Monday, June 13, 2011

Harvest Monday - June 13, 2011

I'll start with the pretty new crop from the garden, a couple of small Treviso type radicchio heads that I harvested to make way for the new zucchini plants. These were an experiment to see how they would do as a spring crop and so far the results are pretty good. There are still a few other heads growing in the garden and as long as the current cooler than normal weather hangs around they should hold and perhaps form some larger and firmer heads. I haven't tried these in a salad yet, perhaps they will go into todays lunch.


Here's the ugly new crop from the garden, one variety of the rust infested garlic. I didn't even try to cure this bunch for storage, these got peeled and chopped and mixed with olive oil, packed into 4 ounce containers and frozen.


I weighed the harvest after trimming off the roots and stems, the total came to 15.3 ounces as shown below and 10.5 ounces after the cloves were peeled.



I've been harvesting caper buds for the last few weeks but haven't gotten around to photographing any of them yet. The harvests this year are down from last year, perhaps because of the very cool weather that we've been enduring - we even had an unusual wet storm come through a week ago. That storm dumped additional snow on top of the lingering snow in the Sierra Nevada which has put the kibosh on our Half Dome hike, the trail isn't safe and the cables haven't been put up yet. Someday...

The peas aren't complaining about the cool weather, the harvests keep coming on, although the snap peas look like they are finishing up. I've put up 6 quarts of pickled sugar snap peas - that's a pound of peas in each jar! The snow peas trickled in for a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden it seemed like they were ready nearly all at once. There's a few bags of them in the fridge and I'm trying to come up with creative ways to use them. Last night I made Farrotto (like risotto but made with farro) with dried porcini mushrooms, snow peas, and pea shoots - it was a winner.

And there's a few strawberries in the total - I managed to snatch some from the jaws of the evil wood rats. Evil, evil, very evil wood rats - it's not enough that they attack my garden - I won't go into the details about what they've done to my car. Grrrrr.


Here's the harvests for the past week:

Piracicaba broccoli - 8.7 oz.
Capers - 2.9 oz.
Golden Chard - 8.7 oz.
Aglio Blanco garlic - 15.3 oz.
Super Sugar Snap peas - 4 lb., 1.5 oz.
Oregon Giant Snow peas - 2 lb., 9.2 oz.
Snow Pea Shoots - 4.8 oz.
Strawberries - 4.2 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 9 lb., 11.9 oz.
The harvests for the year so far total - 193 lb., 5.65 oz.

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

12 comments:

  1. Be happy the wood rats didn't get all, or you would have no harvest at all.
    I wish I had more to harvest, but it's at least more than I had..

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  2. The radicchio looks great - what a wonderful colour. Shame about the garlic, though. I'm not sure why ours has been OK the last two years as we've never succeeded with it before. It's still nothing like as big as the heads we buy in the market, though. I'm glad you found me on the new blog!

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  3. Michelle,

    Those darn rats! Meg is bringing home compost from school. The school has rats in the storm drains and the compost has to go, three bins of it. Kind of worried she'll bring rats home. Honestly our cats would like the challenge.

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  4. What beautiful pictures for another beautiful harvest post! Pickled sugar snap peas? I'm so curious, but I can eat so much of them raw that I don't think I could grow enough to spare any for putting up.

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  5. Ok, I live in MO, whats a wood rat? Did it eat your car too? Yikes! Looks like Zeke there can handle those bad rats! Great blog!!!!!!

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  6. I love the look of radicchio but have never been able to develop a taste for it. Yours is very striking.

    Your garlic looks like they reached a decent size despite the rust.

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  7. The radicchio is beautiful. I have only grown it once and loved how it looked - but really am not a fan of the taste of it - so never grew it again. LOL! It was strictly ornamental for me. :D

    I had to really laugh about hte wood rats and your car.... been there and done that with packrats when we lived in central Washington. They moved into our pumphouse - stole everything loose and shiny and tried to shove it down the cut out for the well pipe and then moved into the truck parked outside and proceeded to chew up all of the electrical wiring. Not kidding. It was a huge mess and cost a fortune to repair. I was never so satisfied as when my dog at the time, managed to grab one of them from under the wheel well of the truck and proceeded to make rat mince meat out of him. Evil, evil, evil, nasty pack rats!

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  8. That radicchio is just beautiful. I'm not a lover of it and probably like it even less now. I had some illness over the winter that changed my taste buds somehow. It made everything taste too bitter. I've never had that happen to me before, but things are slowly going back to normal. Or maybe I'm just getting used to it.

    Sorry to hear about your rat woes. In my last garden I never got strawberries because of the chipmunks. They would pick one and eat it not quite ripe. But they would just take a bite then go on to the next. Oh how they aggravated me. I got my revenge one year when they were taking bites of everything. They finally took a bite of one of my hot peppers. lol They quit sampling the garden after that. They still ate their tried and true crops, but I quit getting random bites out of everything.

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  9. Gingerbreadhouse7, I'm very happy the woodrats didn't get all! And they won't if Zeke and I have any say in the matter...

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    chaiselongue, the heads may not be big but the garlic still tastes great.

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    Randy, I doubt that Meg will bring any rats home if the compost is finished, it's the raw materials that they love. I have to set traps around my compost bins...

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    thyme2garden, Pickled snap peas are easy and a great way to preserve the harvest. I love to eat the peas raw or cooked, but my plants have been so prolific that I can't possibly eat them all right away.

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    Debby S, wood rats, aka pack rats, are our native rats. They've found the engine compartment of my car to be a very cozy place to call home - I'm driving around in a mobile rat house. They've managed to nibble on something that has disabled the ABS and driving stability features of my car. Saturday I whacked an adult and Sunday I found it had died down in the engine compartment, thankfully within reach. And the last 2 nights I've managed to zap a couple of baby rats...

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    Thomas, I love the look and flavor of radicchio, although I like it best in small doses as part of a lettuce mix. But I seem to be developing more of a taste for it as time goes on.

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    kitsapFG, Your rat story made me laugh, I so know what you went through... The dang things have been building nests all over the place (why can't they confine themselves to the wood pile??) and I find all sorts of things in them - bungee cords?!! I know, I know, I know how satisfying it was to have your dog GET ONE. Zeke gets a lot of them and gets tons of praise even if he eviscerates them on the hall carpet or in the bath tub...

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    Daphne, I think that radicchio is an acquired taste, I'm still working on my husband. He'll eat it if it's been cooked since that moderates the bitterness - grilled radicchio is really quite tasty. How weird to have your sense of taste affected that way, thank goodness it doesn't seem to be permanent.

    The rats are doing the same thing to my strawberries - grrrr. More traps, more traps, more traps..... I wish I could have seen that chipmunk after taking a bit of that pepper! :o

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  10. In the community garden that I am at, there is swiss chard just growing wild there. And so are the strawberries.

    I'm not sure if I would have as much as you, but I would have my share.

    Thanks for the pictures.

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  11. Sorry about the evil wood rats and garlic. Those radicchio are beautiful.
    My piracicaba broccoli is always infested with aphids, they are so yucky looking, I gave up and pulled all of them.

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  12. The radicchio looks good Michelle, is it like chickory? Our leas are beginning to come to an end now, even though our weather has been cooler than usual too. Shame about the garlic though.

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