Harvest Monday - December 28, 2009

Harvest Monday is here again! My garden is slow to produce at this time of year and I've been even slower to pick. I came down with a nasty head cold last week. It made me want to stay inside where it was somewhat warm and it also took away most of my desire to cook or eat. Lucky for my husband there were leftovers and lots of cheese and bread on hand.

Before my head got too clogged up I harvested a bowl of Meyer lemons and put up a batch of preserved lemons. Can't wait 'til they're ready, they already have a lucious aroma. (I'm on the mend, I can smell things again!)

Yesterday I got out to the garden and picked another bunch of Piracicaba broccoli. I tried to arrange it this time so that you can see the florets.

Each bud in a floret is called a "bead". You can see that the Piracicaba beads are larger than typical broccoli beads. Most of the shoots I picked yesterday were a little more full blown than I would usually let them get, I just wasn't feeling up to getting out in the garden when they should have been harvested.

Fortunately, I've found that even when the beads start to open up, like you can see below, that the broccoli is still good eating.

I also harvested a lot of Opal Creek Golden snap peas. A lot of them have frost scars on them and are not very pretty, but they are still suprisingly crisp and tasty. There's a couple Kefe Beinwil snow peas buried in there also.

The snap pea plants are still growing well. Birds have been munching on the tender top growth but there are a lot of new shoots growing lower on the vines. This is a nice surprise, I expected the cold weather to knock the plants down and I was hoping that I would get regrowth in the spring. It's going to be interesting to see how they fare in the next few months. The snow peas aren't growing as vigorously, but they are still hanging in there and are also pushing out new shoots from the bases of the plants.

Other than lemons, broccoli, and peas I've been harvesting parsley, thyme, sage, and bay leaves. Funny, I don't normally mention my herb harvests for Harvest Monday, but the pickings are so slim at this time of year....

Hey, I almost forgot, I found some perfectly good peppers on my scraggly frost nipped, but hanging in there, Aleppo chile pepper plant. Here's two of the six that I picked yesterday, the rest went into a spicy Indian cauliflower (store bought) dish that I made last night to take to dinner with some friends.

If you would like to show off your harvests, join in the fun at Daphne's Dandelions. Or just head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have harvested in the last week.