Harvesting gems

The past week has been very hot and dry.  The sky has been clear blue, with hardly any dot of cloud.  And rain is not expected to fall any time soon.  Naturally, the grass has turned brown and dry and we have had to make sure our plants in the garden are well watered.  

The balcony gets extremely hot during the day as well, since it gets the full blast of the afternoon sun that can shine and heat up the room for up to 7 hours.  I've had to water my plants there twice or even three times a day.  It's amazing how dry they can get in the heat.  The poor plants will droop and wilt if it gets too hot so I have to open up the windows so let the cool wind in and the heat out.  

However, with all the sun were having, the vegetables are doing well.  Lots of French beans and snap peas are ready to be harvested with even more tiny ones waiting to grow bigger.  The carrots are also growing well.  Their green tops are so bushy and we can see the carrots just beneath the ground getting bigger.  The potatoes are also starting to wilt and turn brown.

All that just means that our favourite part has come: harvesting!  Yesterday, we harvested the first row of potatoes. From about 8 small plants, we got a hefty 3 kilos of spuds.  It's really fun to harvest them.  Just dig carefully around the plants and pull them out.  Some potatoes would be attached to the plant but the fun bit is to carefully search the soil and uncover the gems.  And to me, they are gems.  I just love potatoes.  The potatoes we got were very well formed.  Some are as big as my palm and some are as tiny as a grape.  

I made French fries out of some of them yesterday and mashed some to make the shepherd's pie we had just now.  They have a very nice texture - not too soft nor too firm.  I forgot which types of potatoes these were.  We planted several types but we didn't label them.  Doesn't matter though because I love all types of potatoes.  We still have some in the kitchen.  Maybe I will make potato bread tomorrow.  And after harvesting more, I will experiment with other potato recipes.  We still have four rows of potatoes to be harvested.  We will harvest them only when we need them so that they'll be nice and fresh.  

We have already started harvesting the beans and peas last week.  They are really good.  I love how they are so juicy and fresh.  For two years, they have been high yielding plants and they are quite easy to grow too.  Looks like we will continue to grow them again next year.  We only need to make sure we rabbit-proof them at the beginning since the rabbits love to eat the baby pea shoots.  Once they are bigger, the rabbits would leave them alone.

We also harvested a few carrots.  They are still thin so they can be left in the ground to fatten up.  This year, we planted a mix of white, purple and the usual orange carrots.  We can't really tell the colour until we pull them out of the ground.  This time, we got the white and orange ones.  They are really lovely.  I love fresh carrots just out of the ground.  They are sweet, crunchy and very carroty!  Again, we would only pick them when we need them.  I think I'll try making carrot soup when the weather gets colder.  Carrot soup with potato bread on a cold, windy day.  That would be lovely.