Harvest Monday 5/30/16

My garden is picking up the pace.  I harvested my first ever Chinese cabbage.  I've never grown it before and I've also never eaten it before.  Here it is with my first amaranth greens of the season.

With my first ever Chinese cabage I'm going to make some stir fry.  I hope that I like it.  I grow the amaranth and cabbage under a row cover and was very disappointed to find that the amaranth were covered with aphids.  The rest of the veggies under the row cover looked fine except for the amaranth.  I grow amaranth for the greens.  It and Swiss chard are my reliable summer greens.  After the cabbage and broccoli are done, then I will remove the row cover so that natural predators like ladybugs can get to the aphids.

Also this week was plenty of lettuce.

This will probably be the last week of this All Star mix before it starts bolting.  I do have some heat tolerant lettuce planted to continue the lettuce harvest as the temperatures continue to increase.

This is a random assortment of an onion (white castle), peas (I think those are green arrow) and our first ever apple that was not successful.

Our apple trees are now three years old and this spring was the first time they flowered and set a few fruits.  This little apple was looking so perfect and we were hoping we were going to harvest our first apple ever this year.  Sadly that was not the case, as this little apple fell from the tree.  We are going to have to wait even longer for the first apple harvest.

I continue to have plenty of greens, mainly kale and Swiss chard.  They get sauteed and added to my breakfast.  I've gotten a bit tired of the green smoothies, but still make them one or two times per week.

I also harvested turnips this week.  I've had a lot of damage to my turnip greens this year that you can read about here.  I was happy to still get some decent sized turnips despite the leaf munching.

I made garlic parmesan mashed turnips that were very delicious.  I'm not a huge turnip fan, but when you add cheese, butter and garlic they are much more edible!

I also harvested some snowpeas and made some fried rice that included more greens.

Weekly harvests:

Turnips 1.4 lbs
Lettuce 1.75 lbs
Chard 0.5 lbs
Kale         0.5 lbs
Peas         0.9 lbs
Onion 2.2 oz
Chinese cabbage 2.8 lbs
Amaranth  0.6 lbs

Yearly total: 98.8 lbs - almost at the one hundred pound mark!

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.