Harvest Monday - June 3, 2013

The garden produced a superabundance of vegetables this past week and the fridge is stuffed near to bursting. Here was part of the harvest on Saturday, a rather oversized battered starting to bolt napa cabbage, a surprisingly generous harvest of sugar snap peas from the few surviving plants, a handful of snow peas from the second planting that is just starting to produce, two new and robust Romanesco zucchini, and one petite Ortolano di Faenza zucchini.

I promptly used half of the head of cabbage for a lunch slaw and managed to squeeze the rest of the head in the fridge. The zucchini are stashed with previously harvested zucchinis and are destined to be prepared Agrodolce, one of my husband's favorite zucchini dishes. I have no idea how I'm going to prepare the snap and snow peas yet...

Here's a near to the final harvest of spinach, all the plants are bolting now.

I harvested the spinach shoots as well. I haven't cooked them up yet so I don't know if they are tasty, but they are attractive.

The Sweetie Baby romaine is starting to bolt already, so I harvested the first head. I used it in a salad last night with some hearts of butterhead lettuce, pear, almond, and goat cheese. It was still sweet. Also shown in another head of starting to bolt napa cabbage and a perfect head of iceberg lettuce that is destined to be used in Minced Chicken in Lettuce Cups.

This is another harvest of broccoli. Two different varieties, Purple Peacock on the left and Di Ciccio on the right.

This head of Purple Peacock isn't as purple as the first head that I harvested the week before last. The one I harvested previously had lovely purple stems, this one only had a bit of purple in the flower buds and a hint of purple in the leaves.

And the head of Di Ciccio is about as big a main head as this variety can produce. It's about 6 times as big as the first head that I harvested the previous week, 13 ounces versus 2 ounces, and is quite a bit bigger than the remaining 2 heads that are still sizing up in the garden.

Yesterday was the day to harvest the last 2 main heads of Purple Peacock broccoli - you can see how much variation there is in this variety, both of those heads of broccoli shown below are Purple Peacock. And that's another 3 Romanesco zucchini in the basket. The two varieties of zucchini that I'm growing this year could hardly be more different in their growth and production. The Romanesco is the Goliath of the zucchini world, my plant is sending out multiple branches and produces huge zucchinis with huge blossoms. The Ortolano di Faenze zucchini is a modest grower that doesn't appear to want to branch out and produces a modest number of petite little zucchinis.

Here's the newest item in the harvest basket, watercress. This is an experimental veggie in my garden and I've got a lot to learn about growing it. You can read a bit more about my learning experience with this variety on my previous post about watercress which I linked to Liz's Saturday Spotlight series.

There were a few other veggies that hit the harvest basket last week as well, most of which I've photographed in the prior weeks. I've had a very busy week in the garden filling the last new bed with soil and cleaning out half of a different bed and planting out 45 pepper plants in that space. Now that the new bed is almost up and ready to go it's time to plant the tomatoes which are near to busting out of their yogurt pots. Then it's on to cleaning out more bed space to plant out the rest of the peppers (another dozen or so plants) and the eggplant. Busy, busy, busy...

The weather did another one of its about-faces yesterday. From a high of 87ºF on Saturday to a high of 58ºF yesterday. From sunny and clear one day to classic central coast June Gloom the next, I think we had all of 3 hours of full sun yesterday.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Baby Ball beets - 6.1 oz. (none of the beet greens were kept or tallied)

Chioggia beets - 3.6 oz.

Golden beets - 6.7 oz.

Di Ciccio broccoli - 13.3 oz.

Purple Peacock broccoli - 14 oz.

Little Jade napa cabbage (little no more) - 5 lb., 7.8 oz.

Circus Circus carrot mix - 7.5 oz.

Deep Purple carrots - 5.7 oz.

Lorz Italian garlic - 4.4 oz.

Iceberg Superior lettuce - 22.8 oz.

Rhapsody butterhead lettuce - 14.5 oz.

Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce - 6.4 oz.

Oregon Sugar Pod II snow peas - 2.7 oz.

Super Sugar Snap peas - 1 lb., .8 oz.

Summer Perfection Spinach - 2 lb., 2.4 oz.

English watercress - 1.5 oz.

Romanesco zucchini - 1 lb., 12.7 oz.

Ortolano di Faenza zucchini - 8 oz.

The harvest totals for the past week came to - 17 lb., 12.9 oz. (8 kilos)

Which brings all the harvests for the year up to - 124 lb., 4.5 oz. (56 kilos)

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