Weekly Harvest
This week I’m harvesting so many tasty things from the garden. I’ve been plucking a few new ‘Purple Majesty’ potatoes from under each plant to pair with large purple beets. My shallots and garlic have sized up nicely and I have a flush of ‘Jade’ beans from my first planting.
We’ve been enjoying meatless meals comprised of a wide variety of freshly harvested vegetables topped with butter and fresh herbs. The bounty of the July garden is always overwhelming, I often forget just how many wonderful things are ready to harvest during the summer. There are endless possibilities for quick, healthy meals comprised of things plucked fresh from the garden.
What’s in your harvest basket this week?
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In My Harvest Bowl
This time of year it’s really nice to head out to the garden instead of the grocery store. Since we have a freezer full of pork and venison, I don’t even need to go for meat. One of our meals is stir fry. It’s easily adaptable to whatever vegetables you have on hand and can be made vegetarian or with any kind of meat. In the winter we enjoy stir fries with carrots, parsnips, onions and mushrooms. In summer it’s filled with squash, cabbage, peas and broccoli. My basic recipe has a ginger sauce and can be found over on Eat Outside the Bag.
This week some of my broccoli was ready to harvest as are my golden peas. Garlic scales are coming on by what seems to be the hundreds as well. The onions in the garden are bulbing up enough to start using them as well. I also had an orange in the pantry so I added orange zest and orange juice to the stir fry sauce – a delicious addition that I might put in the recipe. It’s certainly not a bad way to eat vegetables from the garden!
What’s your favorite adaptable meal to use your garden or CSA produce?
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Homegrown
On Saturday I was making venison stew. As I pulled potatoes out of the bag from the root cellar I found this:
This isn’t the first time I have harvested a heart shaped vegetable from my garden. Many years ago I got a heart shaped tomato as well.
I love all the different colors, shapes and sizes of homegrown vegetables.
Have you ever harvested vegetables that were funny shapes?
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Hello Squash
I’ve never had much space in the garden for growing winter squash. Their vines sprawl far and wide, much farther than I ever had the space to give them in my tiny space. Now that I have a large garden, squash finally made the cut.
Frost was predicted for the night before last, so I decided it was time to harvest all the winter squash. This year I grew ‘Sweet Meat’ and ‘Waltham Butternut” from Baker Creek, along with ‘Burgess Buttercup Squash’ and ‘Delicata’ from High Mowing Seeds.
There were loads of beautiful delicata squash in the garden as well, but the voles and porcupines have been going crazy eating them. I managed to harvest four for us to eat. You can see here they were starting in on the pumpkins as well. At least they almost always came back to this pumpkin instead of gnawing on every single one.
Now all the squash are sitting in an upstairs window where they’ll stay warm. Squash don’t like cool storage like other vegetables, it’s best to keep them in the same conditions you like to live in. I’ll probably pile them in a corner of the living room after a few weeks.
In mid summer I planted a second crop of zucchini, mostly for feeding the chickens, ducks and pigs. They’re still going very strong. In fact I harvested about twice this many zucchini. They’ll be slowly eaten by the animals and us over the nest few weeks. The smaller ones are dried into zucchini noodles for us to eat on this winter.
Next year I’m planting about half of my big main garden in squash. I plan on growing a good amount for animal feed in a well mulched area of the garden since I won’t have time to grow crops that need more attention. I’m thinking however that an electric fence around the garden is going to be a good idea.
Do you grow winter squash in your garden?
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Sets or Pearls
Very early this spring, I direct sowed some onion seed in the low tunnel. I added a label that said “bunching onions”. Since I had seed for red bunching onions, I wasn’t surprised when they came up with red stems. Then, they started to bulb a little, not exactly what I thought was going to happen.
Evidently, these were bulbing onions and not bunching onions. I don’t know if I planted the wrong packet of seed, or if the seed packet was mislabeled. It doesn’t really matter, I can use these onions as pearl onions or I could save them and use them as sets for next year. I don’t usually grow onions from sets because they have a tendency to flower and I don’t find that they store as well.
Of course pearl onions would be nice as well, I was thinking I might pickle them if I chose to use them in that way. Peeling all those onions will be a chore though, not something I’m looking forward to.
Would you save these and plant them or enjoy them as pearl onions?
