Monday, February 16, 2015

Harvest Monday - February 16, 2015

Weird Weather resumes. Truly, if the days weren't still short I would swear it's summer. Actually it's better than our typical summer. Highs around 80ºF and lows around 50ºF. My winter veggies aren't necessarily loving it, especially the lettuce. I'm in the process of clearing out the lettuce patch, trying to keep up with bolting heads and fungal diseases brought on by the warm weather while the garden is still drying out after the previous rainy weekend.

Rhapsody butterhead and Ruby Gem romaine lettuces
That's the last of the butterhead and Ruby Gem lettuces. The outer leaves on the butterhead were turning brown and the Ruby Gem was bolting and getting a bit moldy on the oldest leaves, most of the leaves were still very good.

Mikado turnips and stray radishes
The baby turnips are getting to be about golf ball size (just in time for the AT&T), but are still sweet. I sliced a few very thin on the mandolin to include in a salad of most of the Ruby Gem romaine, the last radishes from the garden, and shaved fennel. I experimented with a new version of my confited garlic by adding a small quartered Meyer lemon to the garlic. The salad dressing included one quarter of the confited lemon and some of the confited garlic, both minced and whisked with fresh Meyer lemon juice, part garlic oil and part fresh extra virgin olive oil, plenty of fresh ground pepper and a dash of Red Boat.

Romanesco fennel
The fennel patch is an interesting mix of new bulbs and bolting bulbs. The new bulbs aren't as fat as bulbs that would form on new plants (the plants were sown a year ago), but they are tender enough to shave and use fresh in salads. They're also good for cooking.

Not photographed last week was a big Spanish Black carrot, another celery root, and a few stalks of celery. I used the carrot and celery root in a braise that included some of the Romanesco broccoli harvested the week before.

It's a bit of a challenge at the moment to work my way through the glut of winter veggies that I've had to clear out of the garden. I'm almost through all of the Tronchuda Beira cabbage, I used a few of the largest leaves to make stuffed cabbage, I blanched the leaves and filled them with a mixture of sweet Italian sausage, rice, cheese, and seasonings and baked them in tomato sauce. You can find the recipe here. I've got just enough cabbage left to try Okonomiyaki, one of Daphne's favorites. There's still a couple heads of Romanesco broccoli to get through...

Here's the harvests from the past week:

Spanish Black carrot - 7.1 oz.
Dorato di Asti celery - 8.6 oz.
Monarch celeriac - 8.5 oz.
Romanesco fennel - 12 oz.
Rhapsody butterhead lettuce - 1 lb., 7.7 oz.
Ruby Gem romaine lettuce - 13.2 oz.
Helios radishes - 3.1 oz.
Selzer Purple radish - 1.6 oz.
Mikado turnips - 1 lb., 12 oz.

The total harvests for the past week were - 6 lb., 9.8 oz.
Which brings the total harvests for 2015 up to - 58 lb., 13 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 lately.

15 comments:

  1. Such beautiful turnips. I need to grow more of them this year. Last year I wasn't good about starting enough in the spring.

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  2. Great looking harvest!! We too are having a weird warm winter, although for us warm means 55 not 80! It sure has made our winter gardening easier this year!!

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  3. Looks good - I love celeriac and lettuce of all varieties.

    All the best Jan

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  4. I can see where your winter veggies could get confused with those temps! Those are beautiful turnips, and it looks like the lettuce cleaned up nicely. I'm going to try some baby turnips as a spring crop here. I usually only grow them in fall, but Hakurei should size up quick enough before it gets too hot.

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  5. Well, despite strange weather you still have more to harvest than any of us! I like the sound of that stuffed cabbage recipe - especially the Italian sausage! BTW, what is Red Boat?

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    1. Red Boat is my favorite brand of Vietnamese fish sauce.

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  6. I don't normally allow my lettuce to form heads, preferring to pick the outer leaves as they grow, so I often find it very impressive when others grow gorgeous heads, like those butterhead lettuces.

    I've bookmarked the stuffed cabbage recipe - sounds delicious! Like you, my favourite use for that variety is soup, but it is a very prolific veg and I often found myself looking for other ways to use it up.

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  7. Amazing how much more I pay attention to weather now that I grow veggies. From Vancouver where I grew up (where weather is pretty mild) to Ottawa where I now live that has have extremes of temperature (up to -35C in winter to +35C in summer). As to your harvest, I'm similar to Margaret where I rarely (OK never) have let a lettuce form a head ... those look wonderful!

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  8. Wish we had some of your warm weather to melt our snow. It will be a while before we thaw out. Lovely harvest.

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  9. Oh, I hope you love Okonomiyaki as much as I do. That is one of the best uses of cabbage, I think!

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  10. The lettuces look spectacular. I'm been dying to start some early spring greens but with the 5 + feet of snow we currently have, I think it would be premature. Awful.

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  11. Love your lettuces, I've never been able to grow a head of lettuce, someday I'll get the timing right!
    Right now our day temps are in the 50s-60s, night temps in 20s-30s.

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  12. Beautiful lettuces. I'm with Margaret and Susie and the other leaf-pickers. Leaves until they look like they are going to bolt, then cut the whole head. Picking leaves from different varieties adds some variety to the salads. I was wondering if you were getting rain. A lot of our storms have originated off the Pacific (the Pineapple Express), traveled cross country, then hit our cold air.

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    1. I used to be a leaf picker, but then my husband expressed a preference for head lettuce so I've been growing mostly those the last few years. I grow other cutting greens like mizuna and baby pac choi to add some variety to the salads.

      The Pineapple Express side swiped us the weekend before last and dropped a couple of inches of rain. I guess it reserved a lot of its moisture for you! It's been dry and sunny since then, although we've been socked in with fog for the past couple of days. No rain in sight for the rest of the month. :-(

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  13. A nice harvest indeed! Lettuce, turnips, and fennel looks good. I can't wait for us to get out of this deep cold freeze, snow, and ice.
    http://LivingItUpAlternatively.blogspot.com

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