Yesterday may have been the first day of Summer, but in our garden the harvest still sings of Spring.
There has been a TON of rain this Spring in Illinois. As a result, Tom and I have not gotten out to the garden as much as we'd like to and the weeds have really thrived. Yesterday we played some serious catch up and weeded our little butts off. Thankfully, we were rewarded with a beautiful spring harvest of beets, greens, peas, chives, basil, fennel, oregano, lemongrass, and marigolds. We're still waiting on the broccoli and cabbage, and unfortunately our spinach was completely ravaged by little caterpillars. We'll be using a row cover on the spinach we plant for the fall harvest. The damage those little pests did was incredible!
The real superstars right now are the beets. We chose to grow Detroit Dark Red which turned out just beautifully. We've been munching on the greens for the past few weeks, and yesterday we harvested a huge bundle of plump, juicy, beet roots. Tom immediately roasted them up for us when we got home, and they came out so good that we've already eaten them all up!
We also had a lot of fun both harvesting and shelling the peas. You wouldn't think shelling peas would be such a great time, but when it's peas from your own garden, it's actually quite satisfying. However, despite the fact that we planted loads of plants, we still only ended up with half a tupperware full of the little guys. We'll definitely plant a whole lot more when we try for a fall harvest.The broccoli is being quite frustrating having produced no heads yet. The plants are beautifully lush with big green leaves and they don't seem to show any signs of bolting. Yet, we still don't have any heads. We'll wait a bit longer to see if we get any. Otherwise, we'll have to resign ourselves to just the stems.
The cabbage is doing well, just coming along slowly. It's finally starting to head up which is great. Both the tomato and pepper plants have flowered which is always exciting! So far the only loss is the spinach, and we get another shot at that in the fall. I'd say the garden is going very well as we enter into summertime.
