Today is June 21st. We got our first two snow peas a couple days ago! And the rest of the garden is looking magical and lush. Here’s a little lookie-loo at what’s happening.
Not pictured: the purple hominy in the pasture and the brand new baby duckling that hatched on Father’s Day!! In the next few days we’ll get a few more ducklings, plus we’ll be planting the sorghum! Exciting times!
It’s June 14th–not even summer yet–and we’re getting small, daily harvests. (Still no peas.)
Today I cut leaves off our lettuces. I love “cut and come again” types of lettuce. It means I can harvest as soon as a leaf is the size I want, then come back tomorrow to get another few leaves. Next year I’d love to try some different lettuces. Josh was all excited this year about planting lettuce, but I wasn’t. But now I am. Lettuce is an early win. You can harvest lettuce before almost anything else (except for overwintered crops). I guess I wasn’t too excited about lettuce back in February because we had so much kale and chard. Now that it’s gone, I’m so grateful for our little patch of tender greens.
We also harvested 5 beets. We eat the beetroot and the leaves. Beet leaves always look sickly and unappetizing, but they transform when they’re lightly steamed and tossed with butter. They turn a glossy, rich green.
I cut a few stalks of what I call our “grocery store green onions” because that’s what they were. Since planting the little stublettes from the bottom of the green onions last year, we have been harvesting non stop. Something that normally ends up in the trash has been a source of reliable flavor and color for well over a year now.
We also harvested our first real cutting of winter savory. Winter savory is an herb that I almost wrote off as just an old fashioned, outdated herb. You never see it in sexy poses on magazine covers. Winter savory never gets lead roles in Broadway musicals or even bit parts in made-for-TV-movies. I really don’t know why. Winter savory has got her act together. She grows upright, has a bright, fresh herbal scent, she’s easy to grow and she fits in with any recipe (never overpowering).
Tour de jardine. La di dah.
Sometimes with gardens it’s easy to feel like you’re so far behind. Like “It’s already June 3rd and were not harvesting peas yet!” True–other years we harvested peas around this time, but last year at pea harvesting time we had zero garlic, a culinary herb garden the size of El Salvador (so teeny tiny, very very small, not big at all), and no overwintered greens. This spring has been very good to us, even though we have no peas to show for it. Our garlic all sprouted and grew, I harvested from the culinary herb garden all winter/spring, and we ate kale +chard all winter/spring like it was going out of style (because it is going out of style–orach is kinda the new kale).
We have no fresh peas yet, but it was the weather’s fault. Nothing more boring than hearing people talk about the weather (except for hearing people talk about video games or Avengers movies), so I’ll keep this short. April was supposed to be cool and wet, but it was freakishly hot and dry. So, no little pea fruits yet. Hopefully we’ll have a harvest before Thor’s hammer of heat withers our little pea shoots like spawned lava in Minecraft.
