Friday, August 10, 2012

First Garden Harvest!

My raised bed garden has been doing phenomenal so far this summer!  The boys and I have been tending to it almost every day.  There was so much lettuce that we started handing out bags to all of our friends to help clear it out.

Today I did some serious thinning of the carrots.  Prior to this we have just been grabbing here and there as snacks while we were playing in the backyard.  I came away with two and a half pounds of little carrots that I will pickle tomorrow if I can track down some garlic.  The peas put out two cups worth tonight and the beets were thinned as well and I got a big handful of mixed sized beets.

But my favorite item of the evening were the POTATOES!  The purple potato plants had flowered a while back so I was anticipating a few gems hidden under the soil.  Well holy crap!  Just from digging under two purple potato and one red potato plant (which hasn't bloomed yet), I came away with two and a half pounds of potatoes and some of them the size of a man's fist!!  And that wasn't with any serious digging, just a wee bit of rooting around in the soil.  It is 9pm and I have four of the wee potatoes boiling in a pot that I am going to enjoy this evening with a bit of butter and salt.

Menu plans for this week are now going to include our very own moose roast with veggies from the garden and butternut squash soup made with our backyard-grown with carrots and potatoes.

This next month will be so much fun to see what all we harvest each week!  And just imagine next year when I have all of my raised beds growing veggies.  I am already dreaming about it.

Now.... please share your best tips for putting up carrots and potatoes just in case we don't eat them all and want to stash them away for the winter!

Potato Row

Peas and carrots.  Carrots and peas!

Romain lettuce is still going strong!

Beets, beets, baby!

Look at the guys hard at work in the backyard! 

The thinned carrots that will be pickled.

Tonight's harvest!

5 comments:

jen said...

Good Job! You got an awesome harvest! It's too cold up there for the Japanese beetle perhaps, my peas and beans were massacred!

Tara Borin said...

I read somewhere (maybe in What's Up Yukon) to store carrots in layers of sand.

Your harvest looks great! My garden didn't happen this year, but we're getting a bunch of land cleared in the next week or so, to put in beds ready to go for next year!

Just me said...

Congrat's on the harvest. There is nothing like fresh food that you've grown yourself it tastes soooo good. Imagine sitting down to Christmas dinner to a chicken you raised and all the veggies from your garden. MMMM.

Sarah said...

Looks so YUMMY!!!! :) That must be so fun eating a whole meal that you have grown, hunted and cooked! :)

Morena said...

Book come out please, please, please.

Fantastic haul. Good job.