Tag Archives: Kale

Today’s Harvest Basket 7/9

Green beans, cucumbers and, kale.

July 9, 2017. Plenty of heat, rain, weeds and green vegetables.

A couple of days of rain and the garden exploded into high production. The garden, patio and deck are thriving, herbs, veggies, weeds and all. The basket has cucumbers, green beans and kale.

Green Beans

Green beans (snap beans) are classed as being pole beans, growing 5′ or 6′ tall, or bush beans which only grow a foot or two. The bush beans do well as container plants and you can see the continuous blooms. I grow beans in the raised bed gardens and in planters on the deck.

Tonight’s dinner included those green beans with ham, onions and new potatoes.Snap beans are more productive for a longer time with regular picking. Use mulch to suppress weeds, preserve soil moisture and keep the beans cleaner.

As you harvest garden produce, immediately plant beans in empty rows to improve the soil.

Because beans fix nitrogen in the soil, they are great companion plants for kale, potatoes, carrots and, chard. Bush beans in my garden are growing  side by side with chard and carrots. As  I harvest the chard and carrots,  I’ll plant more green beans.

Cucumbers

After waiting  and waiting for homegrown cucumbers, I discovered four on the vine. Because the vines grow on a trellis, these vertical climbers don’t take up much space. When we’ve had our fill of fresh cucumbers, I’ll make a few jars of Bread and Butter Pickles.

Find recipes for pickles on my Pinterest page: Canning, preserving, pickling, smoking . Refrigerator pickles, canning recipes for Bread & Butter Pickles, and dill pickles are on the page.

Kale

Purple tinged kale is growing from self-sown seed. The leaves are mild and excellent in fresh salads. This is Red Russian, an heirloom kale.

Leaves are frilled, purple-veined and, deeply lobed like oak leaves. Tender, mild and sweet even in summer, but more colorful and sweeter after frost. Gives repeated harvests through a long season.  Ready in 55 days.

We are eating the kale fresh in a salad. My favorite way to use kale as a cooked vegetable is in green rice. Use kale and chard interchangeably in any spinach recipe.

I pulled a few Cipollini onions this morning. (Pronounced chip-oh-LEE-nee) They are curing with the other onions and garlic on the covered porch. As the stems fall over, I pull the onions and let them dry in the shade.

Our garden is mainly for fresh eating. But if we suddenly have too many green beans and kale to eat fresh, it’s easy to blanch and freeze a package or two.

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Today’s Harvest Basket 6/4

Last of the lettuce.

Salad and stir fry ingredients

Picked the last of the lettuce today. The lettuce, radish and green onion will make a salad topped with strawberry poppy-seed salad dressing. Sweet local strawberries make the bright pink dressing.

Today’s harvest: kale, mustard, lettuce, peas, green onions, radish.

Fresh, red ripe local berries make this dressing bright pink. It looks like food coloring is added. There is no onion, usually found in poppy-seed dressing.

Strawberry Lime Poppy-seed salad dressing

1/4 cup chopped strawberries
1/4 cup lime juice (about 2 limes)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon honey
1 Tablespoon poppy seeds

salt and pepper to taste

Combine all the ingredients except poppy seeds and blend till pureed and emulsified. Stir in poppy seeds.

Heads Up

Zucchini plants are loaded with golden blossoms. Zucchini Everything is my collection of zucchini recipes.

Zucchini is on the way.

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Todays’s Harvest Basket 5/24

I gathered our dinner directly from the garden today.

Still gathering cool season crops. Peas, radishes, green onions, kale, chervil and cilantro.

The egg basket is over flowing, so we will have a picnic favorite, herb deviled egg with dinner tonight. I have lots to lacy-leaved chervil and picked extra for my morning omelet. Delicate chervil is only in the garden for another week or so. It is my favorite fair weather herb.

What’s for Dinner?

  • Kale salad with green onions, home-made herb vinaigrette, topped with hemp seeds and currants.
  • Deviled farm fresh eggs sprinkled with chervil and chives.
  • Open-faced radish sandwiches, a springtime-only special: Simply fresh thin-sliced sourdough or baguette, fresh butter, salt, thin sliced radishes.

Chervil Anthriscus cerefolium, mild flavored, delicate lacy leaves. If you don’t grow your own, you probably will not have the privilege of  enjoying this fresh herb in the spring and fall.

I use chervil (pronounced SHER-vil) in delicate dishes, like tomorrows breakfast omelet. Sprigs of chervil will top the deviled eggs and, in a non-mayonnaise based potato salad.

Chervil is a delicate annual, growing only in cool weather. It’s a great herb for succession planting. Add a few seed to the garden every week in the spring to extend the season as long as possible.

Fines herbes, the French herb blend uses chervil. The combo includes chervil,  parsley, chives and French tarragon. Fines herbes (pronounced feens-erb) is best used fresh because the herbs lose a lot of flavor when dried.

Sweet and tender spring peas will be tossed into a stir-fry or used as dippers on a veggie tray.

2 Cool Seasons
Remember, anything you grow as an early spring crop can be grown a a fall crop. Sometimes veggies are even more successful since the soil is already warm. This fall, give peas a chance.

 

Spring kitchen bonus.

Pick chervil, chives and cilantro often, to encourage plant growth. Keep the cut stems in a glass of water on the kitchen counter, making it easy to add fresh herbs to any dish.

The peas, radish and herbs are grown from seed purchased at Renee’s Garden Seed.

When fresh herbs are not available, get Fines Herbes at Penzeys Spices .

My handy husband, Jeff, made the harvest basket.

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Today’s Harvest Basket 6/4/14

June 4, 2014

Loaded with kale. It was just thinned. There's plenty more to come.

Picked more fresh kale and more to come. Photo Patsy Bell Hobson

Green onions, snow peas, kale, radish, spinach. I also took a small bucket of cold water to the garden along with the harvest basket. As I cut parsley, it went directly into the bucket along with Flashy Trout Back lettuce. The tender young leaf lettuce and the last of the garden peas seem to be the baby bunny rabbit’s favorites as well.

It won’t be long before it’s time to pull the onions and garlic. The recent rains has been a big help. Everything is growing fast.

The snow peas will be a stir fry with the last of the asparagus and shrimp.

Todays Harvest Basket 6/1/ 2014

June 1, 2014

Today's Harvest Basket 6/1/14 Picked lots of Russian Kale "Wild Garden Frills" (seed from Renee's Garden). Despite being wild, it's also quite mild. Tore up some small leaves to add to our salad tonight. Will use the rest in a green rice dish. Picked a few baby butter head lettuces and lots of leaf lettuces like Flashy Trout Back, Oakleaf, Garden Ferns. There are onions and radishes picked yesterday, so it's wilted lettuce on tonights menu.

Today’s Harvest Basket 6/1/14 Picked a few baby butter head lettuces and lots of leaf lettuces like Flashy Trout Back, Oakleaf, Garden Ferns.
It’s wilted lettuce on tonight’s menu. Patsy Bell Hobson.

Picked lots of Russian Kale “Wild Garden Frills” (seed from Renee’s Garden). Despite being wild, it’s also quite mild. Tore up some small leaves to add to our salad tonight. Will use the rest in a green rice dish.

Picked a few baby butter head lettuces and lots of leaf lettuces like Flashy Trout Back, Oakleaf, Garden Ferns.

There are onions and radishes picked yesterday, so it’s wilted lettuce on tonight’s menu.

IMG_8058

Every inch of soil is productive. In the blocks that frame this raised bed are lettuces which will be harvested soon so the onions will have space to bulb. Patsy Bell Hobson

It’s just too bad that we can’t have home-grown lettuce and tomatoes at the same time. Usually lettuce comes to an end about the time cherry tomatoes start coming on.

A broken transplant or starter tomato might have been a disaster.

A broken transplant or starter tomato might have been a disaster.

 

Tomato plants want to live.

All you need to do is stick the broken stem in the ground and plant the rooted base.

Don’t forget to keep these starts well watered and protected from the hottest sun until till they are well rooted and starting to branch.

It will be the same as planting two tomato plants. Meaning double the tomatoes as planned.

This tomato is Gold Medal, a big old heirloom producing 1/2 to 1 pound size yellow globes with red streaking.

I love Gold Medal tomatoes, they are meaty slicers that are beautiful on a plate of  Caprese salad (Italian: Insalata Caprese, meaning “Salad of Capri”)

The salad has no recipe, just combine basil, tomato and mozzarella. drizzle a bit of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt.

Non-bitter late lettuce

No bitter lettuce here

Romaine lettuce fresh from the garden in mid June. It takes very few plants to get a meals worth of green beans. Photo by PBH

Romaine lettuce fresh from the garden in mid June. It takes very few plants to get a meals worth of these bush green beans. Photo by PBH

Harris Seed sent 5 seed packets of my choice for trial. I’ve never grown their product, so I thought I would give it a trial. There will be a full report on all 5 varieties at the end of the season.

But these two vegetables are doing exceedingly well. I just couldn’t wait to tell you because you still have time to get in a crop of beans and a fall batch of this Romaine lettuce. Leaf lettuce is my favorite, but if a Romaine can change my mind, Kruger may be the one.

All other lettuce is gone for the season. As we jump into full fledged summer, my juicy leaf lettuces have gone on to bolt, bloom and produce seed. The only lettuce still growing bitter-free is the Kruger.

Get this: Kruger has just started to bolt – a week or 2 later that all the other lettuce. It is not bitter.  I sat there like a rabbit in the garden, taste testing a leaf from a few different bunches of this cos lettuce.

Kruger Romaine is beautifully formed and nearly every leaf is edible. It stands tall but tender.  There has been a minimum of insect problems and no disease.

The Lewis green beans are beautiful and the plants are loaded. Keep them well picked for the slender haricots verts to appear bountifully. If you do not frequently pick beans, they will grow bigger and thinker. (and tougher)

Plant a few beans every two weeks for a steady supply of green beans this summer. photo: PBH

Plant a few beans every two weeks for a steady supply of green beans this summer. photo: PBH

From the catalog:
Lettuce – Kruger MTO SKU: 11196-00-02
75 Days. Kruger Romaine lettuce is an improved Parris Island Cos type that offers growers’ resistance to Corky Rot. The heavy, tall, upright heads of Kruger produce crisp green outer leaves that are slightly puckered. The hearts are creamy yellow and have a very tender and sweet flavor. When harvesting Kruger lettuce, there is very little waste, which leads to more useable product and higher returns per acre.

Bean – Lewis SKU: 11016-00-01
53 Days. Lewis green bean produces early, big yields of 3-4 sieve beans, on upright plants that offer a high pod placement for easy mechanical or hand harvest. The attractive medium-dark green, round beans are 5.5″ in length, straight, smooth and have slow seed development. Lewis green beans have an excellent eating quality and an excellent disease package that includes resistance to BCMV-1 (US 1), Beet Curly Top Virus, Halo Blight and Rust along with intermediate resistance to Bacterial Brown Spot. Patent Pending.

Kale Dwarf Blue Curled heirloom Seeds Brassica oleracea

This beautiful almost blue and very frilly kale is from Botanical Interests. We’ve been picking as needed, but with the launch of summer, I harvested it all today. The smaller leaves will be part of a fresh spinach salad. The biggest leaves will be chopped, blanched, frozen.  Sometime later it will be used in a pasta and sausage dish,  qiiche or, potato soup recipe.

I have more seed in the packet. It will be sown in late summer for a fall crop. The kale that gets a touched by frost is sweeter. The ideal method of growing kale is to plant an early spring crop, use the garden space for a summer crop, like bush beans, and sow kale again in August or September.

 

  • Lewis green bean and Kruger Romaine lettuce from Harris Seed

 

Todays Harvest Basket 6/24/2013. photo: PBH

Todays Harvest Basket 6/24/2013. photo: PBH

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