Harvest Monday - December 30, 2013

It's the final harvest post for 2013 and I've got just a few more harvests to report.

The carrot thinnings were more substantial this week so I weighed them and included them in the tally. I showed my husband the bunch of carrots, turned my back, and then I heard crunch crunch and turned back to find most of that first big carrot gone... The man has a serious carrot habit.

The next carrots were kept out of range of the carrot thief long enough to be cleaned up and grated into a slaw with the celery...

and part of head of newly harvested napa cabbage. The tips of some of the cabbage leaves were showing signs of damage from the freeze earlier this month but...

overall the head looked pretty darned good.

I harvested a bunch of Lacinato kale for our Christmas dinner.

I tore the kale into pieces, steamed it for a minute in the pressure cooker and then tossed it with chunks of Black Futsu squash that I had roasted with garlic and rosemary. I took a photo of the squash after cutting it in half. That's my 8-inch chef's knife next to it for comparison. The seeds from this squash are thin skinned and delicious roasted after being simmered in salted water first.

This was our big treat for Christmas Eve dinner. We bought a couple of one-pound abalones from the abalone farm on the commercial wharf in Monterey. The abalone are raised right under the wharf and anyone can go to the farm and buy fresh live abalone pulled straight from the water. The only catch is that they don't shuck them and clean them for you, but it's not difficult to learn how to do that and I think that abalone is best when shucked immediately before cooking. Oh my, were they good.

Another Christmas treat was a loaf of bread made from freshly milled heirloom wheat. I haven't lost my bread baking skills, nor have I neglected my natural yeast starter. My husband and I are eating a pretty low carb diet these days but bread is one treat that I can't give up entirely. So I figure that if I'm going to eat bread that it better be really good. I invested in a small grain mill and stocked up on some heirloom wheat that I keep in the freezer. Now when I want some bread I rev up my starter, mill enough wheat for a loaf, and bake some of the best bread that I've ever made. Whole wheat bread made with super fresh flour is a revelation. Add heirloom wheat to the mix and you may never be able to eat store bought bread again.

And now for the weekly weather recap. It's been unreal. A high of 81ºF (27.2ºC) the day after Christmas, most days with highs in the 70's and forecast to continue that way for the foreseeable future. And still no rain in sight. Can you spell d.r.o.u.g.h.t.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

DiCiccio broccoli - 9.3 oz.
Little Jade napa cabbage - 3 lb., 2.4 oz.
Dorato d'Asti celery - 4.4 oz.
Lorz Italian garlic - 1.5 oz.
Lacinato kale - 1 lb., 1.6 oz.

The harvests for the past week came to - 5 lb., 5.7 oz.
So that makes the total for the year - 984 lb., .9 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.

This was my best year ever since I started recording my harvests. Here's a side by side comparison of the harvests for the past 4 years.

	2013	2012	2011	2010
Amaranth	4.0	0.0	1.9	2.1
Arugula, wild	0.9	0.0	0.0	0.1
Basil, Profumo di Genova	0.0	0.6	0.0	0.0
Beans, Green	35.8	39.2	33.9	19.1
Beans, Dried	9.1	8.5	3.5	9.3
Beets	34.1	4.2	17.4	26.1
Beet Greens	0.5	2.2	9.9	0.0
Broccoli	33.3	17.4	28.2	16.0
Cabbage	20.1	18.3	39.5	16.7
Capers	0.0	3.1	2.1	3.7
Carrots	20.5	0.0	0.0	5.2
Celery	13.5	2.8	8.8	1.9
Celery Root	6.5	0.0	7.3	35.5
Chamomile	0.0	0.0	0.3	1.2
Chard	13.6	4.7	6.9	19.6
Chervil	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.1
Cilantro	0.0	0.0	1.9	0.0
Coriander Seeds	0.0	0.3	0.0	0.0
Couve Tronchuda	8.8	3.0	3.3	0.0
Cucumbers	81.8	37.5	15.8	12.0
Eggplant	72.2	51.3	16.2	34.7
Fava beans	34.2	0.0	112.7	105.2
Fava beans, dried	0.0	0.0	0.0	4.9
Fava leaves	0.0	0.0	0.3	0.7
Fennel	4.1	0.0	0.0	1.8
Frisee	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.8
Garlic	5.6	0.0	7.6	19.8
Corn Salad and Mache	8.9	0.0	0.8	0.7
Kale	14.2	11.5	4.4	12.4
Lettuce	28.2	12.1	19.7	20.8
Melons	20.5	0.0	0.0	0.0
Mizuna	0.0	0.0	0.0	1.2
Onions	1.0	11.5	0.0	4.5
Pak Choi	2.9	0.0	0.0	0.0
Peas	6.6	10.9	34.6	7.8
Peppers	126.7	122.2	15.5	44.8
Poppy Seeds	0.0	0.0	0.6	2.8
Potatoes	0.0	0.0	2.3	9.2
Radicchio	0.0	0.0	2.7	0.0
Rapini	6.6	0.0	2.1	10.9
Romanesco	0.0	0.0	7.4	10.3
Snow Pea Shoots	0.2	0.0	2.1	0.0
Sorrel	0.0	0.0	0.1	0.1
Spinach	13.2	2.4	5.7	0.0
Strawberries	0.0	0.0	0.5	19.8
Tomatoes	206.2	358.9	110.0	148.9
Watercress	0.1	0.0	0.0	0.0
Winter Squash	25.4	0.0	38.6	39.7
Yu Choy Sin	0.0	0.0	1.3	0.0
Zucchini	124.7	49.1	18.0	27.6
Zucchini Blossoms	0.1	0.1	0.8	2.5
	984.1	771.7	584.8	700.5

There are a number of reasons for the fluctuations in production from year to year. Partly because I've changed the mix of vegetables, but the main differences from year to year have been because of the configuration of the beds in the garden. In 2010 I had four beds but they they were basically big mounds of soil barely contained by mix of low walls made from scrap wood and piled stones. The shapes of the beds and their vulnerability to gophers and moles limited what I could grow. That configuration continued on into 2011, but in 2011 we had an explosion in the population of rats in the area and they ate their way through my garden. In 2012 I started a renovation project in the vegetable garden and started to replace the informal "beds" with properly constructed raised beds. That year I never had all four beds going at the same time and didn't grow some significant producers such as favas and winter squash. Thank goodness the rat population dropped back to normal levels so most of the harvests were left for me. This past year I started off with only three beds and finally brought the final bed into production in June. It's going to be interesting to see what the garden can produce in 2014 with all four beds available for the entire year.

I'll be doing a more detailed review of the 2013 garden in a coming post. How did your garden do in 2013?