harvest

the leaves on the edamame were starting to turn yellow. most of the pods looked ready to harvest, so i clipped all of the plants at their bases, and stripped the pods off the stems. next i boiled the pods for 5 minutes, dried them in the salad spinner, bagged them and put them in the freezer. we ended up with a little over 5 lbs total, which turns out to be 3 full gallon size freezer bags. each plant had between 7 and 16 pods, with the average being around 10. most of them were fat, and ready, but a few seemed over the hill, and some were tiny, but still yummy. i was amazed at the large amount of biomass (of leaves and stems) compared to the small amount of edamame pods.

clip


strip


boil


bag & freeze

cosmo ate a mess of 'em yesterday. it's one of the only vegetables he truly loves, so i am thrilled to have a freezer full of home-grown.



since soybean roots fix nitrogen, i left them in the ground to enrich the soil. soon i will turn the bed and plant some fall crops like lettuce, spinach & arugula. i hope to build some sort of a cold frame for over-wintering some chard, kale and maybe a few hardy herbs. i'll also be planting some garlic in october.

edamame!

we harvested our first handful of edamame pods last night, and promptly par-boiled and ate them. so delicious. sweet, nutty and fresh. i told carl i didn't think i'd ever had edamame that was not previously frozen. cosmo kept asking for more. luckily, there's plenty more out there. they need a few more days to mature, and then i think i will harvest them all at once, farmer-style, instead of hand picking each and every pod that looks ready. i had to cover them with floating row covers when i discovered rabbits camping out in there on a regular basis. it's not pretty, but those beans underneath sure are.



i dug up a carrot and found that indeed, those lush, green, feathery plants do have bulging orange roots in the ground. seems they need a bit more room to fill out, so i did some thinning. i thought cosmo would be really into the carrots. i was wrong.



our pole beans were incredibly successful, and are still producing. they strike a dashing figure in the garden too, on their too tall tee-pee poles.



we've enjoyed a crazy sweet and plentiful harvest of cherry tomatoes, and those brandywines are gorgeous, and yummy. let's hear it for heirlooms!



there's a section in one of my cook books called the beautiful tomato salads of summer i think i need to look that one up.