In My San Diego Garden and Kitchen
I relish the time in spring when the kumquats turn their lovely orange and the leaves bright green. They are ready for my indulgence. Wandering past the tree on the patio, I’ll stop and grab one off the tree for a sweet-tart delight. Like the strawberry guavas I grow, not everyone likes kumquats. To read more about kumquats see my post Kumquats and Marmalade.
There’s kumquat marmalade to make when the summer garden is planted. As soon as my lavender bursts forth in the next week or so I’ll be making a Lavender Kumquat Shrub, something I never got around to last year.
The garden greens—spinach, arugula and kale—are waning and about this time of the season they’re not the best quality. My annual practice is to make a galette of winter greens which takes 6-8 cups of chopped greens.
I should do an updated post on the process. The greens I use vary with the year. A combo of spinach, chard, arugula, kale, radicchio or mustard greens works. You can see a post I did some years ago, A Galette of Winter Greens.
What a year for artichokes! With four plants and abundant production we’re awash in them, but happily so. Only a few remain on the architectural, garden-worthy plants now.
I harvested the last side shoots from the last broccoli plant. When I pulled it up I could see why it produced so well—a very thick stalk and a deep, extensive root system. A bag of leaves went to my friend’s bunnies.
This is about a third of the carrot harvest. I’ve been pulling them all along at various sizes. There were more smaller carrots and this week’s take was 7 pounds. About ten percent of the crop remains, soon to make room for the corn. With all the rain this was definitely the best season for carrots in many years.
A few more beets pulled to make room for the first planting of corn. Thankfully, these are very tender and sweet and any size.
Garden salads are luscious these days.
There’s more to share but I’ll save the pickled red cabbage for next week, after I’ve tasted it.
This time of year I can usually gather a flower bouquet from the garden. Here we have arugula, chives, violas and the last of the sweet peas. Some years celery, parsley and carrot flowers are in the bouquet. Zinnias were planted out last week.
You may enjoy seeing what other garden bloggers harvested last week at Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.
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