Lol, sorry for the pun. I bet only a few of you realize my name is Di anyway so probably lost on most of you, lol. Anyway here is a pic of my scarlet bean harvest Monday :)
Just 3oz but lots more on the plants and I planted some more at the weekend :) At em with some scrambled tofu Monday night. Definitely Yummy!
Harvest figures for May are as follows:
The harvest would have been more had I not lost the majority of my beets to the damn squirrels! So add a potential few more lbs there! Dang squirrels!
It's been harvest time here for the winter crops. I've shared some pics recently of the harvests and thought it'd be interesting to show you this monster turnip I harvested from the garden recently. DH snapped this pic with his iphone.
Lest the pic not do the size justice, let me tell ya that weight of this monster was just a smidgen under 2lbs!!! To say that we ate turnips almost daily would be an understatement. I am still trying to find a cooking method that I really like for these since they were an experiment this year. They certainly grew well though huh?
I had a bumper harvest this week! It was time for "Peas glorious Peas"! We love peas here at WOY HQ and homegrown taste sooo good! I admit a couple of pods didn't make it to the basket but in all I kept myself in check and only ate a couple of the green pods of goodness!
See they look good enough to eat! lol! Which is a good job cos that's what I did, after I had the obligatory weigh in!
Yep the scale reads 32.3 oz! That's over 2lbs of peas! I used some in peas pilau rice Monday night and have had some with most meals since :) Love peas, raw, cooked, mushy, in curry, in dishes, in my tummy! Really needed the 2lb weigh in of peas though as I haven't been harvesting like I should have recently. Really need to get ontop of going in the garden and using the homegrown produce more.
The peas are a mixture of pole and bush peas, but the BIG majority winner harvest wise was the pole peas. I think next year I may not even bother doing bush peas, unless I just plant LOTS more peas :) They certainly are an easy crop to grow, unless your trellis blows over in the gale force winds like mine did! Bob promises me new trellises for Summer though so hopefully fingers crossed he gets some time to get those done for me :)
In other news I'll hopefully be sharing some new additions to the WOY 'ranch' soon! Got my hands full with this project so gonna go get out in the garden and get busy :) Happy gardening!
I don't always take pics of the things I harvest from the garden, but I am trying this year to document more about the harvesting. I do weight the produce and plan to keep tallying that up each month, and am already half way to my goal for the year so I need to revise that goal I think! lol! Anyway here are some harvest pics from February starting with Collard Greens, oranges and Broccoli:
Next up are a couple of radish and some beet greens. It was the first time trying beet greens and they are YUMMY! Plus a 2 for 1 veggie in edible root and leaves so well worth it!
Next up is my mutant plant: Mustard Greens. This grew VERY well here! As did the collard greens. Both overtook there alloted area and thank heavens I finally got around to trying them. I like them both, but prefer the collards and beet greens I think.
February was a month of firsts for trying the veg, and I tried swiss chard. Pretty much like a lettuce only more substance to it. Definitely worth growing and I need to look into seeing how heat tolerant it is. I believe it does ok and should be good for salads in summer when we can't grow lettuce (though I am gonna attempt an experiment naturally, lol).
Notice the tomato! Yep I am harvesting tomatoes still! Not many, probably 1 or 2 a month from the remaining plant I had left. That was an experiment (and laziness on my part as I couldn't be bothered to remove the plant from the container). Plus the amazing thing is the plant flowered in Feb too!!! This was a surprising fact and definitely means I'll be overwintering a couple of tomato plants this year too! I will say they didn't taste as nice as summer toms but still better than store bought!
That about wraps up the harvest pics I think, I'll try to take more this month!
Last year was my first foray into vegetable gardening and I didn't really know what I was doing. I think this was a bonus really as it allowed me to make mistakes, to try new things and learn. There were many experiments last year but the one that sticks in my mind as the most successful is the "Cherry Tomato Experiment". See I bought a pack of tomato plants from the garden center but I wanted cherry tomato too and couldn't find plants locally, only seeds. Now my budget was slim pickings last year so I figured why not try growing from grocery store produce? So I checked the fridge and had grape tomatoes in there, cut em up, squidged out the seeds, rinsed em, dried em then put them in potting soil.
This actually proved pretty successful with about 95% of the seeds germinating! I had some in eggcartons and some in plastic seedling starters and both germinated. Not knowing what I was doing I tried to save them ALL rather than pinching out to the strongest seedling in each cell and lost a few seedling that way. In all I think I ended up with 10 pretty strong small plants in the experiment.
All the containers were recycled from the kitchen or from other plants so nothing new was bought for this experiment, the only thing it cost was time, and a little potting soil. I lost a few plants in the great heatwave of June 2008, when temperatures soared to 110 degrees for two weeks solid, but I still managed to keep about 6 alive. As the plants grew, when they got to around 8" I put them in their big containers or in the ground.
The plants in containers did better, cos frankly our soil is pathetic, which I had no clue back then. Basically horrid clay soil, very little nutrients and probably 1-2 worms for the whole back yard (this was the reason for the raised beds later in the year!). Still they produced flowers! Which pollinated! And produced baby fruits!
Now I still figured it all had time to go horribly wrong as if they were hybrid tomatoes that I bought well they wouldn't be true to seed. Even if they did continue to grow and ripen would they taste ok? That was my ONLY criteria. If they tasted ok, then they were worth it.
Happy to report they did grow, they did ripen, and they tasted just fine. A little sweeter than the originals but then they were homegrown and organically grown so no surprise. I'd estimate I harvested a couple of lbs of cherry grape tomatoes from those plants. Not bad for nothing!
I guess the lesson of this experiment is that even if you have NO money you can still garden, and produce edibles! If it doesn't turn out then so what? I had plenty of failed experiments last year! Most of the plants were lost during the aforementioned heatwave in June so I don't take credit for killing them, but I lost nothing by trying!
And you can bet your butt I'll be trying some experiments again this year so stay tuned!!!
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