First harvests of 2014

We're excited that we've already harvested over 40 lbs of food from our garden!  Bea's set up a garden tally page where we'll be keeping track of how each crop fares throughout the season, which we plan to update every couple of weeks or so.

We bought a secondhand hardware-store style scale from Community Forklift, and hung it right in the hoophouse to help us keep track of how much food we grow this year.  Bea has a spreadsheet (of course!) to keep track of how well each variety does.  We also have a somewhat vague agreement to keep track of the approximate economic impact of our garden & thus the value of Bea's “income," based on multiplying the typical local per-pound price by each crop's productivity.  We figure this first year or two will actually be a loss, but it'll be interesting to see how/if all the work in the garden actually affects how much we spend on groceries, snacks, etc!

We predicted that our first harvest of the year would be something like radishes, which typically are the fastest-growing veggie that we plant.  However, as a total surprise, the first thing we ate that we grew here at the farmhouse was a pound of Shiitake Mushrooms!

Bea has ideas of some day growing shiitake logs in our “woods" which is currently a tangled mess of invasives, but until we have a suitable site (and at our current rate of progress it might be a while!)  Chris wasn't sure that he even liked shiitakes so Bea ordered a couple of self-contained indoor mushroom-growing kits to keep on top of our fridge over this winter.  The shiitakes produced their first flush of mushrooms on April 1st, within 2 weeks of setting up the kit, and the Lion's Mane mushrooms only took 4 weeks to grow.

We chose to grow Lion's Mane mushrooms because it supposedly tastes like lobsters!  We tried cooking this recipe for Butter Poached Lion's Mane Mushrooms, which Chris says “tastes like fried butter."  It turns out that neither of us has actually eaten lobster in any recent memory, so for all we know it could've tasted just like lobster.  We can say with certainty that it was chewy, buttery, and delicious!



Of course, our radishes weren't far behind the mushrooms.  We got to enjoy the first of our Easter Egg radishes with visiting family while hosting an impromptu Easter brunch!  This variety is a mix of brightly colored egg-sized radishes, vaguely resembling dyed Easter eggs.  Not too spicy, but crisp and delicious!

Trying not to waste anything, Bea has been cooking up our turnip green thinnings.  We don't think we know anyone who absolutely loves turnip greens, but they're certainly healthy and definitely edible -- preferably marinated with some onions, garlic, soy sauce, and dry sherry!  Usually we end up working outdoors until just past every last scrap of daylight, so our headlamps are now stored right by the door for late evening harvesting/watering.  We've learned it works better to get things planted when you can actually see what you're doing, but having one person water our garden by moonlight/headlamp takes about half an hour and by then the other person can usually have dinner just about on the table, so for now it's a peaceful way to end the day's work (at least until we get our drip irrigation set up!).

Bon appetit!

Bea's first attempt at food art, decorating a salad made entirely of our own harvesting!