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.