Harvest Monday, 8/5/13

Tuesday's harvest: Eggplant, zucchini, and summer squash are really starting to coming in and we are still getting a few cucumbers although the plants look like they are on the downward slide into oblivion.

This is from the same Tuesday picking, more summer squash and zucchini. Look how the overgrown squash on the right look like shmoos, those wonderful mythical beings who love to be eaten (they were not counted in this weeks weigh in).

Friday and Saturday's harvest: Tomatoes were picked along with fresh hot peppers which were canned into 16 jars of salsa on Saturday, the jars are 3/4 of a quart so about 12 quarts total. Plus the 2 quart jars in the fridge were refilled for cooking and immediate consumption.

Sunday's harvest: A handful of Red Noodle yard long pole beans, okra, a single cucumber, and all manner of eggplants. The little round eggplants are a bit different then normal eggplant, they have a firmer texture perfect for soups and simmered coconut curries.

The garden is looking very overgrown and crazy messy. Pictures will be shared later this week. Shield shaped squash bugs are all over the eggplants, tomatoes, and pole beans. There are swarms of flea beetles amongst the eggplants. And vine borers have decimated a few winter squash vines. It has been raining too regularly for me to dust the plants with diatomaceous earth but something will have to be done soon.

I have been thinking about a fall garden in an abstract way, I don't know if I'm up for it. Maybe if the garden was flagging but there is so much canning and processing to be done. Pickled okra and hot peppers, dried eggplant, and maybe some tomato sauce are planned for the future.

This week's harvest:
17.89 pounds tomato
13.07 pounds eggplant
6.90 pounds zucchini
3.66 pounds summer squash
3.57 pounds cucumber
2.47 pounds hot pepper
0.79 pound okra

Totals: 48.35 pounds vegetables

Please join us for Harvest Monday hosted by Daphne's Dandelions.

Harvest Monday, 7/29/13

Monday's harvest: 36 pounds of tomatoes and 8 pounds of Hungarian Hot Wax peppers picked on last Monday became 25 gorgeous quarts of canned salsa (23.66 liters). Plus there's 2 more jars in the fridge for cooking and eating with chips. Yay! Salsa!

It took 2 days to can that much salsa. Whew, am I tired. There's still a ton of hot peppers in the freezer, so I might have to can more salsa in a few weeks. And there's even more growing on the plants which may just end up as pickles.

Tuesday's harvest: A zucchini that grew huge overnight. It must have swelled with the torrential rain, without the tomatoes it looks like a baby cradled in a basket. I also went through the garden looking for tomatoes that were missed on Monday, the greenish ones are Big Zebra and are actually nice and ripe.

Saturday's harvest: Cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, and a gigantic pile of okra! The green little orbs are actually round eggplants, which I've seen my great aunty use in Thai coconut curry soup.

On Sunday I started a 20 day sweet pickle recipe! It took every cucumber I've been collecting for 2 weeks to fill this gallon jar (3.8 liters), and yet there's still room. Next time I won't give away so many cucumbers.

I also picked some pole beans on Friday and Saturday but the husband immediately sauteed them for dinner with onion, garlic, chicken stock, and a little sugar till caramelized. Which he served with pork cooked with salsa one day and chicken cooked with salsa the next, served on rice. Delicious.

This week's harvest:
43.77 pounds tomatoes
8.02 pounds hot peppers
3.96 pounds zucchini
2.90 pounds eggplant
2.72 pounds cucumber
1.88 pounds okra

1.03 pounds sweet peppers

Totals: 64.28 pounds of vegetables

Please join us for Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions where wildly obsessive gardeners share their stories and weekly harvests.

Harvest Monday, 7/22/13

About 20 pounds of tomatoes were picked on Monday, last week. They went directly into the fridge, a deposit towards this week's salsa making extravaganza.

I ran into the garden Friday to gather everything that was getting much too big. Lots of cucumbers, giant zucchini, yellow summer squash, and okra. The okra at the top were too woody and had to be discarded.

I'm a little late for Harvest Monday, a tradition created by Daphne's Dandelions where gardeners share the past week's harvest.

It rained hard all day Sunday and throughout the night which spells big trouble for ripening tomatoes. I work long shifts so was unable to get out into the garden to save the tomatoes, by Monday morning yesterday a lot of the tomatoes were split open and there were even a few slugs sucking on the fruit. There were 36 pounds of salvageable tomatoes, and I went ahead and picked 8 pounds of sweet peppers since some of the plants had been knocked down by the deluge and were liable to get sun scald.

Then I got busy canning salsa, since tomatoes that split open when they are ripe can spoil quickly. I was only able to can two batches yesterday which equals 8 quarts of salsa. Hopefully with my husband's help we can get through 16 more quarts tomorrow.

I have to say this year's salsa is outrageously delicious. The flavors are so complex, bright and sweet with an undercurrent of fruity spicy smokiness, which is probably due to the huge variety of tomatoes and hot and sweet peppers used.

This week's harvest:
20.6 pounds tomatoes
5.76 pounds zucchini
4.52 pounds cucumber
3.14 pounds crook neck summer squash
1.29 pounds okra
0.98 pounds straight neck summer squash

Total: 36.29 pounds of vegetables

Harvest Monday, 7/15/13

Tuesday's harvest: zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, and okra. Cucumbers are good in stir fry they add an interesting and refreshing flavor, my grandmother stir fries cucumbers with pineapple.

Wednesday's harvest: hot peppers, tomato, zucchini, and eggplants. The tomato is Berkley Tie Dye, it has a good tomato flavor and weighed 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg).

The Ma Zu Purple eggplant measures over 14 inches long, it is very tender with a sweet mild flavor.

Friday's harvest: yellow tomato, bitter melon, pole beans, summer squash, cucumber, eggplant. The first yellow Kellogg's Breakfast tomato has a very mild flavor and good texture, sadly though it was eaten before making the weigh in.

Sunday's harvest: The biggest zucchini yet and more eggplants, summer squash, and cucumber.

12 pound (5.4 kg) mixture of jalapeno, Hungarian Hot Wax, and Santa Fe hot peppers were harvested in preparation for a salsa making extravaganza next week. The peppers went directly into the freezer, hopefully that wasn't a mistake since they are going to be canned in the near future. And the tomatoes seem to be ripening quickly which I will be amassing in the fridge.

The rabbit is definitely still hanging around the garden, I found a Thai Long Green eggplant nibbled on in 5 different places. The rabbit doesn't seem to like eggplant too much since it looks like it was taking tasting nibbles, and no other eggplants have been chomped on. Some of the eggplant plants are chest high already. But they may have been spaced too closely together, I am definitely having trouble reaching the middle row.

This week's harvest:

12.2 pounds peppers

6.20 pounds zucchini

4.45 pounds eggplant

3.98 pounds cucumber

2.57 pounds green beans

2.48 pounds yellow summer squash

1.57 pounds tomato

0.40 pound bitter melon

0.28 pound okra

Total: 34.14 pounds of vegetables (15.5 kg)

Please, join us at Daphne's Dandelions where garden enthusiasts share their harvests successes as well as trials and tribulations.

Harvest Monday, 7/8/13

Tuesday's harvest: green beans, eggplants, zucchini, cucumber, and tomatoes.

Sunday's Harvest: cucumbers, zucchinis, yellow summer squash, bell pepper, and yard long asparagus beans.

This week the first tomatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash were picked. On Saturday, I actually picked a summer squash and 3 more tomatoes that went unphotographed and unweighed, the tomatoes quickly went into a pile of bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwiches just like the first tomatoes that were picked earlier in the week. So good.

I have been trading green beans and other vegetables for country eggs and barbecued chicken. A coworker gave me a couple pounds of blueberries for a very minimal cost, so I was planning to give him some salsa. Lots of good food have been a direct result of the garden.

Hopefully the tomatoes will start ripening in mass quantities because I am planning to take the last week of July off to do some serious salsa canning. The hot pepper plants are laden with fruit, we are just waiting for the tomatoes to color up.

This week's harvest:
5.69 pounds green beans
1.85 pounds eggplants
2.25 pounds zucchini
2.26 pounds cucumbers
0.56 pound yellow summer squash
0.86 pound tomato
0.10 pound bell pepper
0.08 pound yard long bean

Total: 13.65 pounds of vegetables

Please join us at Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday where gardeners share their blogs and what they're harvesting every Monday.

The First Ripe Tomatoes and Cucumber with Lots of Eggplants

A basket with almost 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of produce including green bean, tomato, eggplant, cucumber, and zucchini.

Today we got the first tomatoes and cucumber! I also spent the morning picking clean the bush bean bed.

The Paul Robeson tomato plant gave the first ripe tomatoes, my husband was helping me stake the same plant and 3 little green tomatoes got knocked off. You can see the two oval Applegreen eggplants in the back of the basket, then a Bangladeshi Long and a Thai Long Purple eggplant to the far right.

The first cucumber of the season belongs to the Japanese Long variety. Training the cucumbers up bamboo poles is working very well, I love seeing them dangling in the breeze. A nice long zucchini was also harvested today.

The bush beans got away from me because I was too busy over the weekend to do much except a little hand pollination in the garden, so the snap beans were a bit plump when they got picked today but are still tender and delicious. All the varieties produced exceptionally well, except for Royal Burgundy. The Royal Burgundy plants are tall and lush and were heavy with blossoms but the blossoms did not set very many beans, I was lucky to get 2 or 3 beans per plant.

The rabbit seems to love the Blue Lake 274 beans, I found lots of munched bean remnants today. Both Blue Lake and Royal burgundy are smooth bean varieties, which makes cleaning them a lot easier than the downy beans like Romano and Tendergreen. But I think I prefer the flavor of the downy fuzzy beans compared to the smooth snap beans.

The bush bean bed was pretty much picked clean today, so I am going to fertilize them and see if they will give a second flush of beans after some rest.