This has been a wacky year as far as the weather goes, with a late freeze and then some sweltering hot days this Spring will bring interesting results for what actually grows and yields. Our fruit trees have been sprayed twice now initially with dormant fruit tree oils early season and then again more recently with standard Orchard Spray. The trees look healthy but fruit show this is likely to be a low yield year as far as that i concerned, and already there are already signs of some bug dinged fruit. This years garlic yield looks to be as good as last (approx 60 head yield); I figure with garlic: for every 5 heads you keep you should reseed with another, and it keeps the rabbits moving away from the other garden plants.
Spring Garden Surprising Crop goes to the various planting of Indian Mustard. At first the baby leaves and yellow flowers/pistols made nice additions to spice up the garden reds and greens used in our house salads. I figured most of the plant would simply go to waste until I did some more Google-ling to uncover that this plant is also chalk full of healthy compounds, vitamins and minerals, plus being related to the Broccoli plant, this is a surprising relative. The Indian Mustard plants did not win on those merits alone, it still had to be cooked into something and for that we discovered the Pakistani dish Sarson-Ka-Saag. This year I had loads of delicious appetizer growing in the back yard serving no purpose other than garden beautification. Steam the finely chop greens before running them through a food processor and returning them to the strove to simmer and add the corn meal.
The Garlic Scapes are beginning to look impressive with their spiraling outward rotations and it will be any day now before the perfect opportunity is upon us for harvesting them scapes for making delicious Almond Garlic Scape Pesto!