Monday 27 June 2016

Harvest Monday - 27th June 2016

I have lots of harvests to report this week (makes a change from mostly Lettuce, eh?).

The potatoes are from the batch of "Lady Christl" I harvested last week!

I picked the first of my Peas this week.


These are the first few (165g) of my "Early Onward" peas. Of course it's not a big harvest by any measure, but fresh home-grown peas are just SO GOOD! Fortunately my peas have so far avoided getting Mildew, which has always been a problem in the past.

Later in the week I picked more peas - about 250g this time.



The good thing about growing veg in one's back garden is that you can judge exactly when to harvest. It's not like having to wait maybe a week until your next allotment visit. With peas, minutes count!




I'm pleased with the quality; they are (were) nice peas. As well as the shelling peas, this week has seen me harvest some pea shoots for use as a salad ingredient. I grew about 20 peas in a small pot, specifically for this purpose:


You don't need a big quantity of pea-shoots if they are going to be just one of several ingredients in a salad, so I just snipped these:


Here's a closer view:


They were extremely tasty - all the flavour we normally associate with fresh peas from the pod, but with such a different texture!

Dare I mention Lettuce? Of course the salad into which those pea-shoots went also included Lettuce - in this case another "Yugoslavian Red" butterhead one.


These three Gem lettuces were harvested as a matter of necessity. With all the rain we have had, the outer leaves were beginning to develop mould. Inside, the hearts were fine though:

2 x "Amaze" and 1 x "Little Gem"

As you will have seen in the first photo, I also took a first picking of Broad Beans. Again, not a huge quantity, but very special.


I really picked the pods just to see how big the beans inside were. They were still fairly small, but certainly viable. Mixed in with the peas and some thinly-sliced (bought) carrots, the ones I had picked made a lovely accompaniment to some baked Ham with Parsley sauce. By the way, I did look at my own carrots, to see if any were of a useable size, but regrettably the answer was No.

The Broad Beans were of two different types, "De Monica" and "Robin Hood". I have picked out a few examples of each to demonstrate the difference in size:


The smaller "Robin Hood" plants produce smaller pods, but they seem to produce more of them, and the pods have less "padding" than the bigger varieties. I have 6 plants of "De Monica", 12 of "Robin Hood" and 6 of another type - "Masterpiece Longpod", though I didn't pick any of the latter this time.

Three days later I picked another batch of beans, just "Robin Hood" this time. This is 350g.




Another batch of potatoes joined the tally this week. These are a Second Early variety called "Nadine":




This lot is the product of two seed-tubers, grown in one 35-litre pot. They weighed 1.12kgs.




My final harvest this week was some "Winterbor" Kale:


It's the first time I have grown this type of Kale (as opposed to the Cavolo Nero / Lacinato type). Jane is not very keen on Kale, but I like it, so I reckon it's fair to serve it on an occasion when there is lots of other veg available for her to eat! I used this batch of Kale in two ways - one of them was boiled, as a green vegetable, and the other was made into crisps (what folks in the US call "chips"). If you want to know how this is done, I gave the recipe for it HERE. When I cooked the Kale Chips I added a "little something extra" - some chilli flakes - and even Jane had to admit that the chips were very nice indeed!


Well that's my harvest for the week. Quite a decent one, I think!

I'm linking my post to the weekly Harvest Monday link-up, over at Dave's Our Happy Acres.

9 comments:

  1. Nice harvest. Your potatoes are beautiful, as always. The kale looks very good, I would eat that. My wife also doesn't care for kale, but try it in some recipes like Portuguese kale soup (not Caldo Verde, the one with onions, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, linguica, red kidney beans, and lots of chopped kale). Or look for a recipe for kale with sausage and cannelini beans. Those should convince her.

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  2. Wonderful harvests - the variety is really picking up! Those potatoes are gorgeous - don't think I've ever seen ones with those splotches of purple before.

    And I noticed the same thing last year with the two varieties of broad beans that I grew (Extra Precoce de Violetto & Ianto) - the EPV produced larger pods, but the Ianto's produced more pods and I believe they had less padding too. Just goes to show, you can't judge a pod by it's size:)

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  3. Lovely harvests, Mark! The purple spots on the potatoes are amazing! I have never seen such potatoes before. The kale chips with the chilli flakes must have tasted delicious.

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  4. Beautiful peas and potatoes Mark! The kale is lovely as well, and looks like the insects are leaving it alone. My wife and I both love kale chips, and while it takes a bit of time to bake them they are a special treat to me.

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  5. Your Nadine potatoes are very pretty! All your peas look perfect and delicious too. I've never tried pea shoots, you make them sound yummy.

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  6. I am really looking forward to picking peas.

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  7. I never thought of eating pea shoots, but they sound delicious. As others have said, your potatoes are beautiful.

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  8. Lettuce molding because of too much rain is shocking. But new potatoes and peas sound like a stellar match. Your vegetables are so beautiful.

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  9. I had thought that pea shoots were the curly little tendrils. Glad to see that they are the tender leaves. Thanks for the education.

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