Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Our First Harvest

So, we've mentioned before that we have a plot in a local community garden. We inherited a ton of spices in our plot--sorrel, oregano, tarragon, chives, rosemary, thyme, spearmint, and an enormous sage plant--and an inordinate amount of chard. And we don't really like chard, especially inordinate amounts.

We've also planted our own veggies since we acquired the plot in May. We planted various lettuces, corn, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, basil, and cucumber. Some of the veggies didn't take and some are thriving. And some needed picking. Badly.

Below are pics of our first major harvest beyond the occasional pickings of herbs for dinner and such. (And by "our first harvest" I mean "Andi's first harvest" since she does 90% of the gardening.)

Our haul from left to right: chard, spearmint (flowering in back), mini apples from the community orchard,
carrots, arugula.

The first truck load of chard.

Arugula.

The carrots. They're not long, but they have girth.
We are very new at this gardening thing so we purchased a book that was recommended to us by a friend: Golden Gate Gardening: The Complete Guide to Year-Round Food Gardening in the San Francisco Bay Area and Coastal California. It's been extremely helpful such that it tells us what plants thrive in the crappy summer weather of San Francisco, it spells out planting schedules, and it helps us identify weeds (although, another community gardener gave us an even better way of identifying weeds: if you don't want it in your garden, it's a weed.)

If anyone has any advice on how to grow big and tasty veggies in our garden, please feel free to comment!

Dean

4 comments:

  1. That chard is beautiful! I use it in soups mostly.

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  2. Looks great! Good job guys. I think chard isn't so bad when it's put in soups. The yellow Gourmet cookbook has an amazing Minestrone recipe that uses it.

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  3. You guys are amazingly creative. I'm sure you can come up with uses for the chard. Chard pie, chard soup, chard flambe' (I'd like to be there when you try that), chard a la russe (I think that means with sour cream and dill).

    But don't limit yourself to food! How about chard wallpaper, chard floor tiles, chard dish scrubbers, essence of chard room freshener ... once you get going, it's hard to stop.

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  4. A tip for your corn next time around. You have to plant several rows of corn with about 18" in between the rows to get a decent yeild. Otherwise the corn doesn't cross pollunate correctly. Your garden looks great.

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