Harvest: Lettuce Mix with Basil

We have plenty of lettuce for salads nowadays. We'll have to come up with more ways to use all this greenery. 

There are some pesky little bugs camping out on them. The bugs aren't eating the greens but we don't want to eat them either so it takes a few rounds of cold water baths.

Jalapeños

Pea Shoots Salad

Our pea shoots!

Here is our pea shoot colony. It is really just an ordinary garden pea variety that we planted. The leaves and tendrils are called pea shoots. They can be eaten raw in a salad or sauteed. There is a hint of pea flavor. Of all our crops, peas are doing the best because the temperature has been so low. Unfortunately we've let these plants grow waaaaayyyy too long. Pea shoot harvest should happen when they are only five or six inches tall.
Lettuce show you lettuce.

Garlic Scapes

Garlic scape is the flowering stalk of the garlic cloves we planted in the fall. We picked some to include in our Sunday dinner and… news to us… it matters when you cut the scape. It should be young, tender and some say you should cut it before it starts to curl. Farmer No. 2 cut the big ones that had been there for probably a month and after sauteing them for a few minutes in olive oil they turned out to be a woody gnawing tool more than food. There were a couple tender ones that found themselves in the mix and they were tender and sweet. But overall it was a disaster.

There are still some young ones popping up in the shaded areas of the farm so we'll try it again. Garlic scape pesto is a really popular recipe. And using them in dressings too. Has anybody heard of anything else. We sauteed them like string beans and threw in some of our pea shoots (that was another mistake that we'll address later).

More Herbs

We have more herbs than what we know what to do with. A few types of exotic basil, a selection of thyme, oregano, chives, wild arugula and more. So we are on the hunt for recipes that can take advantage of all of this. Mixed in with salad is our usual route. Last night No. 2 made a herb risotto that wasn't so good… probably too many different kinds of herbs. Any other ideas?

Green Architecture

We are learning from past mistakes. Although unsightly, putting the cages in earlier is a lot easier than wrestling with a unwieldy four foot tall tomato plant.We are also trying out pole beans planted from seeds. The said pole is salvaged wood from a bench that went from "I can fix this" to "look! now we have wood for poles!".

Harvest: Green Garlic

The cloves we planted last fall have turned into majestic stalks of garlic. They still need some time before they are full bulbs of garlic but we couldn't wait any longer. We pulled a couple stalks for fresh green garlic and scape.