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| Sabre Shelling Peas |
The shelling peas gave up their final basketful of pods last Monday and now there are some Blue Speckled Tepary beans just starting to pop up in their place. We really enjoyed the peas and my little patch that started with 36 plants (with a few losses along the way) produced 9 pounds (4 kg.) of pods. I don't know if other gardeners would be disappointed with an average of only 4 ounces per plant but I'm happy because I harvested enough to satisfy my appetite for peas and not so much that it was a chore to process or preserve them. Also, the short variety that I grew fit in well with the rotation that I use, utilizing a space that might have been been empty for much of the spring growing season. So spring peas will probably be back in the lineup next year.
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| Roc d'Or and Red Swan beans |
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| Romanesco Zucchini |
Romanesco zucchini is a proven winner in my garden, it gets off to a quick start and one plant produces more than enough zukes to meet my needs.
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| Yellow Sweet Spanish Utah, Tropea Rossa Tonda, Di Maggio Cippollini |
Some of the onions are bolting and I've been culling them as I find them. There's the latest batch of bolters shown above.
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| Pink Plume Celery |
The celery keeps pumping out the stalks and they are getting to be longer and more plump as the season progresses. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they hold off from bolting, I've really been enjoying their crisp juicy addition to salads and have been cooking with them quite a bit also. The stalks are a bit too stringy to just munch on, but the strings aren't so fibrous to be unpleasant when the stalks are sliced. That was just one of a number of harvests last week.
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| Misty and Sunshine Blue Blueberries |
My four potted blueberry bushes have been producing some really good berries and far more than I expected, that harvest was more than a quart (1 liter) of berries. I been able to harvest about a quart of berries once a week for the past three weeks and there's probably about a quart left on the bushes. You aren't going to find these in my tally, I quite trying to tally fruit harvests years ago.
Other harvests this week that I didn't get around to photographing were more capers, another head of Manoa lettuce, some cucumbers, and the first head of Ruby Gem lettuce (which also escaped the scale).
Here's the details of the harvests for the past week:
Red Swan beans - 1.3 oz.
Roc d'Or beans - 1.6 oz.
Capers - 6.3 oz.
Pink Plume celery - 1.2 lb.
Green Fingers Persian cucumbers - 7.9 oz.
Manoa Crisphead lettuce - 11.5 oz.
Di Maggio cippollini onions - 14.1 oz.
Tropea Rossa Tonda onion - 1.2 lb.
Yellow Sweet Spanish Utah onions - 3.5 lb.
Sabre shelling peas - 2 lb.
Romanesco zucchini - 1.8 lb.
Total harvests for the week - 12.3 lb (5.6 kg.)
2016 YTD - 329.4 lb. (149 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.
Beautiful harvests, Michelle. I haven't grown pole beans since I finished my failed experiments with 3 sisters gardening a few years ago. But I like the concept of pole beans themselves. I just haven't made space for them. To be honest, we are swimming in frozen bush beans, and I only planted 16 wax beans this year to use up the remaining seed.
ReplyDeleteThe yields from Peas never sound very impressive in terms of weight, but I believe that their main attraction is their taste. When something is that good it's worth growing it even if you get a modest amount.
ReplyDeleteNice haul of peas and the onions are pretty. I'm surprised you have so much trouble with bolting, something that virtually never happens to my onions. They say temperature extremes can cause it, but I can't believe your daily extremes are worse than here.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if the daily extremes are different, highs in the 70's or 80's and lows down to the high 40's, but the weather can swing from extended cool periods to warm and back and forth and back and forth.... I think it's all that back and forth that the onions object to.
DeleteYour bean strategy sounds a lot like mine, planting a few early bush types before the pole beans go in. I've become a fan of the hybrid Romanesco too but I do grow more summer squash plants, since they usually succumb to bugs or disease here before summer is over. And that's a great harvest from the potted blueberries!
ReplyDeleteBeautiful harvests! I'm glad to hear that you have had such good results from only 4 blueberry bushes - we can't plant them in the ground around here because of the alkaline soil, so I've got my 2 in raised beds. A lot more work & expense than simply plopping them in the ground, but worth it if they eventually produce.
ReplyDeleteWe've got the same issue with alkaline soil here. The advice here is to dig out the native soil, mix it 50/50 with peat and then plant the bushes in that. Also to use an acidic mulch like pine needles and to add sulfur every year. I didn't want to deal with that and the gophers as well so I opted for pots and used a 50/50 mix of potting soil and peat. I also mulch the soil in my pots with oak leaves.
DeleteConsidering they are potential "bolters", those onions look fantastic. Wonderful harvest all around. My potted blueberry bush dried out, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm so envious of that zucchini - my plants are very small right now so I have a long wait ahead of me.
Lovely harvest!
ReplyDeleteI love that your potted blueberries are producing so well. Even with peas stilling coming in your snap beans and zucchini have started producing, it's really nice when spring and summer vegetables mingle. That's too bad some of your onions are bolting, I assume they have to be processed relatively quickly.
ReplyDeleteI do use the bolters right away and if I have too many at once I can chop them up, saute them, and freeze them. That worked great with the last of the onions from last year that needed to be used up before they spoiled.
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