Garden Bloggers Harvest Day

Barbara and Christine over at The Gardening Blog have started a garden meme showing what edibles have been harvested in the last month: Garden Bloggers Harvest Day!

It helps that they're in the Southern Hemisphere so are enjoying summer right now, with gardens overflowing with edibles. My cold St. Louis garden will pale by comparison, but I decided to give this one a go. It's a short list, but at least I have a list -- it is supposed to be winter right now.

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So we'll start with the easy one: Kale.

I've got several plants that are still going strong, and I may be able to get another meal or two out of the plants before I use up all of the leaves. Really surprised that they've been around this long, but our winter has been quite mild so far.

Next up: bittercress.

Technically I'm not growing this in my garden -- it's actually all over the back corner of my lawn. When I posted about this a month or so ago, some helpful readers let me know that bittercress -- although considered a weed -- is edible. It's in the mustard family. So I harvested a few handfuls and spiced up some salads. Very nice! There's plenty more around too, which I'm not sure is a good thing or a bad thing...

My next edible is a hot pepper, 'Cajun Belle'. Not something I'd eat any quantity of, but they're great to add to some chili or burritos:

Yes, this is from the pepper plant that was infested with aphids, and was the last few fruits the plant produced.  I'm still deciding what to do with them. (The aphids don't touch the fruits, just the leaves and stems.)

Finally, I have several onions that I've been using the greens from all year long. Do you remember the post I wrote last winter where I potted up the green onions I got from the grocery store? Those things are still growing (outside in a pot), and are still producing delicious onion greens! It's been over a year!

I also have herbs which I could probably still harvest: thyme and rosemary primarily, but sage is a possibility too. I won't touch the rosemary though, because I have high hopes of getting my two plants through the winter (they'll need some protection) so I can start growing a nice big rosemary bush. I've not had success with overwintering them yet, but this year I'm bound to -- considering I have a potted one indoors as a backup.

So that's my harvest for this month. I expect it will be a couple of months before I can participate in Garden Bloggers Harvest Day again, but we'll see. Sometimes you never know what surprises the garden will provide.

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