Harvest Monday - July 22, 2013

I'm really happy that I started the Lacinato kale a little early this year, it has been producing some beautiful leaves in spite of the interest of the aphids. Well, the aphids have been quite attracted to just one of the three plants but I think I got that infestation under control so the harvests should increase soon, unless the birds become more interested... 

Here's the latest picking of kale which I first steamed in my pressure cooker for 3 minutes and then sauteed in olive oil with a generous amount of fresh garlic. It was combined with some Black Valentine beans from Rancho Gordo and served with the juices from a slow roasted (7 hours at 225ºF) pork shoulder that had been seasoned with a Korean 5-Spice rub. Yum, that was good!

I'm still harvesting the Sugarsnax carrots a few at a time, they are keeping quite well in the garden for now. The beets needed to be thinned. I used the Golden and Chioggia beets raw, very thinly sliced on a mandolin, in a salad with shredded napa cabbage, carrots, cucumber, and peanuts with an asian style dressing. It was quite good, the baby beets were not too strongly flavored. The greens were beautiful so I'm planning to use those in some No-Crust Quiches.

I love how even the stems on the Chioggia beets are striped. It's too bad that the Chioggia beets loose their stripes when they are cooked, the colors all run together to turn the roots pink, but raw sliced beets retain their stripes and are quite pretty in a salad.

I'm harvesting the first dried pods of the Greek Gigante beans. These aren't included in the tally yet, that will wait until all the beans have been harvested and shelled.

The Tortarello Abruzzese cucumbers keep coming on, that one plant that was produced from a packet of 10 year old seeds has been the surprise of the cucumber patch. The other three varieties have been struggling along but that one little runt took off and is growing like crazy and putting out cucumbers on a regular basis. The Tortarellos are at the top, then there's one Tasty Green Japanese cucumber, and one Garden Oasis cucumber. And another handful of runner beans. The production of runner beans was slowed quite a bit by the heat we had in June, but now that the weather has moderated the plants are happier and have been setting more beans. I didn't photograph the half pound of beans that I harvested yesterday and there's more beans on the way.

There's a few more veggies that I didn't photograph last week, such as the continuing avalanche of zucchini, a few French Gold filet beans, and more broccoli sprouts.

You can see from the graph below that the weather has moderated quite a bit lately and we are still getting some nighttime temperatures below 50ºF. It slowed the zucchinis down a bit (thank goodness) but the rest of the garden seems to appreciate the more mild weather.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

French Gold filet beans - 1.3 oz.

Runner beans (St. George and Moonlight) - 1 lb., 2.1 oz.

Baby Ball beets - 1oz.

Chioggia beets - 4.8 oz.

Red Baron beets - 8.2 oz.

Renee's Golden beets - 4.8 oz.

Di Ciccio broccoli - 1 lb., 1.1 oz.

Purple Peacock broccoli - 12.6 oz.

Sugarsnax carrots - 9.1 oz.

Garden Oasis cucumbers - 5.2 oz.

Tortarello Abruzzese cucumbers - 1 lb., 4.9 oz.

Red Janice garlic - 1.8 oz.

Lacinato kale - 1 lb., .9 oz.

Ortolano di Faenza zucchini - 1 lb., 9.4 oz.

Romanesco zucchini - 4 lb., 9.3 oz.

The total harversts for the past week came to - 14 lb., 1.9 oz.

Which brings the total harvests for the year up to - 240 lb., 2.2 oz.

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.