Today brings us our first two cucumbers, first French fillet beans, first tomatilloes, and first jalepeno. The two tomatoes we picked came as damaged goods but still tasted great. The black prince tomato had nibble marks and the San marzano tomato was suffering from end blossom rot as so many seem to in the perrenial plot. Need to figure that one out.

It has been hot and no rain for a few weeks with little in sight.

Our first tomato. A Black Prince. Strangely, it seems to be the first by a long shot. It might be as much as a week before we see our next one ripen.

Three quartes of the perrennial plot is now weeded and planted! We finished off the left side with fillet, fava, and soy beans along with a patch of sweet corn.

Yea! The tomatoes seem to have suvived the drop in temperature the past few days!

Impressed by a garden neighbor’s 2009 early greens harvest, we made sure to plant our own in February.  As a result, we have been harvesting chard, collards, kale, and spinach for over two weeks.   We have even had a harvest of broccoli and mesclun.  Each day we have been incorporating our garden greens into at least one of our daily meal.  This has given us quite the opportunity to play with new recipes while enjoying our tasty veggies.  Here are some highlights from this week’s menu:

Collards:
Collard Frittata.  from NY Times (the left over sauce I used to replace the diced tomatoes in the Kale Soup recipe)

Kale:
Lentil-Kale Soup.   from The Ordinary Vegetarian/101 Cookbooks YUM!!!

Chard:
Tofu & Swiss Chard Stacks.  from MyRecipes.com/Cooking Light

Spinach:
Spinach-Broccoli pizza with homemade mozzarella

Lots going on at the farm today. From the first alpine strawberry flower to the sprouting of the white turnips as well as the Jacob’s cattle and great northern beans it has all been good news.

We also planted a row of fava beans as an experiment and more sunflowers behind.

Kale, collards, and spinach

The kale and spinach have really taken off. The kale so much so we had to transplant some and give away others to our neighbors.

Success! Dried Edamame (soy bean) from the bulk dried foods section sprout. We can finally plant rows and rows of the stuff economically.