Onion/Spinach Harvest

My entire spinach harvest.

Yesterday was a busy, happy day spent doing my job at the winery, and today was a busy, happy day spent harvesting my spinach and onions.  You never know how your crop is going to grow every year, and so it's rare that you get the exact amounts of anything that you'd planned on. So it's either feast of famine in the garden.

Today, for instance, I harvested about six spinach leaves and about three metric tons of onions. (perhaps a teeny bit of exaggerating, but that's how it felt.)  I actually got about 3 store-bought bag's worth of spinach, and have about 30 pounds of onions -- half in the fridge and half still in the ground.  

So now I will be hoarding my spinach like a madwoman ("no you can't have a spinach salad! I am saving it!") and giving away onions to anyone who looks like they might need or want one, or even better, a whole bunch. 

The pathetic spinach crop is a shame, because I love adding spinach to different recipes -- lasagna, chicken casserole, omelettes, etc.  but this will be a lean year for that addition.  We do really commit to eating what we grow and rarely shop the market for anything we're able to put in the ground ourselves, so when we have a lot of something, it becomes a regular visitor to the dinner table, and when we have a sparse harvest, we do without. Farewell, spinach. Maybe next year.

.000001 percent of my onion crop.

But since onions are -- face it -- an accent spice and not usually a main dish, I have no use for a lot of this bumper crop. This year I am going to try freezing some for use in cooked dishes, which means I will not need to grow any for awhile, which will be nice. And since I've left half the crop in the ground, we have enough on hand for our fresh needs for several more weeks.

But just like life, the vegetable garden teaches you to be prepared for anything. Those raised beds are as full of drama and plot twists as your average soap opera, and adapting to what worked and what didn't is an ongoing thing.

And so I say a fond farewell to spinach for awhile, and hello to The Year of The Onion. 

There will be lots of onion tops in the compost this year.

Cleaning up

Tomato beds are cleaned out and awaiting compost.

I waited to clear the tomato plants this year until December, with the idea that having some late tomatoes would be a good idea. Unfortunately, this is another one of those DIY lessons; even though our days are warm and sunny, our nighttime temperatures dip into the low 40s and even upper 30s.  So while the tomatoes look beautiful and freshly vine-ripened, they taste like tomatoes that have been in the refrigerator for a few days....just kind of bland and mushy.  Oh well.  It was a noble experiment. It was nice to be able to put them into the salads at Thanksgiving, but honestly, they were no better than crappy store-bought tomatoes, gassed with ethylene or greenhouse grown -- okay, but definitely not like a delicious summer tomato. Everything really does have a season I guess.

For fall 2015, I'm thinking it will be better to just add some fresh onions and carrots to next year's salads and call it a day.  The tomato thing did not work.

So now they are gone (there's one last pile you can see in the right of the pic).  So it's time for making some rich, lovely soil by compost-adding, ryegrass planting (for green manure) and fallow time.  Perfect, since inclement weather is expected and being out in the elements is no fun. I can just sit inside with a glass of wine and watch my spring soil being made from the warmth and comfort of the house.

Surprise late harvest!

I was down in the pasture yesterday spreading around some chicken manure in approach of a coming rainstorm when I found these late harvest red grapes, in perfect condition and ready for picking, two months after harvest officially ended.  They are super-sweet, and a perfect end to the 2014 growing season.  I have no idea when these appeared but am very glad I found them before the freeze sets in.

Sometimes nature gives us a bad surprise -- gophers, disease, or other damage. And sometimes, she gives us a sweet treat long after we thought the season was over and done with.

Second (third, fourth....) Harvest

A few weeks ago, I cut away at my spinach plants, reaping a good harvest but leaving each stalk intact with a few leaves on each one.  Yesterday, I finally pulled the plants out and removed another big bowl's worth of spinach leaves. It was a marvelous second harvest of some plants most other gardeners would have removed after the first harvest, either because they didn't think they would produce again, or to make room for something else.

But many plants will come back again if you just harvest carefully, and leave enough leaves on the plant for photosynthesis to happen, with roots intact.

This cabbage plant is on its third season of production.  It was planted in winter 2012, and since then has produced no less than six heads of lettuce.  This started because I was initially too lazy to pull out the plant's roots, so I cut the cabbage head off and just left the rest of it alone in the bed.  Lo and behold, come fall 2013, there were another couple of heads to harvest from the same plant.  And now, in summer 2014, there are two more. The leaves may be bug-eaten and sorry looking, but the head of cabbage is still good.  Just in time for summer slaw.

And last summer, I again got lazy at the end of the growing season (if you're sensing a trend here, you're right) and left a few tomatoes on the vine, to ripen, fall into the dirt, and disperse their seeds.  And I have these volunteer tomatoes to show for it, every bit as big and lovely as the ones I painstakingly grew in the solarium this spring.

We talk a lot about the wisdom of recycling, but rarely do most of us think of allowing our plants to recycle themselves. 

For success like this, all it takes is being too busy to garden (and/or plain old laziness), some serious procrastination and some patience or just a willingness to look away for awhile while Mother Nature works her magic.