Harvest Day In The Vegetable Garden | Tips, Tricks & Recipes

It's May 25th here in our Southwest Ohio Zone 6V garden and in this video we are going to harvest some of the cool weather crops to make room for the warm crops that are coming in right now. While we're harvesting I'll give some ideas and some inspiration about how I use the food in the kitchen to feed our family. And I'll just talk about what we did to grow them. So let's get going. Well let's start by getting this cauliflower. Look how massive this is. It looks so good. This variety is amazing and that's actually been our favorite white cauliflower and it's definitely ready to harvest. You can see right up here it's got the florets are just starting to loosen slightly. So we definitely want to get this out of the ground. The thing with cauliflower is it doesn't produce any side shoots. So basically it'll produce one head and at this point this plant is done. So we're going to get it completely out of the ground and then you know the leaves and stuff they are edible but we've got more than enough kale and other things that are slightly more tasty than that. So I think that will be a chicken treat. So let's get this harvested. Look at this it looks so good. So other tips as far as cauliflower goes the main thing is just getting it in early enough. So we like to start these mid-February try to plant them out early April weather permitting. Lots of times we have frost cloth on them initially but really we're about to get into the heat and so you want it to have time to make a big head before that heat comes. So probably the easiest way that we eat cauliflower is roasted in the oven at 350 about 25 minutes olive oil salt pepper and parmesan cheese. Oh and a little bit of lemon juice. It's so good but my favorite way to cook cauliflower is to make aloo gobi which is an Indian dish that involves cauliflower potatoes sometimes tomatoes and cumin turmeric it's the yellow kind of potato cauliflower dish that you can get in an Indian restaurant. A little more involved so good and you know we've made cauliflower crust pizza which is good not as good as my pizza crust pizza but even plain this cut up plain dipped in hummus with your lunch or just as an afternoon snack has so much more flavor than those sad vegetable dishes that you get at the grocery store. All right well let's talk about broccoli now well I guess before we talk about broccoli just really quick this bowl I carved myself so if you're questioning where do I buy a bowl like that unfortunately I don't know and they take me way too long so no I don't sell them I'd probably have to sell them for ten thousand dollars to make it actually worth it. Let's talk about broccoli now so we've got two varieties of broccoli and they're basically all ready to go the florets are just starting to kind of open a little bit and so I'm going to go ahead and get these out now I'm not going to squash the leaves down on the broccoli like I did with the cauliflower because you can actually keep the plants alive and you will get some side shoots in fact I'll show you that here in just a second with some broccoli that we harvested before but these are the heads of broccoli timing is the same as far as the broccoli and the cauliflower in that we start them about mid-February indoors and then plant them out around April 1st weather permitting. As far as varieties this variety here that I'm harvesting is Emerald Crown and it seems like it is just a little bit later than Green Magic which we just harvested before but there's another head of broccoli there and then just the last thing about broccoli one of the things you could see there's some hoops here one of the main pests of broccoli are the cabbage butterflies or worms there's little white butterflies that come you'll see them kind of fluttering around your and these plants do need some sort of protection for that and unfortunately the dog is not good protection what you need is some sort of netting over the top these hoops also allow us to put frost cloths over the beds in the really early season because we get some pretty cold temperatures in early May. Okay so Peter mentioned the side shoots from the broccoli this is amazing to me that he grows these plants harvests a big head like you've seen and then a week later we have these massive side shoots that are you know you buy these at the grocery store and they're $3.99 a pound and these plants just continue giving us broccoli heads and they are fantastic so eventually it'll get too warm for this plant to keep producing good little side shoots but for now we continue harvesting until the season's done. So while I love cauliflower I really really love broccoli because I feel like there's a little bit more I can do with it than cauliflower one of my family's favorites is a I call it a broccoli pesto now yes the basil gets heated because of the heated broccoli but it makes a really good sauce that you can put on a pasta you can make it creamy you could put on pizza so that's definitely one thing honestly steamed broccoli is fantastic a stir fry or cooking the way we cook our cauliflower which is roasted in the oven salt pepper olive oil lemon juice and parmesan cheese perfect. We're at the garlic bed and the garlic isn't quite ready but what are ready is something almost as good these little garlic scapes which is basically the flower stalk of the garlic and they taste like garlic they're almost like a we were just talking about almost like a garlic asparagus like a garlic flavored asparagus as far as the growing of the garlic we grow hardneck garlic varieties here they are more hardy in the cold than the soft neck which is generally what you get at the grocery store and the hardneck varieties are the thing that are going to make these scapes in fact the hard neck is the flower stalk going all the way down to the bulb down there once you see the scapes on here generally you do want to remove them because they are taking some energy from the plant in order to make the flower and then it's going to be just a few weeks before these are ready to harvest you can see on ours we can already see some yellowing of the leaves timing as far as when to harvest the garlic is a little tough especially if you're getting a lot of rain if it's really rainy then we tend to harvest earlier because you don't want it to rot underground if got some dry weather you can usually let it sit a little bit longer as far as timing garlic you plant it in the fall so we actually planted these in november and then you're harvesting you know just a few weeks after this usually in june for us here in ohio so i think this is our third year harvesting garlic scapes so i actually don't have a lot of recipes that use them they're not a very common thing i don't think i've ever seen them at a grocery store around here so if you have any ideas that are you think are great for using them in the kitchen please share like peter mentioned we think of them as a cross between garlic and asparagus so we can cook them in olive oil salt and pepper and we've heard that they make a good addition to pesto which we love but if you have a specific idea or recipe please share in the comments because i am not very knowledgeable about this thing we grow as far as strawberries that's another crop we've been harvesting right now we've got two 24 foot beds of strawberries and one thing i would say we didn't do that great here is we didn't thin them very well they're very very thick in here strawberries take a lot of maintenance because they just send out runners everywhere we've also had a ton of rain as anyone who's followed us has known we've just been dealing with rain rain rain for the past week so one of the issues that we're having is because of all that rain i'll get a little closer and show you this but the uh there's a mildew that can come on strawberries and when they're not thinned you're going to get a lot of water down there so you really have to kind of harvest them every day we haven't been able to do that because it's been so rainy but they are super tasty and we grow mostly the june bearing variety we found that they do a little bit better here than the ever bearing variety just because no matter what type of variety they don't really like super super hot weather and so we've got a lot so one of the reasons why we have so many strawberries is because i love making strawberry jam and you need a lot of strawberries to make a lot of jam and we probably go through 12 to 20 half pints throughout the year so strawberry jam is the main thing i like to make the other thing i love about growing this many strawberries is i'm not spending 5.99 for a tiny little carton at the grocery store to go home and find that my strawberries are already half rotten this bed's pretty much all direct seeded so i've got radishes up here these radishes are getting way too big though so we obviously don't eat quite enough radishes so these usually get kind of woody in fact i'll cut this one in half and kind of show you that we'll see yeah actually not too woody usually you can see some kind of some areas of air gaps in here when it shows when it's getting kind of woody and not as as good other thing we have is this lettuce this is what we just kind of call cut and come again lettuce still very very soft the only real issue is the rain in that down low we're starting to get just kind of a little bit of brown kind of rotted type lettuce so it will take just a little bit more washing than normal we've got all of this dill here i mean just a ton of dill i don't think we'll ever go through this much dill but i think it'd be nice to dry it so basically this whole bed including the cilantro right up there we kind of just need to kind of mow it all down and then let it either come back up or you know like this mesclun mix is kind of like a spicy lettuce this one's already going to flower so we'll probably take that one out completely well that about does it for our harvest here on may 25th it sounds like because it's been our one you know not raining day in the past i don't know two weeks yeah that pretty much every single person in their ohio is on their mower right now or in their plane so we apologize if the sound was a little bit crazy but we're so excited about all of this food uh we got a lot of work to do and i have to figure out what i'm cooking for the next um two weeks if you guys have any recipe ideas with these types of foods let us know in the comments we'd love to hear from you guys happy gardening everyone