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.