Sunday, August 23, 2009

The Great Quinoa Harvest

A couple weeks ago I told myself that my quinoa was probably ready to harvest, and come the weekend I should attend to my garden.

Well, I didn't.

Weeks go by, and I see my quinoa leaning more and more, and a greater amount of leaves had fallen to the ground.

This morning I went out to take a look at things and found something horrible! Some sort of bug had infiltrated my quinoa! I almost cried.



It looks like a dust mite of sorts. (I don't have any idea really, I'm just guessing.)

However, I freaked out, and decided to save the remaining quinoa while I had the chance. So, in my pajamas, I began the Great Quinoa Harvest.

You can see I had pulled most of the quinoa off of the plant in the foreground. The red plant was the one with all the bugs. It's still in the garden. I haven't dealt with it yet.

I decided to put it all in a paper bag. I still need to remove the leaves, rinse the quinoa, and then spread it out to dry before storage. I don't know when I'm going to do that. Right now it remains in the bag on my porch for the night. There were little crickets and spidies in there, and they need some time to get the heck out of my quinoa!


However, my quinoa has beautiful autumnal color which causes an excitement to stir within my heart for the advent of scarf season.


In other related news, my peanut crop is doing quite well. I think. I'm not exactly sure when to harvest them. I'm pretty sure that it has been the appropriate amount of time, but I think I need to wait until the plant turns yellow.

I think.

I'm so proud of all the protein I'm growing in my garden this year.

2 comments:

Kylie said...

Congrats on that quinoa! I just can't wait until you eat some. It will be so great!

In my mind, I had imagined peanuts to grow like peas. You know, pods-on-a-vine type deal. But it looks like they are hiding in the ground, because I don't see no stinkin peanuts.

I'll check again once you harvest them and have pictures to show me.

(my verification word is "emifilo." I'm pretty sure it's a spell of some sort. EMIFILO!)

Melanie said...

Kent and I think it is SO COOL that you grew your own quinoa. We really like eating it but have never been able to find the red kind in stores!