Harvest Fridays

Every Friday at the Seattle Youth Garden Works garden is harvest day; since we have the farmers market on Saturdays.  This Friday we harvested SO MUCH stuff.  If you are in Seattle, go buy produce from the youth!  My group was working on picking radishes, lemon cucumbers, green beans, basil, and kale.  It was great to harvest alongside of the youth because it gives you some time to talk to them and form relationships.  It was also great to teach them how to pick each specific thing; they were very into it and asked lots of questions and were excited to harvest.  They were amazed at how much food we had at the end.  The green beans we were picking were huge! and we fill up like 3 big buckets just with beans.  It really was a great day and these youth that have come from all over the city and have all different circumstances worked together amazingly.  It was also cool to see some leadership potential in a few of the youth.

Our zucchini has been growing so fast that we can't pick it quick enough.  Last Friday, we harvested any zucchini that was even close to being ready.  But even the really small ones grew so fast.  We picked three yesterday that looked like this:

Nobody buys these MEGA ones at the farmers market, so they let the staff take them home.  I was excited.  I cut it up in chunks and froze most of it.  But I used a bit of it to make an amazing vegan zucchini cake:

I was gonna wait until my roommates got home since they all work on Saturdays and share it with them.  But it just looked and smelled so good when it came out of the oven that I munched on a little piece:

Anyways, not including the giant zucchini I got to take home for free (that was just a bonus), it was a great harvest day at the garden.  All of the youth are really great.  Each one has so many great things about who they are.  I have begun to connect with a few of them as we work in the garden.  I am looking forward to getting to know them more and LEARNING so much from them.