Monday Harvest – May 14th 2012

Its cold here today (59F/15C) and as a result I don’t know how much longer the summer crops will last.  We are still getting eggplants, a few tomatoes and the never ending chillies.

What we are not getting are decent coriander crops, I pulled up this lot which had bolted before producing many leaves  in order to use the roots in a Thai red curry paste.  The paste also contained the lemongrass.

The below Thai basil, kaffir lime leaves and chilli went into the curry I made with the paste.

I just know that I will be harvesting a bit of silverbeet (chard) each week from now until Spring so I am trying to find new ways of photographing it.  Not entirely sure that this one was that successful photographically but it did taste good in Chicken Saag.

Another thing that I harvest each week and have similar photographic issues with is parsley.  I can’t remember if this lot became stock, was used in bean and chorizo casserole or was simply used in salad.  What I do know is that the lizard didn’t eat it.

The reason why I am trying to find different ways of photographing parsley and chard is clear when you see this next pic – while this picture is fine do you really want to see it every week?  Celery is something that I harvest every week so I need to come up with some new ideas for that too.  Thoughts anyone?  I do like the little spider in the bottom left of the photo though.

Despite the cooler weather I’m still eating a lot of salads – this basket went on to become a Salad Nicoise which I ate for lunch one day last week.

I didn’t only harvest summers crops and greens this week.  More tamarillos hit the basket, I’m up to about 50 so far and counting:

Finally, I decided it was high time I harvested one of our pots of turmeric.  This is what it looked like just out of the pot.

This is what the rhizomes looked like after I’d cleaned then up a bit:

This is a pretty small harvest admittedly but then my climate is really not well suited for growing turmeric and this is really something of an experiment.  This is my second year of trying and I’m learning all the time.  This lot comes from some rhizomes that I left in the pot over winter.  I will be interested to see how much bigger or smaller it is than that from the pot with freshly purchased rhizomes.  My suspicion is that I will get better crops from rhizomes that I either buy fresh each year or lift and store until the next planting season as our winters probably cause a reasonable amount of it to rot in the ground.  But I might be wrong.  I’ll leave my other pot for a few more weeks and then harvest it and compare.

For more harvest related excitement head over to Daphne’s Dandelions to see what else is being cut this week.