I'm still waiting for the BIG harvest from my labors (you know, that book deal for my novel...coming ANY DAY NOW). In the meanwhile, I'm still working on my more mundane harvest--fruits and veggies from the garden.
I love my garden: it's beautiful, I get amazing (organic) food to eat out of it, and often it acts as a kind of therapy. There is nothing like digging in the dirt to ground and center your spirit in the midst of an often chaotic world. And if you happen to be able to eat a tomato afterwards, that's nice too :-) On the downside, of course, it is a hella lot of work and I never quite feel like I'm keeping up. So on my Wednesdays off from the shop, I can often be found outside, trimming and weeding and harvesting. Here's what came in from the garden yesterday:
This is what it looked like when I dragged it all in (seriously, the basket was HEAVY). Basil, the last of the yellow and red onions, carrots, potatoes, a few strawberries, and one tiny red pepper. The long green stuff in front is the first few stalks from the soy bean patch. I grow them for edamame (eaten fresh, like peas--just throw them into boiling water, pop them out of the pods, then eat).
Cleaned up, don't these look great? Three kinds of pototoes: Yukon Gold (they keep well, so I'll be eating them all winter--that's the big white ones), small red (some of which got pretty large), and my favorite, French fingerling. You'll probably think the carrots look funny. I grow a kind called "Purple Haze" that is actually purple and not only has extra antioxidants but tastes sweeter.
Here's the basil, a bit more neatly put together in water, waiting for me to make it into pesto today. YUM.
This is the final, cleaned garlic harvest. Do you think I have enough? Actually, the largest half of that batch will get replanted in the fall for next year's harvest. The rest...well, I'm going to be eating a lot of garlic!
If you have a garden, what are you harvesting now? If you don't have one, what would you grow if you could pick any three edible plants? (I'd love to have blood oranges and Meyer lemons, but they don't grow here in the Northeast, alas. My parents, on the other hand, have an amazing lemon tree in their back yard in San Diego. Jealous!)
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I want a garden but I can't come down to 3 plants I want more then the others. Living in FL I get a better option of what I can and can't grow because of the long growing season and warm more tropical temperatures. I did try a garden this year but it turned out thus far kinda of poorly. I have a squash, cucumber, and tomato plant growing. The other 15 plants don't seem to be coming. We also are trying to grow Pineapple tree/bush. And eventually I want a lot of other fruit trees and would love a herb garden and a beautiful veggie garden too. I should start saving seeds now for next year and try again earlier in the year. Your garden looks great!! And all those foods look yummy. I'm going to have to try me some purple carrots.
ReplyDeleteI like "odd" colored veggies :-) Purple tomatoes and carrots, red lettuce and peppers, even purple cauliflower...
DeleteI would grow raspberries (and need to move northward to do that), blueberries, and strawberries. So what if my harvest was a crazy time in the summer? Those are my faves.
ReplyDeleteI have all three, but they are mostly ripe at different times. It wasn't a great fruit year, though, because of the high temps and low rainfall.
DeleteI have some lemons a friend brought me from San Diego, and it's been such a treat to use each one!
ReplyDeleteI am so inexperienced with garlic--that haul makes me jealous!
Garlic is easy to grow! Just find some nice big heads of a type you like (I prefer the stiff neck, which you don't usually find in the grocery store), break them into cloves and plant each clove pointy-end up about 4-5 inches from the next one. It is best to plant in fall for an end-of-summer crop the next year. You can plant in spring, but the end result will be a little smaller. When they start to flower (there is a long stalk called a "scape" that comes out of each plant--you can clip them and eat them in stirfries or BBQ them), be sure to remove the flower before it blooms, so that all the plant's energy goes into making the heads.
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