Grow – Cook – Make

The week’s harvest started innocently enough with a basket of fava beans. Here you have it, one basket of favas, nice and full. It’ll take some time to shell and peel them, but before it gets too tedious the job will be done.

I brought in another basket full, and another one, and another one… By the time I had filled the two vegetable drawers of my fridge with favas I stopped harvesting. I am going to spend a whole lot of time shelling and processing this pile of beans. And there are a lot more where those came from!

Sunday dinner included a nice bunch of red chard. Since I didn’t have room for it left in the fridge, I made a chard bouquet and set it on my desk. Who needs flowers if there is gorgeous chard in the garden?

To round up the week’s harvest, I picked carrots, scallions, savoy cabbage, little broccoli florets, bok choy, radishes, and lettuce, lots of lettuce. The garden took good care of us this week!

Head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners are harvesting. I so enjoy checking the progress of the season in gardens all over the world. You will too.

On a recent walk in the orchard I noticed all these flowers turning into fruits on the peach trees.

This is how a peach starts: the petals have fallen off the flower, the sepals are still in place, the stamens are bright around the ovary, which has a prominent style. At this stage the ovary still very much looks like a flower part but it is starting to round up and it shows the fuzz of a peach.

Here the style and stamens are drying out. The ovary is getting rounder and pushing the sepals apart.

And now we have tiny peaches. The stamens and sepals have fallen off and there is just a hint of the old style on the tip of the fruit.

The fruits will be growing slowly but surely, they’ll be ripening in the warms days of summer and in a few months I may have a harvest.

I say may, not only because inclement weather can set my hopes seriously back, but, specially, because I need to come up with a good way to protect this fruit from predation. The trees are small, their branches quite thin and delicate, and there is some heavy beast that likes to climb on them, snap the branches with it’s weight and take the fruit before it is ripe. It has been happening several years in a row and I’m tired of it. I will build a cage around the trees if needed, but come july, I’m the one eating the fruit.

I hope.

We shall see, I’ll keep you posted.

The harvest was smaller this week. My garden is pretty productive right now, but somehow I didn’t need to harvest much. We started the week eating left overs and later on I did some freezer harvesting–tomatoes, some peppers–both of which mean that fewer freshly picked vegetables are needed.

Saturday I picked this bowl of thin stemmed pac choi, I don’t know the exact variety. I was initially disappointed when I realized that it doesn’t have the wide succulent stems that I love in bok choy. It turned out to be quite delicious stir-fried with a good amount of garlic, ginger, soy sauce and a bit of white vermouth. Now I am glad I planted it, and I still have enough for a few more dinners.

These are the last of the blood oranges. I have been harvesting oranges since late January, which is pretty good considering the trees are very young. I expect the harvest to increase every year until they reach maturity. In about a month I will be planting one or two Valencia orange trees, hoping that some day we will be able to eat oranges from the orchard year round.

The scallions are sweet and pungent cipollini onion thinnings. They are coming very handy in the kitchen right now, since I finished last summer’s onion harvest a while back and I keep forgetting to buy onions when I’m in town.

I’ve also been picking lots of lettuce, some carrots, fava beans and kale. Actually, I guess the harvest hasn’t been so small after all. In any case we’ve been eating home grown veggies every day of the week, and, I have to admit, it is nice to be able to pull some tomatoes or peppers from the freezer to add to all the greens we harvest in the spring.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

New little green apricots coming up! Isn’t it nice how even at this early stage they already have their lovely blush?

It looks like we may have a decent crop this year. I am dreaming of jam and apricot tarts… If everything goes well in about a month and a half these little green fruits should be plump and golden, ready to pick.

I’ll keep you posted!

Let’s go back to the chaparral surrounding the garden and see what is blooming right now.

The garden lays on the upper part of a gentle south-facing slope. Below the garden the chaparral covered slope becomes rocky and steeper. There, among the boulders, look at them, the bush poppies are blooming.

This one has an umbrella. Actually, an open seed pod, still a couple seed hanging from it.

The bush poppy is a rangy, floppy shrub. It blends well into the chaparral, it doesn’t call much attention to itself, until on a spring day it decides to step into the spotlight with a profusion of small, yellow flowers.