Who Needs Flowers?
Who needs flowers when you can have a vase of beet greens? I’ve been harvesting some of my golden beets recently and we’ve been enjoying them roasted. Since we eat the beet greens, I put them in a vase with some water to keep them fresh until the next morning. They get sautéed with garlic and onions, with eggs poached on top.
That’s one of the things I love about beets, you can eat the roots and the leaves. It always makes me feel like I’m getting a lot bang for garden space when I grow beets! It’s like a double harvest.
Do you grow beets? Do you eat the greens?
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Real Food
Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now thing of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basic desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.
Kristin Kimball from The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love
The main reason I started an edible garden is because I was dissatisfied with the quality of produce at the grocery store. There’s just something about food that’s freshly plucked from the garden. I still buy some things at my local farmer’s market, but even that isn’t quite as good as something that’s only minutes from plant to plate.
This week we’ve been enjoying so many wonderful homegrown vegetables: beets, potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, and all kinds of herbs to season and add flavor. Every morning we’ve been enjoying harvest vegetable hash with eggs poached on top – life is truly good! (for my recipe visit Eat Outside the Bag).
What are you enjoying from the garden this week?
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Filling my Pockets
On Sunday afternoon I went out to check on the garden since it had been a few days since I had done it. First stop was the edible garden of course and I noticed right away that there were some peas ready to harvest. I picked and picked until my pockets were full, then I made a beeline back to the house to shell them. These are the ‘Dakota’ peas that a few of you recommended.
These peas are quite nice, they plants are very short, they probably wouldn’t even need support. They seem to be blooming and producing quite prolifically. I planted a few other varieties of shelling peas as well, but the deer have munched all of those off. Thankfully these are planted where the deer can’t get to them. The golden peas are ready to harvest and I have a few nice heads of broccoli as well.
We enjoyed these peas with dinner that evening, steamed and sprinkled on top of the Hungarian Goulash we were eating. They were simply divine. One of the best things about eating seasonally and growing your own is tasting freshly harvested items after a long time without them. You remember you like peas or beans, but you forget the complexity and freshness of just harvested vegetables, I can’t wait for the first tomato!
What fresh vegetable are you most looking forward to this gardening season?
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Harvesting a Bowl of Comfort
Every year I add a few more herbs to the gardens of Chiot’s Run and learn how to use them. A few years ago, chamomile was added and my gardens will never be without it again. Even if I didn’t harvest it for calming teas, I would grow it because it’s a beautifully graceful plant.
My chamomile plants are about 18-24 inches tall and blooming profusely with hundreds of tiny white daisy like flowers. These plants grow right by my driveway. They were only supposed to be 8-10 inches tall and I was planning on them spilling over the rock wall. Not the case, they grow upright and are a bit leggy. In the future I’ll grow in among other plants to help cover up it’s skinny legs.
Mixed in the with the chamomile the ‘Lady’ lavender is blooming as well, together they make a wonderful night time tea that’s delicious, comforting and certain to help lull you to sleep. Hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have a quart of dried chamomile for the pantry this winter.
What’s your favorite kind of herbal tea?
Looking for some great books about growing/using herbs & spices, here are a few of my favorites:
A great source for herb plants of all shapes, colors, flavors and sizes is Richter’s Herbs. Most of the herbs in my garden have come from them.
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Mushroom Harvest
Last spring, I inoculated a bunch of logs and some wood chips with various mushroom spawn. I was lucky enough to harvest a big batch of oyster mushrooms last fall but this spring has been super hot and dry, so no mushrooms harvests yet. Watering the logs would stimulate growth, but I really don’t want to do it and I don’t have a container big enough to soak them in.
The Garden Giant spawn that was used in the wood chips was spread in the walkways of the new lower garden. Every time I water my onion patch a few winecap mushrooms pop up in the walkways. I have completely missed seeing them until they’re too big and slug eaten to harvest – until yesterday.
Even though I inoculated the wood chips and these mushrooms are growing right where I did, I was still a bit leery of harvesting them and eating them. After spending some time on google and finding this great website with identification tips, I decided they were indeed Winecaps and into the pot they will go. Last night we enjoyed them cooked into some Hungarian Goulash made with lots of garlic scapes and venison.
Sometimes when we add some new edible to the garden we can be a bit leery of proper identification. When in doubt, spend some time searching for proper identification or ask a seasoned gardener/grower.
Have you ever had a harvest that you were leery of eating?
