yard to table

We had a bumper crop of hops this year and today we enlisted our beer-brewing friends to help us with our harvest. We only got about half of them off the vines before giving up, but we still managed to fill at least one whole 50-pound chicken feed bag full.

The peppers and volunteer tomatoes are doing pretty well on the roof this year. It gets nice and hot up there. We need to come up with a more attractive and durable cold frame set up next year — the wind shreds the old brittle plastic and makes a mess.

The hops are flowering and climbing all over the parapet, they seem to more than double in size every year! Next year will they cover the whole house? We promised to ship my cousin’s husband a box of hops once they’re ready (in exchange for the Meyer Lemons we got from them this spring in Berkeley). It’s almost time! It’s going to be a very full, and very fragrant, box.

Down on terra firma, I checked on my lettuce seedlings and it seems a few have fallen victim to a frisky digger (Bizzy? a cat?), so I’ve spread some more seed, put out Sluggo, and put our little vegetable tent over them.

The warm evening was great for cleaning up the veggie beds up front. I hacked back the parsley, while Nathan trimmed the rhubarb and harvested a huge pile of stalks for making jam. This freed the green onion starts and fennel from its smothering leaves. We also tackled the fava beans, harvesting another grocery bag’s worth of beans that we now need to husk, and pulling up plants that were done producing. The pile of compost for the chickens is huge!

I also hacked back the kale, cabbages, and collards - making room for the tomato that I planted there two weeks ago. I’ve left a few plants so I can harvest the seeds once they’ve dried out. The pile of strawberries (and a handful of tiny alpine strawberries and blackcap raspberries) that I harvested were a great addition to dinner.

In the new plant department, one of the hubbard squash seeds has sprouted, and one tiny basil, but I couldn’t find any other seedlings poking through yet. 

The hops have reached the roof! The Cascade hops are on the left (facing the house), the Chinook hops are on the right.

Garden tour, including our new back fence, built by Josh of Rove Custom, our hops making their way up the house, and the fava beans.