bonanza

My daughter is the co-manager of the local grocery, and last night she stopped by with two enormous boxes full of this season’s unsold seeds, which the store gets rid of after they don’t sell.  They were all from Burpee, and there were hundreds, if not thousands of packages.  I got to sift through them before they went to the local food bank where my wife serves as secretary.  What a rush.  (I wasn’t greedy, I promise, and I’ll donate some of the results).

Meanwhile, I decided to harvest the rest of the kohlrabi crop for freezing.

Later in the day I also decided that it might be safe to remove the fencing that I had put around the beans. My experience has been that the critters only chew the tops off the young, tender plants. I hope that holds true this year.

The variety in the middle of the picture (Maxibel) tends to get too tall to stay upright. It grows taller than most bush beans but it’s not really tall enough to be a vine. I’m trying rope between stakes for support. It’s a real pain digging around in flopped-over bean plants for the reward. But the beans themselves are so good; long and thin and tender.

And the carrots are finally getting to the point where they’ll start shading out their own weeds. I like that.

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kohlrabi time

I’m a pretty big fan of cole crops.  Probably the easiest to grow is kohlrabi.  It looks like a mint-green above-ground turnip, and has a milder flavor than broccoli.

I planted out seedlings on May 8th and they were ready for harvest yesterday, less than five weeks later.  Quick turn-around, and I like that. They’re usually picked when they’re 2-4″ in size. Any bigger and they’ll be tough. You can however pick them earlier and smaller.

My wife was kind enough to make stuffed kohlrabi with a sour cream sauce. Yuh-um.

The spring crops keep coming. More nice lettuce…

And five more meals of broccoli for the freezer.