One thing about gardens... never be afraid to eat a young succulent plant. There is always this idea that one will wait for the plant to become "optimum" for it's harvest. This is a fools paradise in our personal gardening world. For example if you waited for your spinach plants to become all "optimal" you would end up with more food than you could eat in a few days. Why not start eating it early?
I have been eating my kohl rabbi now and it is delicious... in past years i waited for it to get bigger thinking i wanted more yield, and then a few hot days and they split and got "woody". Same deal with the peas... nothing is taster than young fresh peas, but you think oh let them get bigger and then you notice you have hundreds of peas and you can't deal with them all... don't fall into the concept of letting everything mature completely. Last year i had beets bigger than softballs and many of them are in my basement pickled but for weeks i passed up on eating delicious beets hoping to get more yield.
If you were on the case in the spring planting like a Man gardener your garden is now at a point where it producing food at an exponential rate. Obviously you are not going to eat an unripe tomato but if you pluck your kale plants down they have the root system to replace that foliage in a matter of days. So by not eating it now thinking you are waiting for more you are actually going down the path of getting less. It's like living your life going after money passing up all kinds of opportunities so that you will be "set" one day... and then that day comes and you may not be of mind to realize it.
Don't get me wrong... money is important and you should always be on the right side of the interest conundrum, but that's another blog. I harvested about 30 peas today and most of them were small and tender, much like you might pay top dollar for in a high class restaurant and the truth is there will be 35 tomorrow. Of course being a pro i have 4 pea patches each growing like an invasive weed species these days. It's good for the plant too.. the plants get the message that "holy cow we need to make more seed because some maniac keeps plucking us dry". It's like milking a mammal... take the milk and the mammal will see a need to replace that milk at that rate.
Clearly there are a few types of home gardener plants at work here... a spinach or a kale or a pea will keep producing fruit so you need to keep on these plants now.. the younger and more tender the tastier. Then you have plants like beets, kohl rabbi, carrots that are one off plants. If you planted 90 beet plants then you can start eating young tender beets early and continue until the beets are larger and older eating the whole time, or you can wait until they are all big and you will have more than you can deal with. If you go the second route there are donation options (see produce for people), or perhaps bartering options with other gardeners growing different crops, but sadly what i often see is plants in the ground that missed their time to nourish the human that planted them under that idea that they would be nourished.
Now being a Man Gardiner i strive for maximum yield always... it's the way i roll, so what i am saying, and i hope i am making sense is that now is the time to make your dinner out of what you have. We are into the extreme growing season and soon things will bolt and you will find you missed it. I missed some leeks this year... they started to flower and when i pulled them up the center of the the stock was solid... or "woody" as they say in the business. I missed it, so now i will let the remaining ones flower... something for the bees, and perhaps some free seeds, and it might look pretty... onion like flowers are kind of pretty.
Also noted, is that the garlic i planted in the fall is now ready... last year i let it go too long and i suffered some rot on the bulbs. In life often times when you act to want more you end up with less... it's all in the poetic blinding power of greed. We have too much in our society, where we can let food go to waste... don't commit to that cycle... get what you can while you can... some smart ass songwriter said that once... ahh! it's true.
I look at gardening as practice for the apocalypse... to be self sufficient you need to be smart... growing plants are like an exponential graph... soon you will be overwhelmed so why not harvest a bit early? It is a matter of staying on top of things, being ahead of the curve as they say... i realize i am hammering this point but it is a point that i believe needs to be hammered. It's not just the rum talking, although it make the points flow in a more fluid manner from my perceptive right now.
It is now that garden can feed families... with of course the proper meat supplements... I have these canine teeth that dictate the diet of an omnivore... a meat and vegetable eater... but that's just me... in some ways i see the virtue of the vegetarian diet, but in another way i see the need for meat in my diet. To each his or her own, on my front i try to buy organic, sustainable, plastic free packaged meat to send my message to our society. But that's just me, the more vegetables the better... may they be young and tender all the better.
I have been eating my kohl rabbi now and it is delicious... in past years i waited for it to get bigger thinking i wanted more yield, and then a few hot days and they split and got "woody". Same deal with the peas... nothing is taster than young fresh peas, but you think oh let them get bigger and then you notice you have hundreds of peas and you can't deal with them all... don't fall into the concept of letting everything mature completely. Last year i had beets bigger than softballs and many of them are in my basement pickled but for weeks i passed up on eating delicious beets hoping to get more yield.
If you were on the case in the spring planting like a Man gardener your garden is now at a point where it producing food at an exponential rate. Obviously you are not going to eat an unripe tomato but if you pluck your kale plants down they have the root system to replace that foliage in a matter of days. So by not eating it now thinking you are waiting for more you are actually going down the path of getting less. It's like living your life going after money passing up all kinds of opportunities so that you will be "set" one day... and then that day comes and you may not be of mind to realize it.
Don't get me wrong... money is important and you should always be on the right side of the interest conundrum, but that's another blog. I harvested about 30 peas today and most of them were small and tender, much like you might pay top dollar for in a high class restaurant and the truth is there will be 35 tomorrow. Of course being a pro i have 4 pea patches each growing like an invasive weed species these days. It's good for the plant too.. the plants get the message that "holy cow we need to make more seed because some maniac keeps plucking us dry". It's like milking a mammal... take the milk and the mammal will see a need to replace that milk at that rate.
Clearly there are a few types of home gardener plants at work here... a spinach or a kale or a pea will keep producing fruit so you need to keep on these plants now.. the younger and more tender the tastier. Then you have plants like beets, kohl rabbi, carrots that are one off plants. If you planted 90 beet plants then you can start eating young tender beets early and continue until the beets are larger and older eating the whole time, or you can wait until they are all big and you will have more than you can deal with. If you go the second route there are donation options (see produce for people), or perhaps bartering options with other gardeners growing different crops, but sadly what i often see is plants in the ground that missed their time to nourish the human that planted them under that idea that they would be nourished.
Now being a Man Gardiner i strive for maximum yield always... it's the way i roll, so what i am saying, and i hope i am making sense is that now is the time to make your dinner out of what you have. We are into the extreme growing season and soon things will bolt and you will find you missed it. I missed some leeks this year... they started to flower and when i pulled them up the center of the the stock was solid... or "woody" as they say in the business. I missed it, so now i will let the remaining ones flower... something for the bees, and perhaps some free seeds, and it might look pretty... onion like flowers are kind of pretty.
Also noted, is that the garlic i planted in the fall is now ready... last year i let it go too long and i suffered some rot on the bulbs. In life often times when you act to want more you end up with less... it's all in the poetic blinding power of greed. We have too much in our society, where we can let food go to waste... don't commit to that cycle... get what you can while you can... some smart ass songwriter said that once... ahh! it's true.
I look at gardening as practice for the apocalypse... to be self sufficient you need to be smart... growing plants are like an exponential graph... soon you will be overwhelmed so why not harvest a bit early? It is a matter of staying on top of things, being ahead of the curve as they say... i realize i am hammering this point but it is a point that i believe needs to be hammered. It's not just the rum talking, although it make the points flow in a more fluid manner from my perceptive right now.
It is now that garden can feed families... with of course the proper meat supplements... I have these canine teeth that dictate the diet of an omnivore... a meat and vegetable eater... but that's just me... in some ways i see the virtue of the vegetarian diet, but in another way i see the need for meat in my diet. To each his or her own, on my front i try to buy organic, sustainable, plastic free packaged meat to send my message to our society. But that's just me, the more vegetables the better... may they be young and tender all the better.
I agree completely. I've been eating my peas now before they're "ready" and they're delicious.
ReplyDeleteThe unfortunate thing is that someone is randomly chopping the tops off of the plants... My solution is to just plant more than you need and you can accommodate some loss.