed at how fast they are growing this year. I'm really glad that I covered them all a couple of weeks ago when we had the first warm days that made the lettuce get wilty. I've kept the cloth over them all and they do seem to appreciate it.

I harvested another pound of spinach on Monday and it looks like I'll be harvesting more soon. And the napa cabbage - grow baby grow!

The Flamingo chard is leaping skywards.

Time for you to hit the compost bin.

Speaking of compost - that's another toasty item at the moment. This lot was cold just the other day, it had cooked itself dry after a few weeks in the bin. I turned it from one bin into another watering well as  I went along. Two days later it's once again toasty at the center.

This bin holds about a cubic yard of material. I topped it with cardboard to help keep the contents moist and warm. The dark area under my compost riddle is where the cardboard has become soaked from the steam of the hot compost. I put all of my compost bins on top of hardware cloth these days to keep the gophers and moles from burrowing into them.

Not all my compost gets hot. The bin on the left is where I toss the materials from the vegetable garden and the chunky bits that I sift out of the finished compost. It gets a bit warm at times when I pile a lot of stuff into it, but for the most part it stays cool and the sow bugs and worms do most of the work. The bin on the right is the latest hot pile.

I covered it with a couple of handy plastic potting soil bags. It's just shy of 160ºF at the center.

Pull the thermometer out about 6 inches and the temperature drops to about 140ºF.

And here's a bunch of chipped oak trimmings ready to go into the next bin. I won't glorify the POC chipper/shredder that I have by showing a photo of it. It gets the job done but I'm rather looking forward to the day when it finally finishes self-destructing so that I can replace it with something better. These four cans will fill one of my compost bins with a bit of room to spare.

When I install a new set of sharp blades in the thing it actually does a decent job of chopping things up, in its painfully slow manner. I hope the POC doesn't break down too soon, I just invested in 5 sets of new blades when I couldn't find the 4 sets that I bought a few months ago, which of course I just found yesterday.

And finally, the cold bin where I toss all the fruit and vegetable scraps, paper towels, coffee filters full of grounds, tea leaves, etc. from the kitchen and soft stuff from the vegetable garden when the other cold bin gets a bit too full. This bin sits on top of hardware cloth, is wrapped in hardware cloth, and is topped with hardware cloth, all of which helps to keep it from being a feasting bin for the rodents. The sow bugs are the primary workers in this bin, it's not really all that worm friendly. There must be a million sow bugs in there, I can hear them scurrying around every time I disturb them by adding new food.

I'm glad it's going to be too toasty to do more heavy work in the garden today, I'm tired of fussing with that POC, and I'm just plain tired. But the oak trees need more trimming, they are growing like crazy after having been munched for 2 years by oak moths and the ones near the house must be trimmed up to at least 6 feet above the ground to reduce the fire danger (it's going to be a bad year for fires this year). I think it might be time to get the check book out and hire someone to finish the job for me! I've got enough compost going to last a while.

Harvest Monday - April 29, 2013

 The harvests are starting to get a bit more colorful!

The first Baby Ball beets

No. 1 Chioggia beet

Carrot thinnings

But green still predominates. I continued to thin out baby heads of butterhead and iceberg lettuce.

I am in salad heaven.

Rhapsody butterhead lettuce

Salad almost every day and some evenings too.

The first spinach of the season! You can read more about this variety on my recent Saturday Spotlight post.

Summer Perfection spinach

The first fava beans are mature enough to harvest. The first few beans that I harvested were consumed whole, I just tossed them with a little olive oil and grilled them on my stovetop ridged griddle until they softened and had browned in spots, sprinkled them with some chopped green garlic, salt and pepper and ate the entire beans - all but the tough strings that run down the side. The next harvest was prepared in a similar way, except they were roasted in a very hot oven until blistered and browned. The next harvest was shucked and peeled and a portion of the peeled beans were used in a recipe that my husband chose from an old issue of Food & Wine magazine for a salad of snap peas, peas, edamame, sweet onion, and goat cheese - we substituted peeled favas for the edamame. It was quite delicious.

Extra Precocce Violetto fava beans

Here's the harvest stats for the past 2 weeks:

Baby Ball beets - 4 oz.
Chioggia beets - 2.4 oz.
Beet greens - 8.6 oz.
Extra Precocce Violetto fava beans - 8 lb., 1.6 oz.
Iceberg Superior lettuce - 13.5 oz.
Rhapsody butterhead lettuce - 11.8 oz.
Lorz Italian green garlic - 3.3 oz.
Red Janice green garlic - 2.9 oz.
Summer Perfection spinach - 1 lb., 2.3 oz.

The total harvests for the past two weeks came to - 12 lb., 2.4 oz.
Which brings the total harvests for the year up to - 65 lb., 12.9 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other bloggers around the world have been harvesting lately.

Saturday Spotlight - Summer Perfection Spinach

Summer Perfection is a new variety of spinach in my garden and I am impressed. But I have to admit, I am not an expert spinach grower, this is only the second time that I've been able to coax a good harvest out of a sowing of spinach, so perhaps I'm impressed because it actually is producing. The last time I successfully grew spinach was with a "winter" variety that I sowed in autumn for winter and spring harvests. I learned a lot about growing spinach with that experience, enough to convince me that winter spinach is the way to go in my climate. But, I just can't leave good enough alone, so when I spotted Summer Perfection in the Renee's Garden lineup of seeds I just had to try it.*

I won't bore you with repeat information if you read my previous post about my superstar spring greens, check out that post if you want to see how the planting has progressed from seedlings to first harvest.

I chose to sow the seeds into a flat of paper pots. The flat is shown below on the right, that's back on March 22, the seeds were sown on the 7th. It seemed like they took forever to germinate and get to that size. The germination rate was great, I sowed 2 seeds into every pot and there are very few pots with only 1 seedling and no pots with no seedling. I set the plants out before they got much larger than this and left the two seedlings per pot to grow together. I've found that the 2 plants will grow just fine together so long as they are spaced far enough apart from the other pots.

I am still very wary of setting out tender tasty young seedlings into the garden without protection from rodents and birds so I totally enclosed the spinach planting under some lightweight row cover.

I left a couple of gaps to allow some ventilation.

We've had a couple of warm spells lately and I was concerned that the spinach would overheat inside its enclosure so I opened up the ends to create a tunnel. The rest of the tender young greens nearby were unscathed so it seemed safe to leave the tunnel open 24/7.

A mere month after setting the seedlings out in the garden I harvested the first 18 ounces of leaves. You can see that I harvested everything from the first young leaves to the largest of the new leaves. I left at least 2 good sized leaves on each plant.

What truly impresses me about this variety of spinach is its eating quality. The first time I served it to my husband he noted how good it was. He really liked the tenderness and mild flavor. I thought - oh, ok, I dreamed up a good recipe (Beans and Greens 2.0). And my high opinion was clinched when he reaffirmed how much he likes the spinach when I prepared it using an entirely different recipe. And yes, I also thought it was very tender and tasty prepared both ways as well.

So there is just one last test of this variety that may or may not convince me to grow it again next spring - just how long will it keep producing before it bolts. Spinach is daylength sensitive - at some point the days will get long enough (technically the nights will get short enough) to give the plants the signal to bloom. Heat can also help to push spinach to bolt, which is one reason why I keep the plants lightly shaded by the row cover. I hope that this variety is as resistant to bolting as claimed. I'm happy to have harvested over 1 pound of leaves with the first harvest and am pretty sure that I'll be harvesting at least that much again in the next week or so. Will I get a third harvest before it bolts? For comparison, the winter spinach that I grew in 2011/2012 produced 6 pounds of leaves from November through January from fewer plants. (If you like, you can read my post about growing winter spinach).

One other note, I'm not sure why this is, but the spinach has been unmolested by aphids and leaf miners so far. I typically have problems with both of those pests in my spinach, especially in the spring. It probably isn't because of any special attributes of this variety of spinach because I also noticed that the aphids haven't infested the neighboring fava beans (yet) this spring. I'm not sure why that is, there don't seem to be any more beneficial insects than usual, although the resident Western Fence Lizard population seems to have increased so perhaps they are helping to keep the garden "clean".

I'll try to remember to update this post in the future once I've seen how this spinach performs through the rest of its growing season. Will it stay mild and delicious as the weather warms up? How long will it  be before it bolts? Will the aphids and leaf miners finally attack... I also want to try starting some of this variety side by side with my winter spinach this fall and see how the 2 varieties compare through the fall and winter.

Is anyone else growing this variety? What is your experience with it?

I'll be linking with Liz's Saturday Spotlight series over at her blog Suburban Tomato.


*Full disclosure, I was doing a thorough perusal of Renee's seed lineup because they offered me a number of free seed packets of my choice as part of a media kit. Quite frankly I was happy to leap at the offer because I am a long time purchaser of their seeds. I've gravitated towards their offerings for a number of reasons, not least of which is because they are a locally based company and have a local trial garden so I can be pretty sure that the varieties they offer will do well in my climate. They are also very supportive of the local gardening community, something I experienced during my stint as a Master Gardener. The selection of seeds in their catalog may not be as extensive as other companies, but that seems to be because they only offer varieties that they have found to be the best both in the garden and in the kitchen. And indeed, a number of the "regulars" in my garden are from Renee's.

Spring Greens, Indeed!

Whoa, now I know why this season is called "Spring". The leafy greens are truly springing into action. Let's see how they have progressed in the last 4 to 5 weeks.

Iceberg (foreground) and butterhead lettuces on March 20
These seeds were sown en masse in 4-inch pots on February 22

Butterhead (foreground) and iceberg lettuces on March 29

Butterhead on April 12

Butterhead on April 25 after harvesting 9 of the 24 original plants

"Rhapsody" butterhead Lettuce

Iceberg on April 12

Iceberg on April 25, these have been thinned quite a bit also

Iceberg "Superior" Lettuce

Napa cabbages on March 22, these were sown on February 22

Napa cabbage on April 12

Napa cabbage on April 25

"Little Jade" napa cabbage

Spinach on March 29
These were sown on March 7

Spinach on April 12

The first harvest of "Summer Perfection" spinach (18 oz.) on April 22.

Spinach on April 24

These are the superstars of the spring garden. I've been enjoying a fresh salad almost every day using the baby heads of lettuce that I've been thinning out. The first harvest of spinach was used in Beans and Greens 2.0 and Asian Stir-Fried Spinach, both tasty treats. And I suspect that I'll be harvesting the first head of napa cabbage fairly soon given the rate that they are growing.

We've been having a fairly typical spring this year, with a couple of almost heat-waves (temperatures hitting the low 80ºF's), but mostly mild sunny days and cool to cold foggy nights. It's been nice to have some warm spells. Last year and the year before we had cooler than normal temperatures, day and night, with hardly a hot day to warm our bones. The spring garden loved it those years, but I didn't. Most of the garden has tolerated the recent warm spikes, with a bit of help from me, I've suspended lightweight row cover fabric over the greens to protect them during the hot sunny days and I made sure they didn't get too dry. Other vegetables suffered a bit through the heat - more on that in a later post when I cover the rest of the garden.

What are the star performers in your garden this spring?