2012 what are you eating from your garden?

[applestar]

Ugh. I can't find the old thread, so here's a new one in a new location

Spring Weed, Pinch, and Thin with Flowers Salad --

Baby lettuce, arugula, spinach, turnip, dandelion, lambs quarters, beets, aurora/red orach, radish, broccoli, green onion, dill, red shiso, cilantro, chervil.

Yellow blossoms of kale and Brussels sprouts, pink blossoms of daikon, and violets.

Simply dressed with Lemon juice, Arbequina EVOO, Himalayan pink sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, shaved slivers of cave aged cheddar and gruyere, chopped macadamia nuts. Scattered with a handful of last year's frozen pineapple ground cherries.

Yumm!

[rainbowgardener]

Had company over for dinner last night. From the garden we had broccoli (with lemon-garlic-butter sauce) and a huge salad. The salad was several kinds of red and green lettuces, spinach, swiss chard, parsley, lemon balm, blossoms of thyme, sage, marigold.

My spinach has been the best ever this year. We've been eating it since February. We have had spinach omelets, spinach lasagna, spinach salad, I froze a bunch of spinach. A week or so ago, thinking it was getting to the end of it's life, I gave a big bag of it away to friends, but it is still going strong. After all I picked last night, there's still a bunch. Fall planted spinach does so much better than spring planted!

But it's really nice. The fall planted spinach and broccoli is close to done, but now the spring planted stuff is coming on, so we are having a long season of it.

[rainbowgardener]

Here's show and tell from the above dinner:


[url=https://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/52/gardensalad412.jpg/][img]https://img52.imageshack.us/img52/7034/gardensalad412.jpg[/img][/url]




[url=https://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/707/iris412.jpg/][img]https://img707.imageshack.us/img707/7567/iris412.jpg[/img][/url]

[applestar]

I have a bed with some kind of crucifer/mustard family growing that I have to constantly inspect for cabbage whites. Somehow, I didn't think they went for these, but they do. The plants were growing thick and had doubled in size to about 8" leaves all of a sudden, so I thinned them to about 6" apart.

I had thought that they may be kohlrabi, but when I washed off the roots, I realized they had thickened white roots with purple cast to the top. I checked my notes and it turned out that I sowed Laurentian Rutabaga in that bed back on March 9th.

Lasagna Pasta with sautéed Laurentian Rutabaga thinnings and Portabella Mushrooms --

Cook lasagna noodles.

Melt butter in some olive oil, add diced bacon (I would have used just bacon with olive oil and not butter if I remembered I had bacon first) and sautée roughly chopped roots and stem end of rutabaga thinnings. Add the rest of the chopped rutabaga tops. When wilted down, add diced portabella mushrooms. Season lightly with salt. When mushrooms are cooked, add chopped Chinese garlic chive and onion greens and fresh oregano.

Toss with cooked drained pasta and a good amount of grated Locatelli Romana cheese, adding a little bit of the pasta cooking water to help moisten.

Salt is hardly necessary. Add freshly grated black pepper to taste, but rutabaga greens is mustardy enough not to really need the pepper.

[Ohio Tiller]

Only thing so far from the garden is broccoli and radishes. But I feel pretty good about that since most folks have not even planted yet!

[applestar]

Fried brown rice with winter mustard and kale flower buds and blossoms, turnip greens, garlic harvested last year still looking good (I think this was Elephant garlic), fresh thyme and oregano.

[rainbowgardener]

Dinner tonight was salad of mixed lettuces, swiss chard, lemon balm, thyme flowers and some pasta with spinach and broccoli. All the greens, broccoli, and an onion the spinach and broccoli were cooked with were from the garden. Everything was so yum! And eaten on the deck surrounded by my two dozen containers of herbs and gorgeous flowers. Life is good! I love spring.

Now I'm busy making soup for tomorrow.. lentil, barley and spinach soup, with the wonderful soup stock from tonight's left overs. Its a slow simmering soup, so I'm working on it now, finish it up at dinner time tomorrow.

I blanched and froze more spinach tonight. Frantically trying to use up as much of the spinach and other greens as I can before it all bolts...

[HotPepperManFL]

Fresh from my garden Jalapeno peppers cut in half long way, stemmed an seeded.. Stuff with cream cheese mixed with fresh from my garden chives. Wrap in bacon.. Broil for about 10 min or until bacon is done!! YUM!!!

[img]https://i283.photobucket.com/albums/kk296/olskoolkid07/DSC05990.jpg[/img]

[rainbowgardener]

Dinner last night was the purslane potato salad, whose recipe I have posted here. But I added a whole head of the garden broccoli, some bell peppers, and a couple hard boiled eggs, to make it more of a main dish. Then we had another green salad all of garden greens and herbs.

But harvesting things I found way more earwigs and slugs than I like, 5 or 6 of each, including a few that actually made it in to the house. I soaked everything in salt water, but the d----d earwig wouldn't die. I kept pushing it back under the water and it just kept swimming. I washed it down the sink drain and it just crawled back up, several times. Finally I washed it down the sink and ran the garbage disposal. That seemed to take care of it, but for awhile there it was starting to feel like one of those horror movies where the monster keeps coming back.

But by the time I had the salad ready, I was pretty creeped out. And very nervous that maybe I missed something that would come crawling out on the dinner plate. If that ever happened, my honey would probably refuse to ever eat anything from the garden again!

This is already a worse year than usual for both the slugs and earwigs...

[hendi_alex]

tomatoes, arugula, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, squash, Swiss chard, jalapenos, sweet bell peppers, basil, parsley, variety of other herbs, lettuce, garlic, and did I mention tomatoes. We are still getting a few strawberries and raspberries. Loads of blueberries are now ready each day. We got a handful of mulberries.

Corn is maybe three weeks away. okra is still very small. Melons are making nice vines now, but still many weeks before any fruit. We have small egg plant, maybe one week away before harvest.

Last night we had a mix of squash and zucchini casserole, green beans, tomato and cucumber. Most everything except the cream of mushroom came from the garden.

[Nancydobs]

You guys are KILLING me! I'm up here in northern Wisconsin (an hour south of Lake Superior) and I'm excited about having radishes and green onions. How pitiful! Where the heck is everybody, the tropics? Geez, I had to cover my garden tonight as there's a FROST WARNING.

[rainbowgardener]

That is pitiful... it's nearly JUNE! I would hate living somewhere where you would be worrying about frost at this point! Actually I pretty much hate living in Ohio where we have to worry about frost in April. Still dreaming of warm sunny climes. At least I'd love to live where alex is!

[applestar]

@Nancydobs - oh but you get to start from the excitement of spring! Some of us are past that to masses of weeds growing overnight and daily/nightly invasion of flying sucking, munching, crawling, creeping pests. ...but not so much in the way of SUMMER produce yet.

I guess early peas are winding down with some late peas survival in question with all the heat. Some of the turnips have given up and started to bolt so I've literally kettles of turnip greens, tired of picking strawberries but it's not even June yet....

Very interesting to read about the season unfolding in various regions.

[Nancydobs]

I planted a month EARLY for this area and covered with tarps at night. And still, my peas are 6" high, I have a bumper crop of unripe strawberries, my tomato and pepper plants are about 8" high, and carrots about 1.5" high. Just to give you a reference!

Even worse than the late spring frosts (which generally last until June 1 or later) is the early fall frost, which starts again in September. It's a race to get the tomatoes to grow and ripen with only a 90-day "frost free" growing season, and it does occasionally frost during that time as well.

Bottom line, if one has the deep yearning to garden, as we all do, there's no end to what we'll do to make it happen, right?

[rainbowgardener]

Spring stuff is mostly done and summer stuff mostly not ready yet. But I made veggie chili tonight with basil, chard, and celery from the garden.

It's been years since I grew celery, but I have more space this year. I planted 4 of them across a 4' wide bed at my community garden plot. I only even see that plot about every other week, so have tended them very little. And I never gardened that plot before, so the soil isn't very good. But the celery is doing great, turned into a whole little celery hedge across the bed.

And it tastes wonderful! The garden celery is as much more flavorful than storebought as garden tomatoes are than storebought tomatoes.

In the meantime, I'm busy already harvesting herbs. I have lemon balm, basil, lavender drying and little vials of distilled mint and lavender...

[Tonio]

I made a quinoa tabuli salad !! yummmyy!!
Instead of mint I used home grown thai basil , genovese, japanese cucumber, black krim tomato. And added purchased flat leaf parsely, EVOO, lemon juice.

T

[hendi_alex]

Here in late June the following are staying ahead of us: tomatoes, green beans, jalapenos, cucumbers, corn, Swiss Chard, salad greens, zucchini. We also have plenty of herbs: parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, and of course we have plenty of garlic.

Melons are just starting to vine. A single squash vine is giving a trickle. Have replanted some squash, so will probably have more in late summer.

[rainbowgardener]

This isn't about eating, so much, but I don't know if we have a thread about what are you harvesting. Yesterday I pulled the last dozen garlic scapes AND picked the first half dozen ripe tomatoes! YAY!!

[hendi_alex]

I'm just too spoiled. Wouldn't do for me to move far up north. We've been harvesting tomatoes for over two months now. With a little luck will still be eating fresh tomatoes in December.

[gumbo2176]

The only things fresh out the garden now that the heat is getting very oppressive are Yard Long Beans, Ichiban and White Globe Eggplant, Jalapeno, Belgian Hot Wax, Banana Peppers and Okra.

For fruit, I have fresh blackberries and figs daily. So many of the latter that I've already put up 4 quarts of preserves and given away some fresh to friends.

Then there's the herbs of Basil, Sage, Rosemary, Oregano and Parsley that are still doing well.

[applestar]

I mentioned elsewhere that I picked my first Tromboncino summer squash and was going to out it in pasta sauce. Well, it didn't make it into pasta sauce because another idea took over.

I sliced up the Tromboncino squash into 1/4" disks and started sautéing in a bit of EVOO, salting to help it along, then added minced Egyptian onion set, Summer Bell hybrid yellow pepper cut into strips, a handful of orange (Sun Sugar hybrid) and red (Matt's Wild Cherry) cherry tomatoes, a stalk and leaves of nameless celery (planted in spring as started plants bought from the gardeners co-op) and the stalk part of a red Swiss chard from Rainbow chard mix. A bit more salt, turn the now nicely browned squash disks to finish the other side, then added diced chard green. Adjust the seasoning, a bit of freshly ground black pepper. And done!

Very simple, but oh, so flavorful !!
yum, yum!!

[rainbowgardener]

Love summer! Dinner last night was stir-fried-garden-veggies-that-need-to-be-used-up: Onion, garlic, celery, green peppers, tomatoes, basil, chard, parsley. Threw in a few store bought mushrooms, just because they needed to be used up too, but everything else was from the garden. Just lightly stir fried adding the hardest veggies first so they cook longer. Didn't add anything else but salt and pepper and light dusting of parmesan when it was done. Came out very nice. If you want more substance you can serve it over couscous, rice, noodles, etc, but I just ate it plain.