Larry, Nice harvest and the log planter looks great. Now, you stop popping Madge's dreams about the purity of the food she buys, or she'll expect you to grow everything y'all eat and she'll just stop going to the store.

I drain off the worms when I cook the broccoli and throw them on the compost pile before my family can see them. Our chickens won't eat cooked worms. I wonder why. I'm noticed our chickens are getting spoiled and won't eat lots of stuff that they used to eat. They're getting very old and picky apparently.

I have broccoli and cabbage to harvest today but seem to lack the energy and motivation to go out and do the harvesting. I've been working really hard all week to bust up the dirtcrete in the back garden before the rain gets here. It is all done, but now I'm too tired to go out there and sow seeds into it. I need to take a nap or something because that dirtcrete-busting has totally used up all my gardennig energy and enthusiasm.

Dawn

That is really beautiful and the harvest is splendid!

your planter is gorgeous!!!

It was always us kids' job to wash the broccoli and check for worms before we cooked it. Fun. Fun. It was also my job to wash all the greens to get the grit off before we cooked them. I apparently didn't have the patience for it...I would get a lot of complaints ;) But mom would complain if I washed each leaf under running water!

I am so glad you came back with this picture. I am going to show these to my son. I love this log planter.
Nice broccoli too. I am going to harvest onions and swiss chard later, my first of the season.
kim

we took our final harvest of broccoli today and I tilled the stalks under. Planted some sweet taters in the spot.

nice planter, not going to show the wife , I have too many projects now.

we soak our broccoli in salty water to kill the critters hiding in them.

This post was edited by busy1 on Sun, May 25, 14 at 2:01

I finished my harvest of broccoli and cabbage yesterday, so now those areas are freed up for a succession crop. Sweet potatoes are going into the raised bed where most of the broccoli and cabbage plants were because that bed has a hardware cloth bottom to exclude the pesky voles.

I also harvested about 300 harlequin bugs, which never have been a problem in my garden before, and hundreds if not thousands of harlequin bug eggs. I suppose I have the drought to thank for them. I had gotten a few dozen the day before, but was astonished at how many more I found. I had one or two last year (if there were more last year, I never found them). I was so freaked out by the harlequin bugs (they'll simply destroy a tomato crop the way stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs do) that I yanked out every kale and almost every Swiss chard plant because they were covered with them too. I normally can keep Swiss chard happy all summer, but don't even want it in the garden if it is going to attract harlequin bugs.

I noticed the heat has really taken a toll on the sugar snap peas and they have the beginning of powdery mildew at the bottom of the plants, so their days are numbered as well. I'm okay with that. I need their space for more melons. This morning I'll harvest the last of the sugar snap peas, yank out the plants, and then plant watermelons in that area. With all the rain that's in the forecast (yes, I am still patiently waiting for it to get here) for the next few days, I've been replacing cool-season crops with hot season crops that will carry us through the summer and which will, of course, give the grasshoppers lots of fresh new foliage to eat. It is an epic grasshopper year here already----the worst since 2003, and so far our 2013 rainfall is less than 2003's was for the first five months of the year. I think this week's rain will fix the rainfall problem, but the hoppers continue to hatch out daily and it is going to take a nuclear bomb or something to get them under control. I've been expecting them as their population cycles up and down over a period of years and has slowly been cycling up since 2011.

I love the log planter, but anything that resembles a log here quickly becomes a home for snakes.

Love the planter! What is the vining plant in it?
Broccoli looks yummy!!!

Sorie6, wife says that she thinks the plant is called Creeping Jenny.

Larry, if there were only two worms in a pan of broccoli that size, that IS a clean harvest. Granddaughters put up a pan about that size here today and only found two. A very good year here. Two-thirds of my broccoli heads are still in the patch. And on most years the biggest picking of the sugarsnaps comes over memorial day weekend, but not this year. Everything is at least a week behind normal thanks to late frosts and cool spells.