Beginning of the Harvest

My garden is beginning to reward me with some beautiful vegetables and herbs. Tim and I enjoyed an abundance amount of sugar snap peas that we ate raw in our salads and with some hummus as well as cooked in a rice dish or as a simple side. I think we have exhausted the vine but hopefully it will produce more as the season goes on.

I have also been enjoying the fresh basil and parsley as well as cilantro and chives. I think next year I will plant more cilantro. The flavors are amazing when you use herbs immediately after picking them. I think I'm going to have to start making some pesto sauce with all the basil I have growing!

I have also been really enjoying the lettuce. I like the butter lettuce a little more than the romaine, so maybe next year I'll plant less romaine. The leaves on the romaine are a little tougher. I haven't had to buy lettuce from the store for a few weeks now and we pretty much have salad every day. I bought some beets from the farmer's market and roasted them and added them to my salad. This is the first time I have ever roasted beets and I really like them. I think I will try growing them next year. 

The green beans are coming in beautifully! These are the bush bean variety. I'm not sure of the difference in flavor between the bush beans and the vine variety, but these are pretty good. I think the skin on them could be a little more tender, but the flavor is really nice.

 Here is the butter lettuce. It is very tender and mild. I've been told that if I don't pull the whole head and only clip off the leaves I need, then it should continue to produce more leaves. So that's what I've been doing. We'll see what happens.

Here is the romaine. Like I said, a little tougher, but still good. I will still grow this next year, but not as much.

I have also been picking some onions. I needed to give the onions a little more room to grow so I have been using them like green onions, or scallions. They are really tasty. I've added them to my mango salsa, my hash browns for breakfast, etc. 

 As you all know, we had one heck of a wind storm last week that knocked out the power for a while. Well, it also knocked down my sunflowers!  Some of the stalks broke completely and I had to remove them. Others just bent over. I am trying to pull them back up by staking them up, but they are pretty stubborn. I have learned that sunflowers take up lots of room and seem to invade other plants. The stems are just crazy! I guess I shouldn't have planted them so close to the corn. They certainly have a mind of their own!

Here is one of the flowers just about to bloom...















Here is the same flower a couple days later...














Speaking of corn...even though the sunflowers  are invading their space, I am still getting ears. I pulled one off the other day to see how far they've come. I think they still need a couple more weeks for the kernels to fill in, but it was really good and super sweet. I'm praying that the deer won't eat them! The deer have eaten many of our flowers so if they run out of flowers to eat, they might start grazing in the garden. I have been putting deer repellent around the area and Tim ordered a motion detector that squirts water to scare them away. It should be coming soon. Hopefully it won't be too late.

 The pumpkin plants are also thriving. I haven't seen any flowers yet, so I hope they will actually produce some pumpkins.  These plants were started form the seeds I collected for the giant 150 lb pumpkin Tim and I bought last year.

Thanks for continuing to follow my blog.

Happy Harvesting!