Life's silly lessons: celery

Brian's first post...

This is our harvest season. Right before it gets too hot and all of our plants burn up. We tried some new items this year - including celery. We didn't know anything about growing celery; most importantly when to harvest.

This was our celery.


We called Karl, who was a farmer, and he explained that we had to pull the celery from the roots, clean the roots and then trim the plant as necessary. It took me 5 minutes of prying around the roots with a spade to finally get the thing up. Our table is 4 feet in diameter.

It was so overgrown, full of dirt, and deposits of insects that Christie did not allow me to clean it inside. So it was cleaned outside.

All of the larger stalks were as big a round as a silver dollar. We could only use new growth and chutes from the main growth.

We learned that celery that is too mature tends to be very tough and stringy. We have what seems like an infinity of tough and stringy celery. Grown from our back yard!


I made soup. Christie did not like the tough, stringy celery. It did not soften during cooking. The soup was chalked full of tough, stringy celery. I refused to throw it away and am currently on day 3 of celery and peanut butter for lunch.

What we've learned: celery is salty and especially so due to our highly salted water. We also learned that harvesting at the right time is advantageous. Next year we might skip the celery.