Monday, July 14, 2014

Harvest Monday 7.14.14

It's Harvest time, again! Yippee!!!

I had a couple of weeks there I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever get back here to report a harvest again. But, here I am! Linking in from Daphne's Dandelions, don't forget to drop by and see what others are harvesting all over the world.

This week brought me - green garlic. It appears that yet again my garlic will not be making bulbs. So, I took a few of these for cooking. YUM... so fragrant and delicious. If I didn't like actually having storage garlic for use later in the year it wouldn't bother me to use this all the time!

This single garlic stem covered my 4' table from one end to the other. HUGE. The usable white part was over 20" long. So growth isn't the problem necessarily. It's hard to grow certain things in Florida, and for me - this is one of those things. Some gardeners still manage to grow it fairly well, but the bulb size is never overly large.

The other thing I've been harvesting is my avocados!
Oh, this makes me happy. I was afraid that like the peaches once the squirrels and rats figured out the fruit was there that it would be gone. However, apparently when they are not ripe they don't entice the little critters. That's good because we have a thing for all things avocado around here. These beauties make me a little less hostile towards the squirrels. Only  a little though. THey are still stealing my tomatoes, beans and anything else they can get their paws on.

Today's avocado will be put into a salad with cranberries and a poppyseed dressing.. Oh my - I can't wait!


Not harvesting these yet, but the promise is there. So far the pomegranates have never had issues with either bugs nor critters. Something tells me that the critters don't like all the thornlike stickers on the bush. This works for me, because they are another one of this families favorite things. From popping the arils like little candy treasures to juicing. Poms are well received here.

Currently there are 7 poms on that have swollen enough I am no longer concerned about them dropping. There are another 6 that look like they have set but the branch hasn't thickened at the base of the fruit so I'm still holding my breath for another week - 10 days on those.

This tree blossomed earlier in the year and only set 1 fruit at that time. It is blooming still even with these beauties on and growing.  It's a good news/bad news scenario really. It means that the single crop I could have had (that is normally a large crop) is not going to happen. But, it also means that these fruits that are setting weeks and even months apart will provide me with a drawn out harvest. In the long run I'd rather have the fruit on an as needed basis to prevent waste, even though I probably will not get enough to juice, reduce and freeze yet again this year.

I have another bush that sits right next to this one and it tried to bloom earlier in the year. Non of those set any fruit and I can only hope that it will try to bloom again this summer so that I still might get even more fruit. That bush is older than this one and has yet to give me any fruit. I think by next summer if it doesn't set I may need to replace it!

That's it for my harvests this week. Nothing spectacular, but it's nice to have something from the garden anyway. Hope you are harvesting well!

See you soon!

Barbie~

4 comments:

  1. I love avocados. It is one of those fruits that I buy here all the time. I wish I could grow it, but I'd need a really good greenhouse for that.

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  2. Interesting garlic. I'm sure you will only be able to grow certain kinds of garlic in Florida, certainly no hard-necks. Apparently artichoke and creole types might work well. Wish I had avocado and pomegranate trees in my garden. I remember walking around in the gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, with citrus and pomegranates hanging from the trees and views of pink clouds of almond blossoms at the base of the blue Sierra Nevada mountains. No wonder the Moors wept when they had to leave Spain. Just think, you have a little piece of paradise in your backyard, just slightly marred by hungry squirrels and noisy ducks.

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  3. Avocados & pomegranates...yum! I do love garlic but would probably settle for small bulbs or green garlic just to be able to grow those two.

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  4. I would love to be able to grow avocados. I guess in Florida you have to trade garlic bulbs for avocados, which sounds like a pretty good trade to me.

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