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July Harvest - July 28th 2019
I have been growing various crops in the raised beds, and this month I have been able to harvest multiple of them. Since June I have been able to have strawberries every day. I'm a big fan of soft fruit, so that has been a great luxury for me. Growing and eating my own fruit and vegetables has been a very gratifying and restorative experience. Growing these plants, caring for them, and then harvesting and being able to eat them makes me feel very thankful.
The left raised beds catches the most sun, and in it I have many strawberry plants on the edges that came from my mom's garden. It also contains two kabocha type pumpkin plants (variety "Winter Sweet") that have sprawled along the other raised beds. In the front of this raised bed there are three bushes of thyme. The middle bed contains a variety of lettuce as well as some herbs: basil, parsley, oregano and lemon thyme. The right raised beds catches relatively a lot of shade and contains lemon balm, multiple types of chives, bear leek (Daslook), shallots and carrots.
The lettuce I sowed a while back has not so much grown, but erupted. We can't really keep up eating it all, so I transferred some of the plants to pots and gave multiple away for friends and colleagues to enjoy.
I harvested carrots too, but did that way too late, especially given the recent heatwaves and dry weather we've been having. Most of them bolted, sprouting BIG flower stems - and only two of them were good to eat, the others had become small and tough. I did thoroughly enjoy snacking on those two carrots though. I also harvested the shallots I planted. The first batch I included in a simple cacio e pepe pasta, and the other batch I pickled, and made a potato salad with.
I like to put fresh chives and oregano on some toast with cream cheese and pepper. Fresh oregano can be a bit harder to find in dutch stores, but quite easy to grow yourself and it is so worth it. I can't believe I have been missing fresh oregano for this long - it is awesome. In the picture below I did not use fresh oregano, but cornflowers that I accidentily picked while weeding. Cornflowers are edible, and although they don't have a ton of flavor, they sure look pretty on food.
Anyhow, right now we are going though an insane heat wave in the Netherlands, hitting between 34-40 degrees Celsius, actually the hottest temperatures ever recorded here. So working on the garden is on hold for now, except for some emergency watering of plants that are about to croak (I've lost two dierama plants that were planted in the spring, the other plants seem to be surviving, most which were planted in november and hence are well established). It has been so hot the last few days that the strawberries are getting sunburnt. They get white soft rotten looking spots where they have been blasted by the sun.
After this heat subsides its time for some extra tlc for the garden.