Yes, summer has been elusive, but that means best quality cool weather crops like lettuce and broccoli. The warm weather stuff has been slow to ripen but I’ve got zucchini and greenhouse cucumbers and the very first cherry tomatoes. And – excitement of excitement – tiny little green beans. I can’t wait to eat fresh beans again.
What we’ve been harvesting over the past several weeks:
The last of the spring broccoli. This bed of broccoli gave and gave. We were eating off of it for about 2 months.
Red Cabbage – It thought it wanted to go to flower, then changed it’s mind, so we got a cabbage/cauliflower hybrid thing. It tasted good!
Sugar Snap Peas – another good use of space. We ate off the one planting for about 6 weeks.
Watermelon Radish – I threw a few seeds in the ground with my carrots. They were pretty but a bit spicy harvested on June 30th.
Beets – Early Wonder Tall Top, I think. My beets haven’t done as wonderfully this year as I’d have liked. They are taking forever to size up and leaf miners have found the foliage.
Garlic Scapes: how grocery stores manage to get people to pay big money for these, I’ll never know. Right up there with $7 a pound Jerusalem Artichokes as far as I’m concerned.
Lots of salad onions. Lots! I planted my starts quite close together so I have to yank every other plant to allow the survivors the room to size up properly.
Carrot thinnings – isn’t this one amazing? The carrots I’m growing between onion rows seem undisturbed by the carrot fly. Interesting…
Baby Lettuce – this is Little Gem Romaine. I’ve always got some kind of lettuce or salad green growing.
Started eating zucchini a few weeks ago. Already working a backlog. That’s zucchini for you. But oh how I’ll miss it in September.
That’s a great looking kale, wouldn’t you say?
It’s my new favorite – it’s an ornamental edible called Chidori. But it really does taste as good as it looks – sweet and mild with juicy, non-fibrous stems, even summer harvested.
The consolation prize from the failed potato sack experiment – a few really nice new potatoes.
It’s been a decent raspberry harvest, but I think all the fruit has been eaten in the garden.
I have one-and-a-half beds of strawberries. The back bed is too shady and is underperforming. The front half-bed is putting out good fruit for a first-year planting. Again, most of the fruit is eaten out of hand right from the bed.
As usual, the golden cherry tomatoes are the first to ripen.
This past Monday the18th I ate steamed just-harvested artichokes with butter for dinner. It didn’t suck.
And look who’s coming along….well, Hello! Ms. Romano Green Bean. Aren’t you looking adorable?
What are you eating fresh from your garden?
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Apples, cherry tomatoes and a few Early Girls, cucumbers, peppers (just 1 so far!), celery, crookneck squash, basil, parsley, lemons, a few oranges left on the tree. Gone already are sugar snap peas, radishes, lettuces, broccoli.
$7/lb for Jerusalem Artichokes? They've got to be joking. They grow like weeds!