Spring harvest is almost fully complete save a few more beets to pull and snap peas to pluck before the vines and roots are removed to make way for the last of the summer vegetable seedlings. This year's spring yields were tops with lots of winning cultivars I'd never tried. Aside from problems with leaf miners in my chard, beets and spinach, which I managed fairly well by removing bad leaves and fresh eggcases, there were no significant pest or disease problems. Here are a few spring favorites from the 2010 season:
There's a surprising amount of variability in radish flavor, particularly with heat, and I tend to like them sweet and mild. The traditional
French breakfast radish , 'D'Avignon', offered everything I wanted in a radish. Even the large ones remained crisp, mild and sweet. They were also beautiful and looked great on a crudité tray. Sometimes we just ate them sliced with fresh buttered bread, salt and pepper. My daughter even liked them.
After just 20 days I was harvesting baby 'D'Avignon' radishes.
I grew two different snap peas this year, the traditional 'Sugar Snap' and the dwarf '
Sugar Daddy.' Of the two, 'Sugar Daddy' was far superior. It's compact vines produced tons of crisp, sweet, virtually stringless peas and no trellising required. They wayyyy out produced 'Sugar Snap.' No more tall snap peas for me. The short size allows little children to pick the peas too.
'Sugar Daddy' sugar snap peas are perfect for small garden spaces. They stay short but offer high yields.
Tender greens are always a big part of the spring garden. Of the five lettuce cultivars I grew, a few were clearly superior in output, texture and flavor. Romaines (cos-types) are my favorites because they're less delicate than leaf or bibb lettuces, and they have a pleasing crunch. A friend gave me some of her '
Tintin', a dwarf romaine, and it was very crisp and flavorful. The heads matured faster than larger cultivars too. The classic '
Red Romaine' had thinner, gamier tasting leaves that my husband really liked. The very large, fully mature heads had crispy hearts to balance the less crisp outer leaves.
I took this shot in the late-day sun, so it's not as nice as I'd wish, but it shows healthy rows of 'Red Romaine' and 'Tintin' romaine lettuces and 'Melody' spinach.
Of the two beets I grew, '
Chioggia' and 'Johnny's
Golden', the 'Chioggia' beets germinated better, grew better and matured earlier. They had a nice sweet taste, and their red and white candy-striped color was very pretty on the plate. We tossed them in olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted them for salads. Its young greens also make a nice addition to salads.
'Chioggia' beets have beautiful color and don't stain fingers and clothes like standard reds.
Spring of 2010 had perfect weather for kohlrabi. I favor the purple '
Kolibri' because its vibrantly colored, flavorful and has to get pretty big before it becomes woody. I only planted 20 plants, and we've been eating them nonstop for a week. My German husband creams kohlrabi just like his father did. He peels and cuts the bulbous vegetable into cubes, boils the cubes until tender, makes a butter-based roux he seasons with salt, pepper and nutmeg, uses the kohlrabi water for the sauce rather than cream or milk and mixes it all together. Delicious!
Just look at the color of 'Kolibri!' It may not hold hold its color when cooked, but it's lovely in the garden.
The two varieties of spinach I grew included the heat-tolerant
Italian heirloom, '
Gigante d' Inverno', and All-America Selections winner, '
Melody.' The most vigorous and texturally nice was '
Melody.' It had larger, more tender, ruffled leaves that tasted great fresh or cooked.
I like my arugula hot and spicy which is why I grew the sharper-tasting, dwarf, Italian variety, '
Sylvetta.' And even though it was sold as arugula, it looked so different I questioned its identity. A little bit of research told me
'Sylvetta' is actually
wallrocket (
Diplotaxis muralis) rather than true arugula (
Eruca vesicaria). Aside from stronger, hotter flavor, wallrocket grows and bolts a bit faster than arugula and produces yellow flowers on relatively short stems, while arugula produces purplish ivory flowers on very tall stems.
Now to get the last of my beans and pumpkins planted. The full heat of the summer has arrived and is here to stay for a while. No more cool season veggies until more temperate fall weather descends.
