Harvest

With all the warm water and (thank goodness, finally!) rain lately, our garden has been growing like crazy. The beans in particular seem to love the hot weather. Here's what I picked the other night:

The purple bush beans, which look almost too pretty to eat, turn green when you cook them. Seeds of Change suggested eating them raw to add color to salads, but I wasn't that keen on the raw flavor so we cooked them anyway.

We've been picking radishes for a while, but here are a few of the remaining radishes. The white icicle radishes are wicked spicy, but delicious. The French breakfast radishes (the pink one) is not as exciting, but I think it would have tasted better picked earlier.

And here's my lone rogue scarlet red gladiolus. I have NO IDEA where this came from, possibly from my sister Karen. It's the only red flower in our entire yard and I look forward to it every summer. I need to get organized and find some other red glads for sale so I can plant a bunch of them.

I really love glads, they're one of my favorite flowers. We have a bunch of them planted along the sidewalk in our front yard and have more in the back yard too. When I was planting them, I was in what I like to call my purple-pink phase so almost all of them are either dark purple colors (which I still find yummy) or pastel pinks (which I'm not as fond of anymore).

The best part was that we turned around and used almost all of these veggies for dinner the night they were picked. We made a nice simple salad with the arugula, adding blue cheese, walnuts, and pears with a store-bought raspberry vinagrette. Steamed the beans. Added the peas and the radishes to the salad. And I put the glad in a tall vase and put it on the kitchen counter, where it's been cheering me up all week.

I really need to pick the rest of the arugula tonight, it's about to go crazy and stage a garden uprising if I don't take care of it. I think I'll probably whip up some arugula pesto with it, and then freeze most of the pesto. I like the arugula, but I don't love salads enough to finish off all of what's in our garden :)

Comments

[Jinjifore]

Your flowers are gorgeous. And what a bummer that the beans turn green when cooked. On the other hand, I can just imagine trying to persuade my daughter to eat purple beans. Then again...

[nova]

Your harvest makes me want to go out and plant a garden this very second. Beautiful stuff, beautiful pictures!

[Betty]

Lovely!