Early harvests

We have been harvesting salad for a couple of weeks already, really since the warm weather in early May tempted us to put our plants out and sow more seeds directly into the soil. By now the arugula has bolted and started to bloom, but I’m still picking leaves and finding them refreshingly spicy and not too tough.

We keep the salad crops damp with almost daily watering to try to keep them happy enough to produce more leaves and to delay flowering. The arugula flowers are not very exciting (unllike the bright yellow kale bloom) but I’m enjoying them too. The colour is a diry-white but the shape is interesting: four squared-off petals arranged in a cross shape. We will try to harvest seeds for our later sowing in July/Aug.

The first baby zucchini went into our salad last night. It was really very small and the slices almost disappeared in the mountain of various lettuce leaves. We also pulled our first kohlrabi out and grated it into the salad. It had a mild fresh flavour, adding an interesting soft texture to the salad. I really prefer it steamed, either warm with a splash of cream and herbs or cold in chunks or slices in a salad. One savoy cabbage also came out, not yet a firm head but with lots of tender leaves for adding to soup or raw in salad. The savoy is a beautiful cabbage with a deep green colour on the outside leaves and an outstanding bubbled texture.