Spring Crops are Starting to Come In

The first harvests from spring planted crops are coming in.

I pulled in big bowl of Red Sails and Little Ceasar Romaine lettuce. Most of it was used for salads, but some of it made it onto our burgers.

Its been a few days since I cut the lettuce to just above ground level and they are already of harvestable size again. (the left two were harvested from)

I also harvested some spring planted carrots. These were planted in my grow box. Their fairly thin and average about 6" long. This amounts to about two servings of carrots.

But if you remember our earlier harvest of 'carrots'--see pic below, then you know that this is a VAST improvement for us. At least we got some orange this time. The carrots above were planted in top soil; they were an experiment so I didn't invest a lot of money in soil. I have since amended my soil with free composted horse manure, so I should have better success in future plantings.

The big harvest this week was the (fall-planted) garlic.

Some of the garlic that I planted from the grocery store grew scapes! We only planted one bulb (seven cloves); so we only have seven scapes. I assume they are hardnecks bc they grew scapes. Hardnecks aren't supposed to grow well here, but these did fine in a mild winter. I will definitely replant some. Now I wish we had more because I want to try making some garlic scape pesto. We tasted one of the scapes raw and it was very flavorful and somewhat spicy. We decided to saute it with some olive oil and seasoning.

  

I wasn't sure if some of the garlic that we harvested was ready because it still had a lot of green leaves. However, the green leaves were all new leaves. The older outer leaves were dying off and the newer inner leaves seemed to be from cloves growing inside other cloves. You can see this in the photo below on the left and there is a close up in the photo on the right. So I said we better pull them because it looks like the cloves are splitting. Not sure what brought this on, but it happened on every single planting of the Inchelium Red garlic that was refrigerated before planted. I also have some Inchelium Red that was not refrigerated before planting that is not 'suffering' from splitting. It is still planted.

Here are a couple of close ups of the bulbs after we pulled them. You can see what looks like three seperate bulbs forming on this one. I promise you that I only planted one clove per hole.

In this photo, the seperating bulbs are clearer. You can see that there is (was) one outer bulb wrapped around two inner bulbs.

All of the harvested garlic is now hanging in the garage to cure.

And here is a closer look at some of the bulbs. All of the bulbs are a respectable size --- about what you get in a grocery store, some slightly smaller. There are some larger bulbs, but they are all still out in the garden.

I'll weigh everything once things are cleaned up and cured.

Check out more harvests over at Daphne's Dandelions!