Strawberries, Peas and Greens

I had my first big strawberry harvest this week with 2 lbs, 12 oz of delicious berries!  We had a lot of rain last week, 3 1/2 inches over two days, so I was worried about my strawberries rotting, but most of them were fine.  The slugs and snails have definitely been snacking as well, but so far the damage hasn't been excessive.

With all the strawberries, I had to make a delicious spring desert: angel food cake with strawberry sauce and homemade whipped cream.  Yum!

If you can pry your eyes away from the strawberry shortcake, the rest of the garden is growing rapidly.  The peas are flowering profusely and look lovely.

But if you look closer you'll see lots of tiny problems, they are covered with aphids.

The good news is that I have some helpers.  I spotted some ladybugs having an aphid buffet.  I'm not confident that there are enough ladybugs to battle the amount of aphids.

I also spotted a dragonfly next to the peas.  Perhaps he is joining the aphid feast with the ladybugs.  I hope combined they can keep the aphid population under control.

I did harvest some fat pea pods, so at least I got some peas in case the aphids destroy them.  Unfortunately we ate them before they were photographed or weighed.

The rest of this week's harvests were forms of green: cabbage, Chinese cabbage, spinach, lettuce and Swiss chard.  I've religiously weighed everything for the past three years and as much as I love having all the data, it has become too tedious.  My goal was to grow 1,000 lbs of veggies and I reached that goal last year, so the motivation to weigh harvests has faded.  The harvests that I dislike weighing the most are greens.  2017 is the year of sporadic weighing.  I'm weighing things that strike my fancy, like strawberries.

We had a delicious garden stir fry with the cabbage, Chinese cabbage, carrots, and the first peas.  I've also been eating lots of spring salads and veggie wraps.  The garden is feeding me well right now.

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.

Trust Issues in the Garden

The last average frost date has passed here, which means I've been busy planting.  I've planted tomato, winter squash, summer squash and melon seedlings along with massive amounts of bean seeds: black and pinto beans for dried beans, soy beans and pole green beans.

However, it you take a look at my garden you may begin to notice I have trust issues, or perhaps an obsession with row covers.

It all started innocently with row covers for my brassicas.  The cabbage moths made me start.  I tried picking them off and spraying Bt, but it seemed to always rain the day after spraying.  I put up my first row cover using rebar and pipe for the frame and Agribon AG-15 for the covers. The cabbage moths no longer destroyed my broccoli and cabbage.

My spring potatoes get attacked by potato beetles.  After trying concoctions of hot peppers, garlic and neem oil, I resorted to handpicking them.  Then the light bulb moment, potatoes don't need pollination and up went another row cover.

Last spring my turnip leaves were mangled by harlequin beetles and they had no energy left to produce turnips, so this spring, up went a row cover.  The beets and carrots and radishes just happened to be next to the turnips, so why not cover them as well?

Before I knew it row covers popped up everywhere.

They may not be the most attractive garden additions, but what they lack in aesthetics, they make up for in easy pest control- no spraying, no handpicking. Simple, effective and low maintenance- row covers won me over.

Of course there are crops that need pollinators or are simply too large to fit under a row cover.  Last spring something kept destroying my tomato seedlings.  I broke out the row cover material and my sewing machine and made mini row covers for seedlings.

They are about 18 inches wide and 24 inches tall.  I anchor them down with rocks and the drip hose.  Of course the tomatoes can not grow in these mini covers forever, but it gives them time to get established before being exposed to whatever bugs want to munch on them.  I do the same for my eggplants.  Flea beetles will decimate young seedlings here, so they get a little cover too.

I have an ongoing war with squash vine borers.  I have not resorted to keeping my squash completely under row covers because that would require hand pollination.  I do put the mini covers over the squash seedlings and try to keep the covers on until they begin to flower in hopes that perhaps the vine borers will miss my squash or at least have a bit later start.

There are some downfalls to row covers: wind, rips and excess moisture.  It seems that we have had a spring filled with gusts of wind.  I use bricks to anchor my large row covers and sometime the wind blows them free.  Imagine a 50 foot kite and that's what it is like wrestling a loose row cover in the wind.  This can lead to the second problem, which are rips.  This material is flimsy, so it tears easily.  I usually either sew up the rips or break out the duct tape, which does not improve my garden aesthetics.  The third problem can be too much moisture and humidity causing fungal problems.  I haven't experienced this, probably because of those excessive winds, but it is a potential problem.

For me, the negatives of row covers are outweighed by the positives.  I will take a garden that looks decorated for Halloween than to have to wage the spraying and picking battle with the bugs!