Harvest Monday – 30th July 2012

Another great week – I’m very pleased. I’m getting concerned though about the space still occupied by winter crops and when I’m going to have time for soil amendment before the summer plantings go in. So I’m ramping up the harvesting and plan to sow my summer seeds in trays this week.

1 wombok (1.4 kilograms)

Although these are slug magnets I was happy with how much I actually got to keep from this wombok once I stripped away the munched-on leaves. This wombok is destined for kim chi.

2.5 kilograms tomatoes

I didn’t photograph the tomatoes this week, but I picked another large bowlful, which was 2.5 kilos. I have been giving a lot away and still have plenty more for eating fresh and cooking. Last night I put some on pizza.

1 Cauliflower

Like Liz, my cauliflower has been a bit disappointing. I was sad to see that the heads were loosening before reaching a decent size, until I went through my records this evening and realised that I planted ‘mini cauliflower’. That explains it! This one at the right went to my friend Karen, who came around on Friday and helped me weed and mulch. It was fun.

4 Turnips and 1 Swede

The root vegetables are reaching harvestable size faster than I can actually use them. My friends Sarah and Aaron took some today.

5 Rainbow Silverbeet leaves and a Small handful Tuscan Kale

Sarah took these for her dinner tonight.

4 Daikon

The daikon is seriously nuts! It is growing out of control, and J was using it over the weekend as a prop for olympics-inspired roll play with her Nan.

Here she is doing daikon weightlifting. We also had hurdles, javelin, pole vault, hammer throw and a ‘torch’ relay. We concluded that daikon is definitely a track and field vegetable.

800g peas

We harvested the first of the shelling peas this week.  They are wonderfully sweet – the kids would far prefer these to lollies. A little over 800g of pods yielded approximately 250g of peas. Well I think there was about 250g. There was 230g once the kids had finished shelling them, and Little D spent most of the time eating them. Maybe there was more than 250g…

3 Green Onions

Now this is really dumb, but it has only just occurred to me this week that you can plant bulbing onions and harvest them early as green/spring onions/shallots. I know it’s obvious, but I’ve always had difficulty growing the ‘shallot’ type, but never any trouble with the standard brown onion. I’ve been harvesting them early as green onions, and I don’t think I’ll look back from now on.

8 Carrots

I’m harvesting carrots a little faster than they are growing at the moment I think. These baby ones went into a bacon and spring vegetable risotto along with the peas and green onions. It was really delicious – both the peas and the carrots are so sweet that you are constantly getting bursts of sugar explode in your mouth as you eat it. What a treat!

I hope everyone else is reaping a great harvest this week. For some inspiring summer crops head over to Daphne’s Dandelions.