Harvesting some plants

Yesterday was pretty exciting- we got to harvest our first batch of mature pak choy, along with some radishes, and eat them!

Our pak choy (which I’ve also probably called bok choy- anyway, it’s the green-stemmed variety) is growing pretty densely, so it was definitely time to thin it out a bit. We collected about four bunches, and it really barely made a dent in the amount that’s remaining.

The other vegetable we collected was some radishes. These were planted in rows with the carrots, because radishes mature earlier and the carrots can continue to grow while the radishes are being harvested. They should probably have planted in separate rows, rather than together- I think the radishes overshadowed the sprouting carrots. The lighter plants in the foreground and in the curve in this photo are radishes; the darker ones are collard greens:

Here’s the day’s harvest. As you can see, the pak choy is the size of the “baby” bok choy that you’d find at grocery stores. The radishes could have been left in the ground if we wanted bigger roots, but we wanted to clear them out of there to make room for the carrots which are starting to come up. Plus we eat the greens, and clearly these are some happy greens. I think I’d like to get a cute basket with a handle to harvest this stuff- clearly the clamshell arugula container we were using wasn’t big enough, and the canvas bag we put the overflow in got pretty muddy.

The misome is also ready to be harvested. We’re really curious to try this new veggie for us, which we picked because it was fast-growing, and there’s really no way to go wrong with a stir-fry veggie like this. Though I suppose there’s some chance that it will get bitter if we leave it too long. Maybe we’ll try this later this week.

So that’s the harvest for yesterday. Last night, the pak choy went into stir fry with garlic (yum!). Today, the radish greens will be cooked and go into a pinto bean dish. We might just eat the radish roots or make a quick Japanese-style pickle with them. And of course Noe got to sample both types of leaves.