First harvest

Nature watered the garden while we were away at the cottage for a week, and we arrived home to a bushy green bounty. I don't think I can adequately express how pleased I am to have successfully grown something edible in my very own backyard. Not just edible, but delicious and plentiful enough to feed multiple people!

To celebrate, we invited a friend for dinner to share the harvest on Sunday night.

I picked enough chard to make a big salad with leftovers for several more (it's sweet and tender enough to eat without cooking). Leafminers left the leaves scarred, but they are still healthy enough, and delicious. We picked all the beans that were fully grown, and it was plenty for three people. The beans were a little past their sweet and tender prime, but still tasted garden fresh.

McPie tested the carrots by pulling up one, which turned out to be four (I didn't really spread my seeds well), and they were only bite-sized. We'll have to wait several more weeks for backyard carrots.

We rounded out the Harvest Dinner with some local fare from the market: duck breast and new carrots. Reading the Globe and Mail earlier in the day, Lucy Waverman's article about duck breast with cherry sauce in honour of the cherries appearing in farmers markets got us all excited. Alas, local cherries weren't available in our market yet; however, we were too set on our plan to veer from it... So we settled for Washington cherries, but felt that since our salad and beans came from a mere twenty feet from our kitchen (and the carrots and duck not much further), our karma was still in balance.

It was our first time cooking duck, but we will definitely do it more often as a treat. It was easy and delicious.

Other updates:

It is a robin in the nest after all, and she's spending a lot of time in the nest so we assume there are eggs. Other than our usual comings and goings, we're leaving the nest be... But McPie suspects that either he or Mother Bird will have a heart attack one of these days, from startling each other whenever the door is opened. Every time we step out the door, she flies frantically to a branch of the nearby maple, and watches us suspiciously.

The tomato plants still only have flowers, but the plants look healthy. My fingers are crossed and my hopes are high.