Harvest Monday - February 24, 2014

It's feeling rather spring-like in the garden, other than the fact that much of the natural landscape is an unspring-like dirty brown.

I harvested the first arugula a mere 5 1/2 weeks after direct sowing the seeds in the garden. I love that I got a such a quick crop from this sowing. It's very young - you might be able to see that I harvested entire plants and did not do a cut-and-come-again harvest. These plants were encroaching on a couple of my new strawberry plants so I harvested enough to create some elbow room for the berry plants. These baby arugula were tender and mild flavored. I have to admit that I don't love really peppery arugula so these were perfect for me. I do believe that I'll harvest the rest of the patch in the same manner and then immediately sow another patch. I'm going to have to try to get on a 2 or 3 week sowing schedule. Another thing that I love is that this one picking is half of a clamshell container of commercially grown organic baby arugula at a fraction of the cost in both economic and environmental terms. I have been purchasing at least one of those containers every week for a while so now I can free myself of that habit, at least for a while.

Tuscan Arugula

This is probably the final harvest of Di Ciccio broccoli. I harvested every shoot I could find regardless of size. And in the left side of the basket is a nice harvest of snow peas. The photo doesn't do the harvest justice. I used the smallest of the broccoli shoots and all of the snow peas along with some slivered red onion in a tasty stir fry flavored with some Thai green curry paste and fish sauce - just enough for the two of us.

I got tired of the gopher raiding the parsley patch so I pulled all of it out and salvaged what I could for my own consumption. I also trimmed the nearby Syrian Oregano which is growing in a wire basket which I hope will protect the roots from the marauder.

I know that the gopher would have gotten around to "harvesting" the nearby onions too, so I cleaned out those as well - there were just a few of them.

More snow peas, another "head" of Romanesco, and more celery. The Romanesco was blanched to get rid of the aphids and then cooked with a variation on my latest favorite garlicky sauce - I gently cooked a few cloves of chopped garlic, chopped capers, and an anchovy filet in some butter and a splash of white wine for a few minutes in a saute pan, then tossed in the blanched and cooled Romanesco, let it steam/saute in the covered pan until tender.

We (or rather, I) have been eating a lot of celery, mostly in my lunch salads.

Another celeriac and a few Circus Circus carrots. The celeriac and that bunch of celery shown above went into a sort of vegetable (not vegetarian) stew/chili along with some canned tomatoes, bacon (everything is better with bacon), and brown Tepary beans. It was seasoned with ground red chile peppers from the garden, cumin, dried green coriander seeds, Mexican oregano, and I can't remember exactly what else, but definitely a chili type theme. My husband finished off the last little bit yesterday for lunch and expressed a longing for more...

The weather has been mild and DRY. However, the forecast for the coming week is for RAIN, real rain, not just the teasers that we've gotten lately. It's hard to believe that we've received only 3 inches (7.6 cm) of rain for the hydrologic year (July 1 to June 30). (There's a burp in the reporting which is responsible for the seeming warm night mid week).

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Tuscan arugula - 2.8 oz.
Di Ciccio broccoli - 15.3 oz.
Circus Circus carrots - 2.9 oz.
Dorato di Asti celery - 1 lb., .6 oz.
Monarch celeriac - 1 lb., .5 oz (trimmed)
Oregon Sugar Pod II snow peas - 8.8 oz.
Romanesco (broccoli) - 13.9 oz.

The total harvests for the week came to - 4 lb., 12.8 oz. (2.2 kg.)
Which brings the 2014 harvest totals up to - 26 lb., 8.5 oz. (12 kg.)

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.