Grow – Cook – Make

So there I am happily puttering out in the yard, doing something here, fixing something there. My husband is also outside, tinkering with his electric cart. A peaceful storybook scene interrupted by a resigned–and loud– “Oh, no”. He calls: “Angela come, look at this”.

Someone is been harvesting my fava beans and it is was not me.

The compartment for the cart’s charger has become a rodent nursery.

Too bad, all creatures need to feed their babies, and specially rodents, they have a lot of babies. I was actually wondering how  come fava production was slowing down recently… um…

For other harvest news, the spring harvest continues at a good pace: lettuce, shelling and snap peas, chard, kale, favas, spring onions, carrots, various herbs and lemons, all have been happily consumed this week in my kitchen. May turned out to be unusually cold, here in California, so I expect to continue reporting spring harvests well into the summer. I’ll be lucky if I have a ripe tomato from the garden before July.

For more  stories of harvests and to add your own, 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.

My little cutting garden is tucked between the blue wall and the fava bean forest. Behind the wall is my husband’s shop with all sort of stuff laying around. Useful stuff, but not good looking stuff. Now, the blue wall is at most two feet tall and the fava forest is an ungainly mess. My little cutting garden is just a tiny bit of color between two big messes. It is actually small, a rectangular bed about six feet by six or nine inches.  I don’t spend much time looking at it, just a quick daily assessment of which flowers will be cut and brought up to the house, that’s it.

I was sitting on the ground, pulling Bermuda grass, when I saw it: my beautiful and tall cutting garden, ranunculus, poppies framed by the blue wall. No stuff, no favas in sight. Just the flowers and the blue wall.

Another week where I was able to photograph a few of my harvests as they were happening. Sharing the weekly harvest with all the gardeners gathered at Daphne’s is having a positive impact on my documentation habits. I love it!

So, what did I get this week? I am most excited about my kumquats. I have a little Meiwa kumquat tree in a pot that I have been babying for the last two years. This is its first significant crop. So far we’ve been eating them fresh, and we’ve been enjoying them so much this way that I won’t be making marmalade or preserving them.

The scallions are fattening up, starting to bulge. These are thinnings of Valencia onions planted in November. Soon I’ll have to stop calling them scallions. I thin the onion bed as my cooking needs dictate, but I should thin it more aggressively if I want to get some nice fat onions at some point.  Maybe I’ll need to make a large batch of Chinese scallion pancakes this week, or add lots of scallions to everything I cook.

Fava beans! Of course, what else? I have been reporting favas every Monday for a while now. I love them, I cannot get tired of them. I am so glad they keep coming, specially since my summer beans are not germinating that well at the moment.

Time to cut the garlic scapes and let the plants make a big fat bulbs. I picked all the buds from my Spanish Roja garlic, a hard neck, very pungent, spicy variety. I also stopped irrigating them since their foliage had started to dry out. I took one out and it seems that the bulbs have reached a good size, are not fully segmented, but are almost there.

I have also been harvesting a regular supply of mixed lettuce for salads–although this will be coming to an end soon, since the lettuce is getting a bit too bitter. Kale, chard and bock choy, as well as carrots, have also made it into the harvest basket this week. All in all, it has been an abundant week. I am very grateful for my little garden that keeps us well fed week after week.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, 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.

This is a seriously proud flower, isn’t it? You’d think it is ready to get on with the business of making peas.  So is this other one.

Let’s take a look, anybody making peas here?

There are a good number of pods on these vines. Plenty flowers and plenty pods, it seems that finally I am going to get a good crop. I’ve been fighting all winter long with mysterious pea-eating monsters. I feel deprived one of gardening’s best pleasures: freshly picked peas. The winter crop took a big hit, even though the vines were not bothered by mildew. First time ever that my pea plants don’t succumb to mildew and it turns out that someone else is ruining them! I am hoping that spring will treat my plants better.

In February I put in Super Sugar Snap and Sutton’s Harbinger shelling peas. When the plants reached about two feet,  someone came and started eating them. Leaves, flowers, tendrils, stems, pods. Wholesale eating them. I’ve been looking for slugs and caterpillars everywhere, nothing. They are not it. I’ve been sizing up the juncos and finches fluttering about the garden. Nah… too small to take such big bites. Who is it? Who is coming to my garden every few days demolishing my pea vines?

Oh well, resignation sets in, I let go, I can’t find the culprit.

A quail calls from the top bar of the pea trellis. A quail? How come I didn’t think about it? A quail, of course. They can take big bites out of a plant, sure they can. They don’t fly much, but certainly enough to get themselves on top of the pea vines. I found the culprit.

My peas are now living under a cover of bird netting. Whatever was left from the pea plants and, I hope, whatever will be able to grow until the mildew makes it’s appearance, as it surely will. I saved my peas.

So I thought. I took care of protecting the plants from above, someone else arrived from below and proceeded to feast on the shelling peas. Gnawing at the shells, taking the seeds, and leaving the empty shells hanging on the vine, where I found them. Again, someone is taking my peas, and it is not me. A rodent, during the day. The ground squirrels are back and they found my peas.

I took care of this new threat. Finally I will be able to have the remaining peas, They are not ready to pick yet, I’ll just wait a little longer before I harvest them but I can relax.

What is this? A soil mound in the middle of the bed? Freshly dug soil, inside the wire mesh? A hole. Did a  gopher get through the wire mesh? Am I ever going to get a decent crop of peas?

Nothing gets planted in this garden without a 1/2 inch chicken wire basket around its roots. All the garden’s beds are lined with chicken wire. Sometimes it is not enough. This hole turned out to be a vole burrow. The opening in the wire mesh is now closed.  I restored order in the bed–my idea of order– and I am planning to keep a tight watch on my pea vines. I am harvesting some peas, but I want more, many more.  And maybe this time I will be getting them… maybe…

I was not expecting any more rain this season.

And here we are, inside the cloud. Drizzling steadily, raining at times, winter has been back for the last couple days. We got half an inch, pretty good for May, hopefully it will help keep the fires at bay a bit longer.

Thick, dense fog. I cannot see the garden. I can barely see the end of the patio, the Dublin Bay rose just faint splotches of red muted in the mist.

I take the camera and go down to the garden.

Leeks.

Tuscan Black Kale.

Red Russian Kale.

The greens are happy, the night shades not so much. I’ll be back tomorrow, we are expecting the sun to be back. Right now I’ll go inside, make a cup of tea and keep dry.