Grazing From the Land

Perhaps my favorite part of the summer growing season is when there are a variety of things becoming ripe in the garden. It is such a joy to step outside my back door and pick a couple handfuls of this or that to incorporate in our meals for the day. Above is the result from one morning trip about a week ago.

We are finally starting to get some peas after we succeeded in preventing the rabbits from eating them. It won't be a bumper crop due to the lateness of the year and the intense heat wave we are getting as I type up this post, but it will be enough for a taste which is what I mostly want.

The potatoes are fantastic! They are large and they appear to be plentiful with the new method I used for planting them. I wanted to dig out a few "new" potatoes but I'm not sure at this point they qualify for that. We will be using them heavily in our diet from now until we harvest the remainder for storage. We haven't yet mastered the storage part so really only get a few months out of them in storage before they wither away.

The carrot crop is also fantastic and has surpassed our best crop I can ever remember in terms of size and quality of the carrots and they still have more to grow I hope. We tried a different variety this year which I'm sure helped as well as the improved soil over last year. After taking this photo, the girls wanted to make a carrot cake so I went out and harvested a large bunch more to have for that and also to have some for snacking.

The onion is actually a small one that I accidentally pulled while weeding them. Most of the other onions are about three or four times larger than that and looking great thus far. Last year if you recall was my first ever onion disaster as we only got a few that grew, all the rest rotting in the ground before they matured. I don't have a handle on why that happened but I'm hopeful at this point that it won't repeat. 

Not shown but talked about already in a prior post is the garlic crop. I cut off the scapes and preserved them which you can see above in the the two pint jars. The bulbs are still a bit on the smallish side of what you find in the stores but are looking good. They still have quite a few green leaves so I'm waiting for more of those to turn brown before harvesting them.

You can see one daikon radish which is a volunteer, one of several, from last year. 

Finally, my wife planted a couple partial rows of flowers and they are starting to bloom and grace our counter tops and table these days. Our youngest especially, loves to go out and cut a bouquet to arrange and put in a small vase/pot of her liking.