Broccoli Harvest

Today I harvested some of our broccoli. Honestly, I can say that our homegrown broccoli is really just about the same in taste as store bought broccoli. The biggest difference is that it was picked and cooked immediately by me, and it had no pesticides or herbicides sprayed on it. It didn’t have to travel hundreds of miles to get to our table…instead it was only fifty feet from the garden to the kitchen.
The temperature down here in Los Lunas, NM has been 105 degrees by 3:30pm each day. It shows no signs of letting up either. With the temperature getting all the way up to 90 degrees before 12:00pm each day, the broccoli can become stressed out, so harvesting it now before it has a chance to bolt is the best solution. If I planted it in a more shady spot, I could let the flower heads get bigger, and actually I am going to be leaving one broccoli to bolt so that we can get the seeds. After I cut three of the heads off, I discovered that there are already more new florets growing. (click on any photo to see full size and up close)

I know its hard to tell from the photo, but the bowl I put the broccoli in is a rather large bowl.

I checked my Brussels sprouts this morning and found that they have little heads starting to form at the base of each leaf.

Our first orange pepper forming on Rasta Row.

Simmi being her cutie pie self.

This is our red onion blossoming. It is from outer space…we’re convinced of it! This thing moves its head like its alive. If you go inside for an hour and come back out, it will have changed direction. I know its following the sun, but still…come on! making a 90 degree turn of its ‘neck’ is a little outrageous don’t you think? Directly to the left of the red onion plant eggplant. I counted the blossoms on it this morning and we will get 13 eggplants on just this one plant. The other eggplant is on the other side of the onion. I couldn’t get a really good photo of the fruit though.

Our beautiful dill.

Planted in this patch are pickling cucumbers, grey zucchini, regular summer squash, mammoth sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, honeydew melon, and snow peas.

Yesterday a good portion of the day was spent cleaning out the shed, getting our tools all organized and put away.

Originally we were going to use this shed as the central part of our chicken coop, but in our hot climate, we’ll be creating a better chicken coop for them. Yesterday it was 110 degrees in the shed.

My dad has been busy painting our fence and this weekend he’ll be painting our shed.

With temps getting over 100 degrees, our strawberries have suffered terribly. We had to resort to shading them or lose all of them. I think there are three strawberry plants that crisped so bad they won’t recover. Everything else is making a come back.

I’m forming our big garden right now in front of the house. I’ll take photos of that tomorrow. Yesterday we were busy with the shed, building up the pond sides and creating the big garden. I’ll be planting the following: