FIRST HARVEST

 I quietly celebrated Lughnasad today by harvesting garlic, and some of our potatoes and beets for the first time.  Lughnasad is the first of three ancient Celtic harvest celebrations.  In Irish Gaelic, the word for August is lunasa named after the God Lugh who is associated with grain in Celtic mythology.

After an unusually rainy spring, we are relieved to discover the crops are surviving and are nourishing us despite the challenges they have faced.  Digging up potatoes is always such fun because you never know what lies beneath.  Scott managed to grow some very fine potatoes this year.  One plant gave us 9 spuds!  The technique of mounding the soil up the stem of the plant throughout the growing season really does increase the plant's production.    I harvested some nice bulbs of garlic as well, but we also managed to grow some duds as well.  A quarter of the bed was shaded by a tall spruce tree which we neglected to prune.  

The beets and peas are as fine as any I've ever bought at the Farmer's Market, which is a huge relief because I missed the market this Saturday.  It is strange to realize that I don't need to buy much there at this time of year because we have so much growing right in our backyard.  We have been eating salad pretty much every night and hardly even make a dent in the crop.  The chard was desperately calling out to be eaten so I made a chard and mushroom lasagna last night.  It truly was a homegrown meal.  The lasagna was made with a white sauce that I prepared with our very own goat milk.  Luckily we had lots of milk gathering in the fridge from our morning milkings because I also had to make fresh ricotta cheese.  What an easy cheese to make!  I remembered reading about the Barefoot Contessa's recipe for ricotta cheese on Gwynth Paltrow's blog GOOP so I googled it up (recipe here)and had it made in no time - which is good because I don't have much of that these days.......

The braised chard, drained, finely chopped and mixed in with homemade goat cheese ricotta.