What are you eating from your garden today?

Tonight we're having fresh salad just picked with a mix of lettuce from my winter crop (black seeded simpson) and mescalun mix that is just maturing. Fresh Radish and one of the very last tomatoes (fresh) that I've kept in the fridge since pulling out the plant in mid-January.

We'll also have zucchini latkes with our chicken breasts. (EDIT: so much for the zucchini, it was shredded cucumber I shredded to use in baking, LOL! I'm not thinking cucumber latkes sounds doable!) So, frozen green beans instead.

I love harvesting and planting on the same day - we just planted to first of our potatoes in our straw bale gardens.

http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-chard-mushroom-lasagna-137482

Made this with chard from the garden. Sure wish I could get butternut to grow here, but I've been unsuccessful so far.
The recipe was really good, but I will add some caramelized onions to the mushrooms and chard mixture next time. I've got a bunch of whole wheat lasagna noodles that I got for .50/box with a sale/coupon, so I was happy with how good this recipe came out. No one else in the family will eat it, but I can freeze it in individual serving sizes and have a quick and healthy lunch to pop in the microwave.

I thinned my indoor pak choi, broccoli and collard seedlings today, and put the sprouts into my salad for lunch. Micro greens!

Does that count?

CC

CapeCoddess wrote:I thinned my indoor pak choi, broccoli and collard seedlings today, and put the sprouts into my salad for lunch. Micro greens!

Does that count?

CC

Sure it does, CC.

Rhubarb from last season, along with zucchini..(casseroles)

Don't you just love it! And finally a sunny day this month!

Harvested 2 heads of broccoli this morning and ate one of them (along with a handful of snow peas) in a breakfast stirfry.

jmdever wrote:Don't you just love it! And finally a sunny day this month!

jmdever
I see this is your first post here. Let us know who you are.

I was finally was able to clear a bed with carrots today that should have been harvested back in December but due to the lousy summer and winter the carrots didn't do very well except for the odd one agains the sunny side of the brick work .. everthing else was just too cold.

We had five of the biggest carrots for tea tonight & half a large parsnip dug up from a few days ago .
The remainder of the carrots are going to be carrot and chicken soup tomorrow morning , then frozen in to family sized soup sessions for three slurpers.

Size wise about 1/3 are under an inch in diameter at the top end and not much more than two inches long. Just over half are below even that leaving one sixth as decent long carrots up to six inches long . All the carrots were sown either on 7 July or 17 JULY last year and should have been nine inch long store carrots harvested in late in December.

Well we had tea ...... Sausages , mashed spuds , carrots baton and leeks in three inch lengths including as much of the green tops as we could use .....served with packet onion gravy , YUM , YUM .

I must confess the carrots and parsnip were fantastic, I thought there was a big chance of them starting to go woody as they run to seed .. this MM stuff is certainly the bee's knees for getting decent crops , in mother earth soil most would have split or been like old fashioned wooden clothes pegs.

Today I had to pull up most of the baby pak choi that I planted as they were going to bolt. Seems like I just planted them out as seedlings a few short weeks ago.

I had them tonite with some baby kale leaves in a stir fry over rice.

CC

Looks excellent CC I'm ready to munch on some baby bok again!

I pulled (and ate) my first pea (pod)!

It was the first bloom I had gotten, and it was now pretty fat and round, but not very long.

I pulled it, cracked it open, and the peas looked just right. I tried the pod too, but it was pretty fibrous (think edamame shell, but not QUITE that bad).

There were six peas, and I savored each and every one.

Homemade pie with home grown and canned sauce, garlic, basil, shallots and oregano.

A salad with three types of lettuce and radishes. By the time the cucumbers and tomatoes and squash come in the lettuce will be bolting. Oh well.

I just picked a bunch of red lettuce (MoFS), and a whole head of Tom Thumb lettuce. Used some for burgers, and made a couple salads out of the rest.

Normally the Tom Thumb would be a cut-and-come-again, but with our weather rapidly turning into summer, the lettuce is going to bolt any minute anyway.

Twas delicious!

yolos wrote:A salad with three types of lettuce and radishes. By the time the cucumbers and tomatoes and squash come in the lettuce will be bolting. Oh well.

Question about bolting... can't you keep it trimmed to keep it producing? Isn't that what you do with herbs, like basil? I know when I've grown basil in the past, I kept it from flowering so I could keep harvesting the leaves. Can you not do this with lettuces and other greens? Or will they just quit growing because they don't like the heat? Dumb question, perhaps, but I've no clue. I had to look up what "bolting" meant when I was ordering seeds back in February.

From what I understand, the way lettuces (and spinach) bolt, you can't really stop it because it's a response to the heat. Also, I think it happens very fast and by the time you notice the flower coming, the leaves have already bittered.

But I could be wrong.

Strawberries! My strawberry bed is bursting right now.

Tomorrow I'll harvest a bunch of dinosaur kale because it's going nuts, and perhaps some of the Russian kale. We will have tomatoes and peas soon, too!

You can keep the about to bolt lettuce growing, so long as you do it as soon as the seed spike starts to rise above the basic plant .. don't leave it till it is three inches high for it will,be too late .

Look in the gallery in the big stuff section. That 19 inch diameter saladbowl lettuce of mine had the centre taken out several times and also got regular dinner table hair cuts

Carrots.
The first strawberries.
Bowls and bowls of lettuce and spinach.
AND my first yellow crook neck squash!

plantoid wrote:
...Look in the gallery in the big stuff section...

Trying to figure out what this means. I looked, but didn't see any "big stuff" section. And which gallery?

jazzycat wrote:
Question about bolting... can't you keep it trimmed to keep it producing? Isn't that what you do with herbs, like basil? I know when I've grown basil in the past, I kept it from flowering so I could keep harvesting the leaves. Can you not do this with lettuces and other greens? Or will they just quit growing because they don't like the heat?

I tried taking out the middles of this current pak choi to get it go grow bigger, as I've had success doing that with some lettuces last year. But, as with other lettuces, the stem gets longer and it made no new leaves, just got taller. The other lettuces also got bitter. So I guess it all depends on the plant. Wish I'd taken notes on what worked and what didn't.

CC

CapeCoddess wrote:

jazzycat wrote:
Question about bolting... can't you keep it trimmed to keep it producing? Isn't that what you do with herbs, like basil? I know when I've grown basil in the past, I kept it from flowering so I could keep harvesting the leaves. Can you not do this with lettuces and other greens? Or will they just quit growing because they don't like the heat?

I tried taking out the middles of this current pak choi to get it go grow bigger, as I've had success doing that with some lettuces last year. But, as with other lettuces, the stem gets longer and it made no new leaves, just got taller. The other lettuces also got bitter. So I guess it all depends on the plant. Wish I'd taken notes on what worked and what didn't.

CC

Think of it this way. There is a cycle of life to everything... The main reason for an organism to mature is to reproduce, some plants do this by bolting and making flowers and then seeds. Certain plants manage the loss of the flowering mechanism by putting out side growth, (basil),but some plants don't do this at all. Some will try, (lettuce) but the life force of the plant may be waning, or the environmental conditions are no longer optimal for flowering......... with lettuce, it tends to get bitter. That's why succession planting is popular with lettuces. The baby leaves are so much better tasting.

does that help at all?

I harvested lettuce this past weekend. One packet was a mix and had red kale in it. I will definitely plant more of the red kale in the future. I had a few ripe yellow pear tomatoes from my plant that survived the winter so those went on top of my salad.

My cilantro and basil are now to the point where I can start harvesting as I need it. My jalapeno plant that survived the winter is also producing lots of peppers.

camprn wrote:Think of it this way. There is a cycle of life to everything... The main reason for an organism to mature is to reproduce, some plants do this by bolting and making flowers and then seeds. Certain plants manage the loss of the flowering mechanism by putting out side growth, (basil),but some plants don't do this at all. Some will try, (lettuce) but the life force of the plant may be waning, or the environmental conditions are no longer optimal for flowering......... with lettuce, it tends to get bitter. That's why succession planting is popular with lettuces. The baby leaves are so much better tasting.

does that help at all?

It definitely does. Since I like to eat a lot of salads, especially in the summer, I want to be able to grow lettuce continually, hence the question. I would harvest the outer leaves when they are still small as the younger, inner leaves grew. I'm growing 6 or 8 different varieties, and I'm contemplating growing some indoors so I won't have to worry so much about them bolting in the heat. (you can do that, right? if you keep the temperature cool enough?) Then, also, no worries about aphids, etc. But, will lettuces continue to grow and produce during the summer if you keep planting new seeds? I really wasn't sure if they would survive very long in the spring/early summer here, because of the heat/humidity issue.