Mid-July – a Week of Harvests

Sunday: Kale and green beans. Dinner included green beans with feta.

 

Friday: carrot, beans, basil. Dinner tonight included a large Greek salad (I used up all home-grown lettuce and the cucumber harvested yesterday).

 

Thursday: first cucumber, the very last lettuce, beets, kale and green beans. Dinner tonight did not involve anything in this picture, but this (with carrots and herbs from the garden) and homemade rosemary focaccia, roasted broccoli (daughter is vegetarian) and sauteed chicken breast (son is not).

 

Wednesday: more green beans that together with the harvest from previous days were turned into this deliciousness.

 

Monday: Swiss Chard, lettuce, green beans, mint and the first cherry tomatoes. On the menu: Swiss Chard, mushroom and sun-dried tomato frittata, and a Greek salad with feta, parsley (from my back porch) and mint.

Garlic Harvest

Today I pulled all of my garlic. I had a bunch of softnecks but the heads seem smaller than last year. I had planted about 30 cloves in the fall and maybe harvested about 20 heads, so I will plant seed garlic again this fall and not seed from my own garlic stock. I got some very nice big hardneck volunteers from three heads that I had left in the ground by accident last year. They are currently spread to dry and I will gently brush off the dirt after a day or so and hang them to ventilate for a couple of weeks. For the hardnecks, I will cut off the stem and store them in an open ceramic crock or basket in the pantry. For the softnecks I will attempt a braid again.

Today, I also harvested carrots and Swiss chard and pulled the last of my lettuce, cleaned and weeded the plot and sowed more kale, golden beets and bok choy.

Nice big hardnecks right after harvest (Red Russian).

Softnecks right after harvest (Transylvania)

Garden Pizza

Pizza last night with all toppings form the garden (except the cheese of course). I made a garlic scape pesto (with scapes and basil from my garden) and topped it with fresh kale from the garden (chopped and briefly massaged with a bit of olive oil and salt), fresh mozzarella slices and shredded cheese. Yum!

I only have a limited amount of scapes this year as I primarily planted soft-necks. In fact, all the scapes are from hard-neck volunteers that I left in the ground last year.

Garlic scapes right before harvesting about two weeks ago (I kept them in the fridge until now and they were fine).

Garlic scape pesto.

Just before going in the oven.