Early Summer Harvest in a Foggy Garden

When I teach at City College, we maintain a garden as part of the class. The site is sunny when there is sun, but often foggy, windy and kind of chilly, even in summer. I keep it up in the summer with the help of student volunteers, and thought you'd like to see a sampling of the early summer harvest. Here is a sampling of what was ready on a recent workday.

The beets are 'Bull's Blood', planted during the early spring class. This variety isn't quite immune to leaf miner, but gets much less of it than most beets. The carrots are 'Resistafly' from Nichols Garden Nursery, which resists the carrot root maggot. The cabbage is a 'January King', planted last very late summer, that decided to wait until summer to make a head. The greens with red tips are Magentaspreen, a kind of lambsquarters. The magentaspreen is good lightly steamed with a light drizzle of olive oil and a few drops of lemon. The beans are Scarlet Runner Beans, a climbing perennial bean that makes excellent green beans in cool summer locations.

This week, if I took a similar photo, I'd be showing some zucchini and purple podded beans. I will try to post another image after our next workday, so you can see.