I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve written a blog post. The last one was six weeks ago. I will blame it on both the global pandemic that began in March and, a month or so later, the civil unrest that began with police in Minnesota who killed a black man by kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes before he died. Black people and many, many white people are fed up with the systemic racism in our society and have been protesting in the streets for months. Somedays, if all I manage to do is water the garden, I feel I’ve accomplished something. The events in our world have us all unbalanced, uncertain, on edge and caught in this weird limbo of a life suspended that is terrifying and surreal at the same time. None of us can plan for anything. So we do our best to get through each day.
Since my last post, we’ve definitely transitioned from spring to summer. Our spring spinach we enjoyed so much for so many weeks finally gave up and bolted. But not before I harvested a ton of it. I blanched and froze what I know we couldn’t eat quickly enough.
I chuckle when I look at the picture above because all the spinach in that photo amounted to 3 cups of spinach in the end! A lot of harvesting, washing, blanching and freezing for 3 cups. When I think of how many batches of spinach dip I’ve made for gatherings over the years, I imagine how much spinach farmers have to grow to sell even 1 frozen 8 ounce block of spinach at the grocery store. It’s got to a massive amount of land and spinach plants. Because all that spinach reduced to this…
I feel good about the spring crops we grew and harvested. Besides the spinach, we grew and used our lettuce. Our radishes and beets turned out really well. And we are still enjoying the carrots we planted in the spring.
We are on a second planting of lettuce, beets and radishes now. None are ready to harvest yet but they are coming along nicely.