- plenty of Mibuna and Mizuna, used both as salad leaves and as a cooked ingredient (also known collectively as Japanese greens)
- a Pak Choi plant, used in a delicious Tom Yum soup (another plant succumbed to rot, cause unknown, while another is awaiting harvest)
- various "cut and come again" salad mixes (Mesclun and Provence mostly)
- the odd bit of Corn Sald (mostly thinnings; it's also known as Lamb's Lettuce or Mâche)
- White Turnip ('Tokyo Cross', an "F1 hybrid"), used grated in a 'slaw and simmered as a veg
- Komatsuna, used in a stir-fry (harvested whole, but the plant regrows; this is another "Japanese green")
- Radishes, used in a beef casserole (half a dozen mature 'French Breakfast 3' and a small Daikon along with another of the turnips)
- Baby Leaf Beetroot greens to fill out the salad bowl (sown densely and cropped sparingly, but before they get too big)
This doesn't include the various bits and pieces nibbled and sampled directly from the garden. Nor does it include the edible weed plants that sprouted up from the topsoil we bought in. On that side of things, I deliberately saved some Chickweed (Stellaria media) to grow in a container, while I just sampled some "Fat Hen" (Chenopodium album). Both are actually quite tasty (and nutritious, apparently). To my surprise, a foraging expedition also turned up a bunch of plum trees, with one of them outside a property boundary making for delicious pickings.
Many of the plants in my "official" harvest list above came from the first bed that I planted. For a variety of reasons (which I'll skip over), when I made my first seed order, plants in the cabbage family featured highly for me. It seems slightly ironic to me that I placed such a high priority on plants from the cabbage family. Not only was it the last crop that had been in the ground—and failed—over 20 years ago, but cabbages and their ilk were the foods that I most hated as a child.
On the other hand, I now know that "cabbage" doesn't just mean regular Irish cabbages boiled beyond the last inch of their lives. Even boiled cabbage (or fresh turnip that hasn't gone woody, for that matter) can be delicious if prepared well. Not only that, but the Brassica family includes a fairly bewildering array of cousin plants that are pretty far removed from standard Irish fare—as I discovered on browsing the seed catalogue. Some of these, like Pak Choi and Daikon, I've already had a chance to become familiar with, either through the odd appearance in supermarkets or in my travels in Asia, while others were still fairly unfamiliar though I may still have eaten them unbeknownst to myself. Mibuna, Mizuna and Komatsuna fall into the latter category. Strangely, I can't recall eating white turnips ever, either.
I mentioned that each of the beds in the tunnel is about 1.4m by 1m. They're actually a bit less, taking the size of the timber frame into account—more like 1.3m by 0.9m (which is roughly 12 square feet). Most of the crops above came from the one bed that I earmarked for cabbage-type plants this year. Between dense spacing (using the "square foot gardening" idea) and "cut and come again" plants (mibuna, mizuna and komatsuna, as well as some salad mixes), this little patch of earth has yielded quite a bit of produce and still has more to give this season. I think that the patch has reached a mid-way point ... an anniversary, of sorts.
On this kind-of-milestone, I'm happy to say that I harvested the one plant in the brassica family that I'd been looking forward to perhaps more than any other. It's pictured here:
That, friends, is a Chinese cabbage ('Wong Bok' variety). As I've got plenty of things to say about it, I'll follow up in the next post.
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