5/20 - I picked these and cleaned them and forgot to weigh them! It was a nice bag full for the freezer.
5/24 - 5.5 ounces of Walla Walla Sweet onions to add to our salads.
5/24 - I did remember to weigh these beauties! That's 22.6 ounces of goodness.
5/25 - 30.3 ounces of rhubarb. Two cups of sliced rhubarb were made into a mini pie, and the remaining 4 cups were put in the freezer for two future mini pies.
Of course, every time I head out to the garden, the neighbor's Big Dog is at the fence waiting for me to bring him his cookies!
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5/26 - I needed room in the kennel garden for more carrots, so I pulled all the lettuce (there's plenty more in other areas of the garden)! Most of it is Romaine, and the heads were big and beautiful. That's a very large basket they are in!
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All cleaned up and in my largest pan (it won't even fit in my oven), the Romaine alone weighed just over 2 pounds.
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When I added the other varieties to it, I ended up with 69.4 ounces. Such a pretty variety of leaves, don't you think?
5/26 - With the big basket emptied, I headed for the spinach patch. Some of the spinach is on the verge of bolting already, so we need to enjoy it while we can. This weighed in at 26.6 ounces. As much as I love spinach in my salads, I think this is all heading for the pot. I'm already begging my kids to take lettuce, I don't need even more salad greens!
This week's harvest:
Lettuce: 69.4 ounces
Onions: 5.5 ounces
Rhubarb: 30.3 ounces
Spinach: 26.6 ounces
Strawberries: 22.6 ounces
Total this week: 154.4 ounces ( 9.65 pounds)
Total to date: 21.74 pounds
Be sure to check out Daphne's Dandelions to see what others have harvested this week!
Your rhubarb is so pretty compared to mine. Mine is such a green variety with just a few little red spots at the base sometimes. At least it tastes good. And all those strawberries. Last year I got over 20 pounds of strawberries. I think this year it will be much less. That area didn't get nearly enough water as it should have. And many of the plants died. This year I bought soaker hoses for it. I'm hoping that work.
ReplyDeleteDaphne, last year I only got 18 pounds, and I'm already up to nearly 4 pounds just these past couple of weeks. being a day neutral everbearing, I expect them to yield off and on until October or November. The berries are really small, and they are clustering under the plants, real close to the ground, which makes picking difficult....but they are there, and that's what counts! I can't believe I'm already getting enough to freeze. Strawberry smoothies, here I come! :-)
ReplyDeleteI meant to add....you are lucky you can use soaker hoses. Our irrigation water has too much yuck (algae) in it, which clogs the hoses. Even screen filters don't help. I've had to give up on them, as well as using drip irrigation. Unfortunately, everything in my garden must be watered from overhead sprinklers. Oh well, rain comes from overhead, and the plants don't seem to mind getting rained on!
DeleteI'm putting on a really good filter. Not just a typical screen filter. I'm hoping it will be enough. But we don't have hard water that leaves deposits and we don't have much yuck besides the occasional rust when they flush the pipes.
DeleteWe sometimes get tiny fish and many times get small snails, but the screens do catch those. I can let my hoses sit for a week, and the stuff that comes out when I turn on the water stinks to high heaven! You never know what you're getting through these irrigation canals, it can be everything from algae to dead bodies! Nice thought, that last one, but every year someone drowns in them. I can only hope the farmers pump out all of the bad stuff before the water gets this far!
DeleteYou must have such nice veggies because you have natural fish fertilizer in your pipes.
DeleteLOL, it smells almost that bad after it sits in the hoses for a few days! Speaking of small, I mixed up a concoction of fish fertilizer and compost tea and put it in the sprayer last year. Some was left over, and I neglected to clean it out before putting it away for the winter. Early this spring, I sprayed my garlic with it, and did it ever stink! I'm surprised I didn't get kicked out of the neighborhood for that. It actually took a couple of days for the smell to dissipate!
DeleteThat's a great harvest of lettuce! I agree with you that it's even more attractive because it contains several different varieties. Isn't it a shame that lettuce doesn't freeze?!
ReplyDeleteHmmmm, Mark, it seems blogger lost my reply to you! I agreed it's too bad we can't freeze it, then posted a recipe for lettuce soup that sounded edible! I'll look it up again.....
Deletehttp://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/creamy-lettuce-soup-50400000110978/
I might have to give this one a try!
That is beautiful lettuce and berries! What variety of strawberry?
ReplyDeleteI am disappointed in our strawberries. I have a large double row bed of Chandler and Sweet Charlie that did very little last year and this year. I will roto-till soon. The Amish in Kentucky grow beautiful Chandlers. ???
Did you have a good trip?
Ray, those are Tristar, a day neutral (everbearing) variety. I've not been terribly happy with them in the past, I wondered whether I'd like a June bearing variety better, but hesitate to switch because these do give us enough for an extended season of fresh strawberry shortcake and usually enough for some delicious freezer jam, even though the berries are quite small. I planted a few Fort Laramie in containers this spring, but no berries on them yet. They really keep me busy cutting off the runners, while the Tristar put out very few.
DeleteBeautiful lettuce. :)
ReplyDeleteCloud, beautiful, sweet and delicious. I have it growing in all stages, so hope I can keep it productive through the summer.
DeleteI really must harvest rhubarb today! I keep meaning to and then never do and it is definitely ready. Your post is yet another reminder I need to get to that. A strawberry (frozen ones for me as mine are not ripening yet) and rhubarb crumble sounds like just the thing for this Memorial holiday Monday. :D
ReplyDeleteYour greens are gorgeous and oh so abundant! I am swimming in lettuce right now too. I need to be harvesting more of it and more frequently to keep up with it, but with only two of us and no family nearby to share the extras with, I am reluctant to harvest more than I know we can use at anytime. We still manage to go through quite a bit in a week as we eat a lot of salads (almost every dinner and often lunch too) when the lettuces are at their peak.
My next rhubarb dish will be a strawberry rhubarb crumble to take advantage of my unexpectedly good berry harvest! I'd love to have your recipe, I wasn't too happy with the last one I made.
DeleteWe eat a lot of lettuce if I make wilted lettuce salads with hot bacon dressing. I've had to make a few adjustments to the recipe to cut the saturated fat (1 tbsp. bacon grease to 3 tbsp. light olive oil and only allowing 1/2 (me) to 1 slice (him) of bacon crumbled per serving), but Mr. Granny has found that to be acceptable.
I'm so impressed with you folks who weigh and measure everything.
ReplyDeleteMy garden is so tiny that doing so would be depressing.
LOL, it starts as a competition and ends up being an obsession! It is interesting to compare harvest yields from year to year though. I keep a spreadsheet, so I can see what days I harvest as well as the weight of each crop.
DeleteI'm going over to steal your strawberries! And your rhubarb, and lettuce, and onions, maybe even the puppies. My kids are fully behind me on the puppies!
ReplyDeleteMrs. R, you can take the strawberries, you can take the rhubarb, you can even take the lettuce and onions, but KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF OF MY PUPPIES!
DeleteSorry, kids ;-)
Lovely tomatoes, strawberries, greens & spinach!! I really should not be so lazy and weigh my little bits and see if I can beat it next year! We did defrost our garage freezer yesterday and so it is ready for when our strawberry season arrives!! Nancy
ReplyDeleteNancy, no tomatoes yet, LOL! I am about 4 pounds ahead of last year so far, so I'm happy!
DeleteLovely harvest. Everything looks great
ReplyDeleteThank you, Sarada. It all tastes great too, after a winter of grocery store produce.
DeleteWhat is your secret for lettuce? We are having mild success but I never have the success that you do and we eat lots of salads. Do you start you lettuce seed inside and then transplant out? I always direct seed because we don't have indoor lights. But it seems lots of people start theirs under lights.
ReplyDeleteVanessa, I start my earliest lettuce inside under lights. When it gets about 2-3" high I plant it out at 6" spacing in wide rows. As it grows, I harvest the outer leaves. In the meantime, I do a second planting outside, using seed mats (just like the carrot seed mats) and space the seeds 4" apart in all directions. As soon as those seedlings sprout, I direct sow a row somewhere in the garden, sowing them rather thick. By the time those are 2-3" high I thin them and use the thinnings as transplants to take the place of the first lettuces, which by then are large enough to harvest the entire plant. Than I plant yet another thickly seeded row for later thinning and transplanting. I really try to keep this going as long as possible, and by the time it gets really hot, I usually have enough plants that I can continue to harvest the outer leaves. Then I start all over again for the fall lettuce! It doesn't always work out, but that's the plan.
DeleteRight now I have one 2'x8' bed of mature lettuce (started inside), one bed (2 large 18"x18" squares) of mature lettuce (seed mats) that was just harvested today (the entire plants), one long row of thickly seeded Red Sails that has been thinned to 4" apart and the transplants used in another row + a few here and there in empty spaces, and a more recently thickly seeded row of Anuenue lettuce that is too small for transplanting yet. The Red sails and Anuenue are both heat tolerant, so I hope they will get me through the summer months. Confused yet? LOL!
Thanks so much for the detailed response. I normally direct sow once maybe twice, but I need to get a better system going for next year.
DeleteGreat harvest very jealous!!
ReplyDelete