Harvest Fridays – The Winter Garden

Friday, already? I’m not complaining! This week, my garden did lots of growing. Sadly, I didn’t do too much picking. I had a weird stomach bug or something for half the week, and although I could still eat, I wasn’t exactly up for harvesting or cooking (or anything I couldn’t do from a fetal position on the couch).

Before the bug hit, I did harvest a big bunch of pretty rainbow carrots. These beauties went into one of my old favorites– Chicken Pot Pie with Biscuit Crust— which I hadn’t made forever! Yay for fall comfort food!

Since I didn’t do much picking this week, I thought I’d show you what’s growing instead! I have lots of little sprouts that are really well on their way to becoming veggies. We’re kind of too lazy to start seedlings indoors, so we always directly sow in the garden. I’m sure we might have slightly less success this way, but we don’t seem to have too much of a problem!

First up, kale!! This is our first year growing kale. We have had such great success with our rainbow chard, I figured another leafy green was bound to do well. I love that it’s already crinkly and kaley-looking. Can veggies be cute? Because this one is.

We planted some sugar snap peas late winter last year and harvested them in the spring. The seed package informed us that we could do a second fall planting, so we are trying it out. They look good so far! Their little tendrils are searching for something to cling to so I will probably put my tomato cages around them soon so they can climb.

Beans are usually a summer veggie, but the package of these, too, told us we could do a second planting. I had wild success with bush beans the first summer we planted them (this past summer we tried pole beans and they were a bust). This is the first time trying bush beans in the winter, so we’ll see!

We’ve been growing beets (our favorite veggie) all year round and have them at all stages of growth scattered around almost all of our garden beds. I planted a bunch more as a winter crop and they are just starting to sprout. These ones seriously need to be thinned out.

Last but not least, those radishes I planted last week are already sprouting! A few nice rows. Radishes are crazy fast growing.

On another garden-related note, since it’s almost Halloween and all. We grew some pumpkins this summer. We didn’t exactly plant pumpkins, but we grew them! My Halloween pumpkins from last year lasted through the winter. When spring rolled around and they were starting to go to mush, Nick took one and smashed it on top of a dirt/compost heap. Pumpkin seeds flew everywhere. We laughed. A few weeks later… our dirt pile started sprouting and soon enough we had a pumpkin plant (which by the way, grew to be huge). Since the pumpkin was planted so early, I harvested my 3 pumpkins in July. Well, by the time fall rolled around 2 of them had started rotting. Sad news. I didn’t want the third one to meet the same fate, so this week I baked it and pureed it and now it’s ready to be made into some kind of delicious baked good!