Grow – Cook – Make

This week I am documenting a forgotten part of most of my harvests: eureka lemons. The lemon tree has become such a reliable producer that it just fades in the background for me. Week after week I am harvesting without a mention large and juicy lemons to use for cooking and cleaning, it is not hot enough for lemonade yet. Well, today’s post puts an end to this neglect, here they are, documented, a plate full of lemons.

Behind the lemons stand the last harvest of Seville oranges. They look bumpier and wartier than most sweet orange varieties. Their pulp tastes close to a grapefruit, but without any sweetness, and their skin is bitter. They are very seedy. This is the first year that the Seville orange tree has produced fruit. It started back in February, and I’ve been making marmalade since. I love marmalade. I am also juicing them and freezing the juice in little cubes, mostly to add to savory dishes.

The dinner harvest continues like the previous weeks: greens–chard, kale and bock-choy, lettuce, spring onions, fava beans. Not much to add to what has been reported every Monday for a while now. For instance, this was my harvest basket for Friday’s dinner: a few leeks and sugar snap peas for a quick pasta sauce, and carrots for a grated carrot salad with a lemon vinaigrette.

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.

Wild oats in the orchard, weedy grasses between me and the sun. A little detour from harvest duties, photographing the grasses in the evening light.

Now going back up the driveway, to the kitchen. I drop the harvest basket and stop to photograph the wild barley in my front yard, between me and the sun.

Soon they will all be cut and left to decompose in place. We do it for fire safety: the annual weedy grasses are the first rung in the fire ladder. They can carry a fire up low hanging branches onto the canopy. I’m enjoying them now, these last few days before they are gone, sparkling in the evening light. The land will look dry and denuded when they are gone.

I’ve been able to harvest some new vegetables this week, my February plantings are now starting to be productive. During the short days of winter plants seem so reluctant to grow. As the days lengthen they get back their enthusiasm for growing, and flowering and fruiting and a happy gardener is well fed.

On these last few evenings the same scene repeated itself: run down to the garden, pick some veggies for dinner, clean them, lay them on the cutting board, I am about to reach for the knife…oops, I forgot the photo.

Quick, where is the camera?

Quick, go find the last patch of sunshine left somewhere, in the living room, outside on the rocks, on the deck, wherever there is still a bit of evening sun left. Take a quick photo, and back to the business of making dinner.

The new additions to the harvest this week are sugar snap peas, leeks and Italian black kale. Lettuce, green onions, carrots, chard and fava beans complete the harvest.

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.

There is this way in which gardening warps my perception of time. It is spring right now, isn’t it, here in the northern hemisphere?

Yes, it is spring, and here I am, feeling rushed, afraid I am late for summer.

I am looking at my garden and I see winter taking over the beds I had reserved for summer. I see spring squeezed in a little corner, a productive little corner, and I am going nuts wondering where and how I am going to be able to fit summer. Right now, first week of May.

Two things conspired to mix up the order of the seasons in my garden: winter crops are progressing much slower than usual, occupying the ground far longer than planned, and a spell of cold weather descended on us just when I was scheduled to plant the summer crops. As a result I still have no room for tomatillos, melons, summer and winter squash and beans, as well as my next sowing of lettuce, arugula and some herbs. On the bright side I got peppers, eggplants and tomatoes in the ground.

It breaks my heart when I have to remove a perfectly productive crop in order to plant a future harvest. I am going to be doing precisely that this weekend. I am harvesting more than enough favas and greens right now. Enough of winter, I am late for summer.

First Harvest of nopales this year! I love nopales. I love most everything about them. I love to eat them, I love to grow them.

Actually, I love to let them grow themselves. My only job is to harvest diligently. The more you harvest, the more you get. I hear that farther south they can be harvested year round. Not here. My harvest starts in late spring and goes until mid or late summer.  It is a long enough harvest season. I get the chance to eat plenty and to preserve plenty, good enough for me.

I do not like to peel them. But I do peel them. I need to,  I love to eat them.

Here I am, peeling the spines off, one by one, with a sharp knife that I keep cleaning and honing as I go. I really don’t like to work on nopales with a dull knife.

These pointy things that you see in the photo are soft leaves. As the pad grows and hardens they fall off. The spines are under the leaves. Some are large, and stiff, they look menacing but are not a problem. The little spines, those are the problem. They come in little bundles at the base of  the big spines, innocent looking bristles that somehow find their way to my fingers and bite. They are hard to see, hard to pull out and painful. They are the reason peeling nopales is not fun, plus it’s a little tedious, I have to admit. But so worth it!

Tonight after peeling, I sliced the nopales, seasoned them with salt and olive oil and roasted them until dry and slightly browned. Nopales are full of a slimy substance that needs to be cooked out of them. The traditional method is to boil them with a copper coin in the pot, but I prefer to roast them until the slime has completely evaporated.  They can also be grilled whole, which is my favorite way to prepare very tender nopales. Roasted or grilled they will have a more intense flavor than boiled.

The rest of the week’s harvest was basically the same as in previous weeks: lettuce, greens, limes, lemons,  favas, and more favas, and still many more in the garden. This is turning out to be the year of the fava beans.

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.