First Harvest & Herb Storage

Is there anything more delicious than food fresh out of the garden?  If there is I don't know what it is.  Oh wait, chocolate cake!  I don't have any chocolate cake so I guess I'll have to make do with some delicious produce!  I acquired a good variety of items in the first major harvest of the year.

Let's start with the dill.  I finally had enough with my dill bush (yes it was the size of a small bush) so I cut it all down.  It was stifling some of the other nearby plants because it was so big and had to be dealt with.  After I stripped all the tender dill sprigs off the branches I packaged them up into handy little dill rolls.  This is a technique that a friend of my Mom's (the very same one that gave her the Pierogie recipe) passed on to her.  Place the dill in the centre of a square of plastic wrap and roll it up like a burrito.  Pop it in the freezer and when you want to use it just unwrap a section and slice it.  When the dill is frozen it is very easy to finely chop the amount you want!

 

The parsley is growing like a weed and I literally can't keep up with cutting it off.  I swear it doubles in size every day.  I think I could cook with fresh parsley every day for the next 6 months and not run out.  To store the parsley, I rinse it off and stuff it into sandwich bags and freeze it.  Once it's frozen I find most of the parsley will crumble up just with the bags being moved around in the freezer, which is handy because I don't have to chop it when I want to use it!

The chives, basil and rosemary are getting to the end of their days so I collected most of what was left from them.  I left a few rosemary and basil branches in the garden and I'll cut the chives back to the ground in the fall.  All of these herbs just get popped into sandwich bags and stored in the freezer.  Chives are a perennial herb that will come back year after year and require little to no care.  I actually have a cluster of chives that are growing in an old pot, in direct sun, without any water (other than rain) for the last 2 years.  Talk about hardy!

The green onions, carrots and beans and chugging right along and producing well.  Roman loves to walk around the yard while he munches on a fresh carrot.  Who can blame him!  He's also been known to make off with a bean or two that he usually ends up sharing with Bronx.  Again, shock shock.

I am completely flabbergasted with the performance of two of the plats in the garden, and for good reason!  The strawberries have surprisingly produced a ton of fruit for us.  The birds must have had their fill of Saskatoons because they haven't touched the strawberries at all.  It may also help that Bronx has snagged a few of the robins out of mid air....  With the two plants we have, every couple of days we all head out to the garden after dinner for our strawberry dessert.  So good!  Probably most surprising of all are the peppers.  Not only are the peppers growing, but they are enormous!  We have been watching these guys patiently as they grow bigger and bigger.  Finally we decided it was time to pick the chili peppers.  I've used them in a few dishes and was very impressed by the flavour as well!  A few of the bell peppers were picked by a certain small person, who then proceeded to bite right into them, but the rest I'm letting grow until they can grow no more, which might be soon!

The tomatoes have grown into a small forest which is starting to produce delicious grape sized tomatoes.  The plants themselves were up to a whopping 6-7 feet before we had a nasty windstorm come through that pushed the higher branches down and wound them into the lower ones.  I've managed to string most of the branches up on the fence, but we did lose a few.  Luckily a few of the plants are growing like vines up the neighbors fence and that seems to have saved them from the damaging winds!

 

To see how I built my garden click here!

To see where this garden was 1 month ago click here!