Monday, March 28, 2016

Harvest Monday - March 28, 2016

Harvests are slowing down as the winter veggies finish up and the spring ones are still growing up. I got a nice harvest of chard from a couple of the plants that I got into the garden very late last fall. The little plants sat there through the winter just barely growing, but now that the days are longer and we've had a bit of warm weather (off and on), the plants have put out some good sized leaves. I used this harvest to make a gratin using the stems and the leaves along with some of the green onions that I've been thinning out of the bulbing onion planting.

Italian Silver Rib Chard
Some of the onions will be red...

Tropea Rossa Tonda
And other ones will be white...

Ramata di Milano
The pea plants that were growing in the cover crop for the solanum bed produced some really good shoots before I cut the whole lot down, chopped it up and dug it in.


Both harvests were used together in a stir-fry along with asparagus and spring onions, all seasoned with an oyster sauce based sauce and toasted sesame seeds.


One of the salad greens that I had going for winter salads, Romanesca da Taglio Endive, had a major growth spurt so I harvested most of them and used wilted them in a saute instead of salads.

Romanesca di Taglio Endive

That was it for the week. I did harvest a couple of wonky heads of Red Iceberg lettuce, half of which I had to discard, and then I forgot to weigh what remained. We enjoyed a number of salads featuring the lettuces that I harvested the week before, those heads are keeping quite well in the fridge.

Here's the details of the harvests for the past week:

Italian Silver Rib chard - 1 lb., 14.6 oz.
Romanesca da Taglio endive - 13.8 oz.
Spring onions - 2 lb., 2.3 oz.
Pea shoots - 11.1 oz.

Total harvests for the week - 5 lb., 9.8 oz. (2.5 kg.)
2016 YTD - 78 lb., 2.9 oz. (35.5 kg.)

Harvest Monday is hosted by Dave on his blog Our Happy Acres, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

8 comments:

  1. Yum, yum...salads...how I miss them! Well, miss the fresh from the garden kind anyhow. Your chard looks amazing too. Do you have issues with aphids at this time of year at all? I probably could have gotten a few more pickings of it in the fall, had it not been for those buggers.

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    1. I haven't this spring, at least not on the chard, but I did toss a bunch of Ethiopian Highland kale into the compost because it was so incredibly infested with aphids - totally disgusting.

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  2. Those pea shoots are lovely, they almost look like baby spinach. The green onions are nice too. Looks like you have will have some Italian onions in your garden!

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    1. I am trying a few different Italian onions this year in hopes of finding a variety that won't bolt. And there's non-Italians in the onion patch too.

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  3. What a great mix of veggies for the harvest! Your green onions look so perfect. I don't know why I have a hard time with them - maybe just the weather as the top half of the greens seem to brown and shrivel up every year before they size up enough to harvest. Maybe I should be looking for a shadier spot?

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    1. Perhaps they aren't getting enough water, onions are quite shallow rooted. I suppose it might be because of some sort of nutrient deficiency too.

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  4. How nice to have greens to cook with, and the onions are beautiful. It's still pretty brown here, except under the grow lights.

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  5. My garden is bare at present - some seeds are in, but little is showing. Those onions of yours look picture-perfect! Like an illustration in a seed-catalogue...

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