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.

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.