Turnipaloosa!

Well, actually it's a radishapoloosa around here, but turnipaloosa flows so much better!

I have harvested one mound's worth of Daikon and one mound's worth of turnips over the past few days - they are cleaned and trimmed and in dated Ziploc bags in my bottom produce drawer. There's a lot - but based on my experience last fall I have about a month to do something with them all. So I've been researching what that "something" might be. Tonight's veggie dish - rainbow chard, leeks (both locally bought organic produce) and (my) daikon casserole in a thick, yummy cheese sauce. It's in a loaf pan in the toaster oven (I'm trying not to heat up the house with the big oven, now that the summer is here). I just took a taste, and it promises to be YUMMY! I cut the daikon very thin and sprinkled about a teaspoon of salt over them and let them sit for a few hours. That pulls most of the moisture out of them. They were actually quite palatable to me raw after that. It kind of tones down the spice. I suspect that in this killer sauce I made (with parmesian and feta) I won't even know I'm eating radishes.

The elephant in the room here, of course, is that it's only the 9th of June and I have two empty mounds; when I get the rest of the turnips and radishes, not to mention all those beets in the next week or two, I will have even more empty mounds...hmmm...what to do? I did some research about this this weekend and it seems that beans and squash are good crops to alternate in the same spot as turnips and beets (from which I extrapolated radishes....we'll see). So after work today I worked in some of the new bag of compost manure that I bought on Sunday, and planted some of the yellow crookneck squash in those two mounds. Hopefully that will do well. If the zucchini, cucumbers and melons are any indication, they will.

I also staked up my cucumbers today, and used some strips of old hose for the time being to get them growing up the poles. I also had to put a new stake off to the side of one of my tomato cages, because the plant is just getting HUGE and one of the branches was both dragging the ground and seemed to be breaking off the main stalk. I'm REALLY missing the camera for this comment...

What else? What else?

I'm starting to get a lot of little tomatoes. Something is eating my Ichiban eggplant leaves (they look like lace, though the plant generally looks healthy), and something is munching on the leaves of one of my cucumbers (I'm guessing from reading the other blogs that it might be slugs), which is why I decided to stake and train them up. I covered the split zuchinni vine with dirt and also used a smaller hooked stake to kind of lift it up off the ground a little bit and support it. I started to weed around the inside perimeter of the fence, which is just getting overgrown with grass and weeds. Uncovered a big black spider that scampered back down into a hole in the dirt. Yuck!

I still have weeds coming up through my straw. I think I need more straw. I have to admit that I love straw now.

Oh, and I potted cilantro, oregano and thyme that I bought at Lowe's last night.

All of which is to say, things are really hopping, and there's something to tend to every day. And in the evenings? Start planning the fall garden, of course!