Tuesday, June 30, 2009

June 30 2009

Yesterday I picked a lot of the beans, hoping to stimulate later growth. There are so many!

I also pulled up the remaining five beets and picked a row of edamame to see at what stage of ripeness their flavor is best. I cut about seven branches of NZ spinach that were sticking out around the bed. I weeded a bit and pruned one of the broccoli beds, trimmed back the cilantro that had started going to seed, and pulled up some of the salad greens that had already bolted. My boyfriend and I picked off the tops of some of the lettuce that looked like it was getting to bolt; we ate it for lunch as a salad.

Today I get to cook all of that. My boyfriend is doing the cooking; he also helped me in the garden yesterday and today. He's a wonderful cook. I picked and washed the spinach leaves. They look delicious.

The leaves are more fibrous and have a much stronger flavor than regular spinach- we sauteed it with onions, lemon and garlic to complement the flavor. We also baked the beets- we wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in oven at 400 degrees for an hour. We sliced the beets and put them over the spinach, and ate them with pan-seared chicken marinated in a soy sauce mix.

We also did some work in the garden today. I bought some seeds for the garden from Home Depot, and we planted them! In the spaces left from the plants I picked, we planted radishes, bok choi, and sweet and genovese basil. We also planted two frames of the new trellis with a type of long bean good in stir fry. We decided to give the potatoes one more week to finish producing and then pull them up and replant the bed.