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.

Thinning out our sprouts

Our sprouts are up and it was time to thin them out. Trimming off every other sprout will give the survivors more space to grow. Here Farmer No. 1 thins out the swiss chard. You can see the red stalks taking shape.
The lettuce mix has been doing very well and deserves the landscaping.
And then, we used all of the clippings in a super salad. There is swiss chard, beet greens, salad mix, arugula and assorted herbs.

Morning Sprinkle