Harvest Monday, June 3rd, 2013

For a start I think I'll write about my expenses, something which often gets into my tally, but I don't often write about. I bought three bales of salt marsh hay this week. One went to the asparagus patch and one got spread on my newly planted fruit trees along the rock wall garden. The other will be for my other fruit trees on the rock wall garden, but I won't do that until the strawberries are done because I want to move them around when they finish fruiting. It added $41 to the expenses, split between the fruit and the vegetable spreadsheets.

I do both spreadsheets differently. The vegetable spreadsheet is done year by year. I do amortize the cost of really big things, but all the little things or something that lasts just one year is always added to the year it is bought. The fruit spreadsheet works differently. I'm keeping yearly track of what I spend and what comes in, but my final totals are a running total for all the years. Fruit often doesn't produce anything the year it is planted. Getting paid back for your effort takes patience. So if you look the the tally on my sidebar you will see I keep track of where I am in getting paid back for those expenses. Right now at the beginning of year three I'm pretty far down. I'm hoping my fruit trees and berry bushes pay off and they will more than pay for themselves, but it still remains to be seen.

Now on to the good stuff, what was picked this week. And I picked a lot. Much of it was picked to make way for summer crops to go in (Asian greens, radishes, spinach, onions).

Tuesday's Basket

Chocolate Mint that I dried for tea

The last of the radishes

The spring spinach that was pulled

Bunching onions

A small sample of the Asian Greens that were harvested

All the lettuce was harvested before the heat wave hit

A huge Michihili cabbage that was thinking about bolting

So many Asian greens were picked, but this baby bok choy wasn't much of a baby

One of a couple strawberry harvests

The first time I've picked garlic chives in more than snippets

English thyme for drying

It was a huge harvest week. I kept some for myself, but a lot was sent over to my townhouse mates. I am trying to preserve some in potstickers (I need more wrappers) and my townhouse mates froze some in vegetable rolls. I think maybe I should have used my email list to get rid of more, but I didn't so I'd better use it up somehow. I still have a lot in the fridge.

• Alliums 0.36 lbs
• Greens 5.17 lbs
• Greens Asian 16.28 lbs
• Herbs 1.02 lbs
• Roots 1.32 lbs
• Weekly Tally 24.15 lbs
• Spent $14
• Yearly Tally 53.13 lbs, -$186.56
• Fruit
• Strawberries 0.81 lbs
• Spent $27

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.