Children, eat your weeds!

This year, we have had an abundant crop of both raspberries and weeds, so for dinner last night we featured both. This is the first time that we had enough raspberries and strawberries within a three day period to bake a berry crumble with no purchased fruit for filler, even with everyone including our bird snacking on the berries before we baked.

 I have been busy and neglecting to weed the vegetable gardens the last three weeks, and noticed that the lamb's quarters became taller than me (yikes!) which means the leaves are less tender and better for cooking than eating raw in salads. The wood sorrel likewise was getting way out of control, and with the garlic harvest imminent, I could barely see where the garlic is for the forests of wood sorrel. My friend Lorena graciously helped me for an afternoon harvesting weeds and raspberries.

Last Sunday, my father-in-law Abraham asked us what percentage of our diet is actually coming from our garden. This is an interesting question. I had once tried to answer my mother's question about whether gardening led to us saving money (I am still not sure if the cost of buying earth, hay, gas money for picking up manure, seeds, bulbs, the occasion purchased seedlings when my crop fails ends up cheaper than groceries when they are at their summer cheapest, though I hope we are breaking even). I had not really kept track. Given that we devote a lot of garden space to garlic, tomatoes, herbs and hot peppers which we use gradually over a long period of time, we are still buying a lot of produce in the summer. We estimated about ten percent, though it goes much higher at harvest time when the beans, peas and raspberries are ripe. So this weekend, I decided to consciously track what we ate from the garden.

Lorena came over mid-morning and we did some yoga together outside in the back yard, then had a lunch before getting down to the business of weeding and cooking. I have been volunteering at Vanier College in their garden project, and it is harvest time there too. All volunteers are encouraged to harvest and take home whatever we like. I have been nabbing kale and swiss chard because I did not grow any of those in my garden, and they are abundant and ripe for picking. My daughters are going to camp at Vanier, and they have a big camp show every Thursday evening. I biked over half an hour early and jammed a bunch of kale and chard into my bike bag. I noticed that the basil was getting ready to flower, so I pulled a bunch of the tops off those too. We'll be making pesto soon so the more the merrier. Josh had pulled out a few heads of garlic which were ready to eat, and I harvested a couple of onions. They were pretty small again, especially as I planted them two years back, but they were in good shape to eat. I decided to make a florentine omelette with vegetables and herbs from the gardens (mine and Vanier's) to get us in the mood for garden work. For my readers who like recipes, I made it from garlic, onion, chopped up chard and kale, fresh basil, thyme and rosemary, and added oil, salt, pepper and eggs from the grocery store.

We made lamb's quarter soup, this time including some new potatoes I had picked, a touch of cream, wine and parmesan, onion and garlic and fresh herbs from the garden. Josh chopped up some wood sorrel as a garnish. We made homemade pasta, ravioli stuffed with a ricotta mix using lamb's quarters instead of spinach. Lorena had brought back a gift of truffles from her travels in Italy, which Josh added to the cream sauce. Josh also made a rosé sauce for those of us who dislike mushrooms, and I was disappointed that our stock of puréed tomato from last year's harvest is finally finished, and after two full years, we had to buy canned tomatoes.Some salad and a raspberry crumble for dessert left us pretty much immobilized.

I have finally given up on trying to grow anything in the hay bales this year, and had enough time yesterday before dinner to transplant the tiny broccoli and basil plants into some fallow patches of the garden. I am hoping that we will get a late harvest in the fall at least. Tomorrow I will be moving the hot peppers out of the bale as well. Now that I am moving things out of the bales into new rows, I will need to rearrange the soaker hoses.  I was looking at the hoses today, and realized that a section of hose running through one patch of tiny, undersized tomatoes had ripped. It was a short hose attached to two longer sections, bought at the local dollar store. Turns out it is crappy quality, and may have been a contributing factor in the lack of growth in that patch of tomatoes. I cannot figure out how it ripped. Tomorrow I will be turning on each hose one at a time and checking if any other sections are not functional.

In the past few days, the peas and beans have grown and will be ready to start harvesting. When I weeded the wood sorrel out of the way, I also noticed a few garlic look ready to pick. I have a busy few days ahead.