Harvest Monday, May 28th, 2012

The week started off with a nice strawberry harvest.

Then we had some hot weather predicted, so I decided I need to get some things harvested. First was the lettuce with some turnips. I have Paris Island, Red Sails, and Deer Tongue. I found one of those nasty large brown spiders in one of the heads of romaine and freaked out again. I was washing the lettuce at the kitchen sink so tossed the head outside then got the spider out. Ahhhhhhhh! I looked it up though and brown recluse spiders don't live anywhere near New England, so it is just a look alike. It still freaks me out though.

Then I had the big harvest of greens. Mostly bok choys and mostly baby white stemmed bok choy. They were all starting to bolt. So out they came. There were a few green stemmed bok choy from the earlier planting, but the green stemmed one doesn't bolt as easily. All of those will come out this coming week though. On Friday I want to plant my sweet potato slips and those are in the way. But it will be time for them. An early planting of the smaller Asian greens really worked out well timing wise to plant before the sweet potatoes. And what I did with all those Asian greens, well, I'll let you know on Thursday for Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard.

The strawberries ought to be picked more than two times a week. They really need to be picked every other day, but that just didn't happen. I'm going to be better this week. Maybe.

The first of the chamomile was harvested for tea. I picked some mint too, but I totally messed it up and over dried it. I forgot to take photos too, so I guess it was not meant to be. I never added it to the tally.

This is just a small bit of self seeded cilantro. It was where my melon patch was going to be so I ripped them out. The melons might turn out well this year since we have been hotter earlier this year than normal. I just might get some good ones.

Friday I harvested the last of the spinach. So long good friend. Though I froze most of it, I did save a good portion to eat up this week. I'll miss spinach, but then again I have that way too huge patch of chard to start eating. Or giving away again. I really need to get out and pick it. I swear at this point in the garden harvests take up more time than anything else. Between the time it takes to pick, wash, and process everything, it really adds up.

And I just want to talk a bit about my tally this week. I've had a lot of questions. I'll talk about the fruit tally right now. I have two tallies, my fruit tally and the vegetable tally. I separated the fruit tally because of the nature of producing fruit. Some fruits like strawberries and raspberries are fairly quick. But most take longer. When we bought the house it was just subsoil. So everything is new. The fruits were all planted last year. This was a huge expense and all upfront. I could have amortized the costs, but I thought it would be more fun to see how it added up over the years and when the fruits would break even. Some fruits have huge expenses since they are being espaliered and needed trellises. They won't produce for a couple more years at least. The raspberries also needed a trellis, but at least they started producing a bit in their first year. Some fruit has barely any expense. The alpine strawberries were grown from seed from Pinetree. So for just a couple of dollars I got a beautiful border for my front yard. And BTW if you are looking for a pretty front border to a garden, Alpine strawberries really are so beautiful. Regular strawberries are a bit messy. Mine are in my front yard too, but as a ground cover for the trellised fruit trees. I keep this tally on my sidebar. You can see I had over $800 of expenses the first year. This year I had a bit more (and have a bit that hasn't been added yet). But then the expenses will taper off to just maintenance. And in a few years the fruit ought to really ramp up a lot. I think it will be fun to watch over time.

• Greens 12.62 lbs
• Herbs 0.61 lbs
• Turnip 0.44 lbs
• Weekly total 13.67 lbs
• Yearly total 92.55 lbs
• Tally -$325.96

• Fruits 
• Strawberries 3.8 lbs

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.