Finally harvesting - Spring & Summer
Winter can be tough on a gardener. We like to eat from the garden as much as we can, and without a lot of extra effort what we can grow in the off season is limited. We can get some greens, lettuce and herbs during the winter, but not a lot.
In early spring we are able to plant more greens, broccoli, cabbage, radishes, lettuce, turnips and a few other things. Later in the spring we start adding in the summer plants - the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, summer herbs like basil and sage, squash, melons, etc.
Right now is the time of year that we are getting a good many early spring veggies and seeing the young fruits for summer appearing. We have green tomatoes all over the place, small peppers on many of the plants. But the summer stuff is still probably at least 2 weeks away. In the meantime, though, we are getting a good bit of stuff for the kitchen - meals are starting to consist more of what we grew than not - a ratio not found in the winter.
This past weekend was mothers day. We have both of our moms come for the weekend, Joey's from Atlanta and mine from here in Charlotte. I was so happy to be able to put a lot of stuff on the menu that we grew - and they love it too! We used lots of onions, garlic and scallions from the garden. We had a salad Saturday night with of our lettuce, spinach, cabbage and other greens as the base and thyme in the dressing. We had pizzas with pesto made from the garden herbs and garlic.
Saturday brunch we had a pasta salad with broccoli, onions, scallions, greens, spinach, turnips, radishes, and kale all from the garden. Plus ground turmeric as one of the spices in the olive oil dressing.
We are finally at that point where we can really get a lot of variety and a lot of volume from the garden - in just a couple more weeks the kitchen should have bins overflowing with beans, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant - then the real cooking begins!! Below are all photos taken from the garden this morning.
Spinach patch
Radishes
Onions
Curly Kale
Broccoli
