Harvest Monday – June 25 2012

Tonight’s stew ingredients

Having a newborn is clearly more demanding than I remembered. Despite Baby T’s good nature I am struggling to keep the house in order, let alone get out to the garden. I haven’t been cooking as much as usual, so I’ve missed a few Harvest Mondays due to meagre pickings.

This week I’m getting more on top of things and I’ve harvested quite a reasonable amount for this time of year. Tonight for example I harvested quite a bowlful of veggies for a lamb stew.

1 Daikon (radish)

These are huge! So huge in fact that they are trying to escape from the ground. Despite a circumference of 4-5 cm, the daikon I picked was almost 50cm in length.  They are also very versatile. I use them in Japanese hotpot dishes, in salads, pickled, raw (sprinkled with salt) and tonight in the lamb stew.

1 Lettuce

 A bunch of these lettuces popped up under the roses (along with countless weeds) after I spread compost around. I weeded, but kept the lettuces.

1 Turnip and 2 Swedes

Also in the lamb stew.

5 celery sticks

In various dishes over the week, including the stew and some bolognaise yesterday. I’ve found that the celery is improving as the weather cools – far less hollow stems due to lack of water.

2 Tomatoes

I picked the first two of my winter tomatoes this week. As usual with my tomatoes they were a bit underripe, but I’m always afraid that they will be stolen by a cheeky rodent or insect before I get around to picking them.

My next door neighbour says that there was frost the other morning, but for some reason the tomatoes have survived. They are loaded with fruit, so I hope they survive despite a touch of blight and my appalling staking.

3 Passionfruit

I’ve given up trying to work out what variety these are. I thought they were panama gold, but they clearly are not that. They may be panama red, but they seem too purple. These should ripen up quickly in the fruit bowl next to the bananas.

There is plenty happening in the garden that didn’t make it to harvest this week.

The womboks have suffered from my neglect – covered in slug damage.

I cut the asparagus down to ground level as the foliage had mostly died off. I should probably spread some manure over before spring.

The strawberries are in desperate need of dividing and repotting.

I repotted the blueberries into bigger self watering pots with new potting mix.

They are setting fruit like crazy.

The kale is ready to harvest once I work out how to cook it.

The onions are coming along nicely.

And the rhubarb is flowering. I need to keep cutting the flowering stalks out, but they are persistent.

I hope everyone else has been harvesting successfully this week. For more harvests from around the world, visit Daphne’s.