Turnips, Peas and Strawberry Shortcake

It is officially summer vacation for me.  Actually I've been on vacation for a week.  I made detailed lists of stuff I planned to do with all my extra time, but that first week I was utterly lethargic.  Hopefully this week will be more productive.  At least the garden has been productive even when I'm not!

I had my first turnip harvest of the year this week.  Those aphids that covered my peas several weeks ago have now moved on to the turnips.  Hopefully since they are mostly mature, the aphids won't have a big impact.  These turnips went on to get cooked (in my Instant Pot, which was way faster than boiling them on the stove top) and then mashed with some butter and salt.

I've also been harvesting plenty of greens.  Salads are being eaten at multiple meals a day here.  I need to get some summer lettuce started soon, since I have a feeling the spring lettuce is going to begin bolting.

I've also been picking and eating kale and Swiss chard.  I made a quiche with some greens and also some greens and cheese hand pies.  They end up in my breakfast every morning with eggs.

Peas have been abundant this week.  I only took a picture of some of the snowpeas, but there were lots of shelling peas as well.  We eat these raw out of the shell.  I keep thinking I'll have enough to freeze, but every day we end up eating all of the tasty, fat peas.

As for the snowpeas, they ended up in a tofu stir fry. Yum!

The strawberries seem to be on the end of their spring production.  This will probably be the last big harvest for the year.  It was delicious while it lasted and I'm pretty sure I made up my investment in building a bed and buying strawberry plants in the first year.

For the strawberries last hurrah, I made strawberry shortcakes.  They were delicious and also quite photogenic!

It has been raining almost all day and the week is looking very wet.  I need to take advantage of all the rain to do lots and lots of weeding and also get peanuts planted.

That's all the harvests coming from my garden this week.  To see what others are harvesting, check out Harvest Monday on Our Happy Acres.

More Strawberries!

This week has been filled with spring goodies.  The harvest basket below sums up what's been going on in the garden this week: 

I love the color combinations of red and green with a little pop of purple!  On the bottom of the basket is a pile of oregano.  My oregano has been growing and growing, so I trimmed it back before it started to flower.  I dried the oregano for using later.

I have never tried eating chive flowers, so that was a new culinary adventure this week.  I tried them in my breakfast with greens and eggs.  They definitely add a nice kick tasting somewhere between garlic and onions.  They also make my breakfast much prettier.  If you start the day eating flowers, it's going to be a good day!

The peas are producing a bit more now.  I do think the aphid population has decreased, so I'm going to claim victory for me, the ladybugs and dragonflies!  The peas that were covered with aphids are looking sickly, but the rest of the pea patch seems to be doing well.  We love to snack on raw peas, so I haven't made any dishes with them.

Of course the star harvest continues to be the strawberries.  This week brought in 6 1/2 lbs of strawberries!  Besides just popping them in our mouths while picking them, my snack of the week has been yogurt with strawberries.

I also dipped them in chocolate.  Delicious and very easy!

We've also been eating plenty of strawberries in smoothies.  I froze some of this week's strawberries to be used later in smoothies.  I've thought about making some strawberry jam, but it hasn't happened yet. Freezing strawberries it so much easier than breaking out the canning stuff!

Besides all the strawberries, I've had a bit of greens from the garden this week.  The spinach is beginning to bolt, so I harvested most of them.  I also thinned my Swiss chard seedlings.  This year I'm growing Perpetual Swiss Chard for the first time, so I'm hoping it does well.  Swiss Chard is usually my reliable year round green.  The mesclun mix salad has been cut this week, so we are eating salads daily.  We had a decent amount of rain and cooler temperatures this week, which has made the spring crops happy.  Unfortunately it has also made the weeds happy too!

That's all the harvests coming from my garden this week.  To see what others are harvesting, check out Harvest Monday on Our Happy Acres.

Spring Harvests

Garden harvests have picked up this week as spring progresses.  It's wonderful to have more veggie variety.  I dug up the last of the overwintering carrots (5 lbs 10 oz) to make room for more summer crops.  Winter carrots are by far the sweetest and most delicious of the carrots!  I've been eating large quantities of carrot sticks with pumpkin hummus from my autumn harvest.

I've also been harvesting loads of lettuce (9.8 oz).  This was the last of the overwintering All Star mix.  They have begun to bolt and were standing in the way of pepper planting.  My spring lettuce is also ready for harvest, so I've been eating lots of salads.  My latest favorite dressing recipe is this Asian Ginger Dressing one.  I like that it uses rice vinegar, which I find much milder than other vinegars.

I also harvested the rest of the overwintering Swiss chard (2 lbs 6.6 oz).  I've been cooking it with eggs for breakfast and yesterday I made a pumpkin, chard, parmesan and quinoa dish.

I harvested my spring planted Cherry Belle radishes.  They also went into my salads and were eaten with hummus.  I took a vegetable tray to a coworker's retirement party last week and the carrots, radishes and pumpkin hummus made a public debut.  There was another veggie tray, so the party game became taste testing my carrots versus the store bought ones.  Mine won, but it may have been biased, since it was not a double blind study!

The show stopper this week is my first strawberry!  I planted them last year, so this is the first strawberry I've harvested since we've lived here, which has been three and a half years.  Needless to say it was a special strawberry and got its portrait taken before being carefully cut in half and savored.  I went on to harvest 10.5 ounces later on during the week and we devoured them before I could take a picture.

That's all the harvests coming from my garden this week.  To see what others are harvesting, check out Harvest Monday on Our Happy Acres.

Early April Garden Tour

We've had warm temperatures and descent rainfall the past couple of weeks, which has brought the spring garden to life.  I love seeing the bright new green growth emerge from blank beds.  Sprouting seedlings contain so much potential for delicious harvests.  I find spring a season filled with inspiration from the germinating seed to the strawberry flowers.

Join me on an early spring tour of my garden.

Two weeks ago I planted asparagus crowns that looked lifeless and brown.  I built a new raised bed using rocks, filled it with soil and buried the octopus-like root crowns.

Today I noticed that they've sprouted thin stalks!  Either I was completely oblivious and missed seeing them emerge or they shot up out of the ground really fast.  They are growing next to the pollinator flower bed and I've discovered that black-eyed susans disperse excessive amounts of seeds and will colonize the world (or at least my garden).  I'm hoping the asparagus bed doesn't get overrun with black-eyed susans.

Now just a couple of years to wait for an asparagus harvest!

In the annual beds of my garden, lots of seedlings have sprouted and are putting on new growth.  I overplanted spinach seeds because I had poor germination in the fall.  All the seeds have sprouted and grown.  I thinned and thinned some more, saving the miniature spinach leaves as microgreens to add to my salads.  Spinach has a narrow window of growth in my climate because we tend to go from cool spring temperatures to the heat of summer suddenly.  Hopefully the spinach will have time to grow before the heat arrives.

Peas germinated abundantly this spring.  Yesterday I put up their trellis since they are growing and reaching into the sky for something to cling to.  Last year aphids infected my peas, so I'm hoping for fewer aphids and more peas this spring.  I still dream of having enough peas to freeze.  It has yet to happen, but maybe this will be the year.

Spring planted turnips are abundant and green.  They are living under a row cover this year because last year I had a destructive infestation of harlequin beetles.

Carrots are notorious for poor germination, but they are looking good this year.  They are growing next to the turnips, so I ended up covering the entire root row.  However, we had some strong winds a couple of days ago and those row covers did not want to stay put!  A fifty foot row cover kite and strong winds makes for an entertaining scene for anyone watching, but not so fun for me!

Detroit red and golden beets sprouted too.  My fall beets performed poorly this year, so I'm looking forward to a beet harvest.

Mustard is one of my new crops for 2017.  I direct sowed them and they seem to be thriving.  

Celery is my other experimental new crop for the year.  I started them inside and transplanted them a couple of weeks ago.  I need to thin them, but other than that they seem to be growing fine.

The little Cherry Belle radishes beat the competition for the first spring crops.  I've never been a big radish fan, but I love to grow them since they are the closest crop to instant gratification you can get.

Fall planted garlic continues to grow and gets greener as spring gets warmer.  I'm hoping for a good garlic harvest this year.

My overwintering cabbage looks ready for harvest.  I harvested one head last week (2 lbs 11 oz), which is a good-sized cabbage for me!  I used the first head in a potato and cabbage casserole.  The next cabbage harvest will become coleslaw for a cookout this coming Friday for J's birthday.

And because gardening is a constant process, here's the newly planted cabbage seedlings.  I need to thin them too!   

Many of the herbs have put on new growth as spring arrives.  My thyme looks lush and dense with little blooms.

Broccoli had a rough start this spring.  We had an exceptionally warm February, but then in mid March, winter decided to return and we had a hard frost for several nights.  At this point, my broccoli were tiny and I didn't have enough row covers and I assumed that they were cold hardy.  They were too young and unprepared for the cold, so I had some causalities and do not have as many broccoli seedlings as I would like.  

Potato stems and leaves have poked out of the ground.  They too are protected under a row cover because I do not trust the potato beetles to leave anything for me.

I am delighted to see my strawberries flower and begin to form tiny, green berries.  This year will be my first strawberry harvest.  I planted them last year and I can't wait to taste the first delicious and juicy strawberry.  I have a feeling that some squirrels may also be anticipating strawberries as much as me.

That is what is going on in my garden this spring.  Soon it will be time to plant the summer crops.  I have tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, melons and okra growing in little pots waiting for the sun to warm the soil so that they can move out into the garden.  I've been putting the seedlings on the back porch on warm days to help them acclimate to the sun.  Our average last frost date is mid-April.  That means that soon the gardening pace will pick up.  Spring is a lovely time to observe the greening of the garden.  It's always amazing to watch as the garden goes from empty soil to tiny seedlings that grow to towering plants producing abundant crops.  Oh the miracles of spring!

Harvest Monday

This week we greeted our first frost here in South Carolina.  I've still been harvesting strawberries and I'm surprised that they are still producing, but no complaints!

 

I also harvested some peppers (covered during the cold nights) and some peas:

I have never grown turnips.  How do I know when to harvest??  They don't look as big as I thought they would be, but I don't want them getting woody. 

My main causality in the frost was the basil:

I've got plenty of pesto frozen and plenty of dried basil to get me through the winter months, so the frost wasn't a tragedy.  The basil is now my Halloween decor!

I hope everyone had a Happy Harvest Monday!  To see what others are harvesting check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions.