Harvest Monday, 8/10/20

 I've started the process of clearing out the garden. Squash bugs and harlequin bugs have arrived in droves, decimating the once pretty free range greens. I managed to clear out 4 beds on Friday with another 4 beds to go.

The cherry tomatoes are so full of water just washing them caused quite a few to split open. I've been making salads with tomatoes, cucumbers, and alfalfa sprouts that I've grown. The Telephone cucumbers are late to produce but the cucumbers are lovely, when their seeds start forming their flavor and texture actually improve.

Just a few large tomato types left, these mainly go on sandwiches. I've started the process of removing the cages and plants.

Black Cherry has finally started sweetening up, they've been strangely sourish which I suppose could be from a cooler than usual early summer. Really, all the cherries have been on the sour end, except for Sungold and Juliet.

I made some more zucchini hash. Shredded zucchini was mixed with shredded cheddar and chopped turkey lunch meat. Then a handful of the mixture was dredged in egg, then dredged in panko bread crumbs, and fried in a little olive oil. So light and crispy, these were served with macaroni and cheese. They also heat up perfectly in an air fryer, if you want to make a big batch of them.

I picked quite a few snap beans and little squashes while clearing out those beds, but didn't get any pictures. And the soil beneath the sweet potato vines look like it's heaving, hopefully lots of big sweet potatoes are hiding under there.

Harvest Monday, 8/3/20

There's a weird space time anomaly surrounding this year. It just seems never ending. I hope everyone is staying safe and taking care of yourselves mentally and physically. Now is the time to be extra kind to ourselves and to our loved ones.

Kale, free range greens, cucumbers, zucchini, fat green onion, and those slender greens stalks on the right are garlic chives, and a giant summer squash.

Tomatoes and summer squash.

We eat a lot of ramen soups or curry noodle soups with tomatoes, greens, squash, onions, and chives from the garden. We also make sandwiches with tomatoes, cucumbers, and sprouts.

We've gotten a tremendous amount of rain the last couple of weeks and the plants our suffering because of it. The only things doing well are greens and peppers. The greens especially, look vibrant and have had a surge of growth that I find astonishing. It's time to clear out the great majority of the beds, except the sweet potatoes, greens, and peppers will get to hang out awhile longer.

We are having a cooler and wetter than usual August, so it's probably the perfect time to get some lettuce, greens, winter radishes, kohlrabi, and a second planting of snap beans in the ground. I'll be putting off planting turnips and spinach because they're so sensitive to temperature spikes. And I've actually ordered onion and shallot sets for fall planting, which should arrive the 3rd week of September. I'm so excited to try this new experiment in fall planting.

Please join us for Harvest Monday as hosted by Dave from Happy Acres.

Harvest Monday, 7/26/20

Tomatoes have come on strong this week. There's 45 tomato plants in my garden with 15 of them being small or cherry types. We'd been talking about drying the garden produce this year, which is why there are so many cherry tomato plants. I told my husband two weeks ago that we needed a game plan worked out because they were going to start ripening en masse.

On Sunday we processed about 40 pounds of tomatoes which are in the drying tent with a dehumidifier as I'm typing this. My husband is a ceramic artist and he uses a similar setup to quick dry newly made clay pieces in preparation for a kiln firing.

We've actually eaten a couple tomatoes the week before, but I've been kind of overwhelmed by the garden to post pictures. It's the weeding. The weeds have been going to seed and I couldn't let that happen, so between torrential rain showers I've been weeding like an insane person.

More tomatoes were picked on Saturday but aren't shown here. The small and cherry tomatoes include Juliet, Sungold, Fat Cherry, Black Cherry, Gardener's Delight, Taxi, and Juanne Flamme. The large tomatoes shown include Green Cherokee which have a yellowish skin color although the interior is very green, Giant Australian, and Brandywine. We've been eating tomatoes everyday this week so not shown are Marianna's Peace, Carbon, Oaxacan, and Goldie. The standout of the large tomatoes was Marianna's Peace, unless I'm confusing it with another tomato, it was delicious with a distinctly salty flavor. And for the cherry's, Juliet is just lovely, nice firm meaty texture with a sweet flavor that reminded me of a good grape tomato.

Also, you can see where I avoided the squash and zucchini beds because of all the rain and then was greeted by massive squashes. Must not put off visiting the squash beds. Once the tomatoes are dried, we're going to dry the squashes as well.

I've had a couple good pickings of snap beans. The first picking, the snap beans were sautéed with strips of carrots in a little olive oil with salt, pepper, and dried herbs till they were caramelized with a good bit of color. Then I added chicken stock and cooked it down until most of the liquid was cooked off.

A picture of the second picking of snap beans, right before cooking. I'm only growing 3 varieties of beans this year, Merveille De Piemonte, Purple King, and La Victoire bush bean.

The second batch of green beans was prepared in a similar manner to the first but I added orange juice at the end, instead of chicken broth. Then finished it with a Pico Fruta spice blend that includes chili pepper and lemon peel.

The tomato bed with Giant Australian, Oaxacan, Carbon, and Brandywine are dying from disease. Most likely fungal because of the very wet weather we've had this year. I'm leery of using tomatoes from diseased plants, so am pulling that bed this week.

I've already cleared the lettuce bed and one of the squash beds. The plan is to plant peas, more bush beans, rutabaga, endive, and chicory in the three beds.

Please join us for Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at Happy Acres. A place to share what you're harvesting and the fun things you might be doing with your produce because eating goes hand in hand with gardening.

Crazy Times and 2019 Planting Lists

We've gotten 9 inches of rain in February, which is close to our record of 12 inches. Maybe this means we'll get all the rain out of the way, and things will dry out enough to plant early. Now, that would be amazing.

The plan is to have a smaller garden with less plants to give individual varieties more room to grow. Diseases were terrible last year with the wet weather, hopefully giving plants ample room will help with that.

Cherry Tomato List
Black Cherry
Fat Cherry
Indigo Blueberry
Red Grape (F1)
Sungold (Hybrid)
Sweet Apperitiff

Tomato List
Black Brandywine
Black Zebra
Brandywine
Celebrity (Hybrid)
Cherokee Green
Chocolate Stripes
Chocolate Prince
Croustralee
Dark Brandywine
Delicious
Flame or Hillbilly
Goldie
Granny Cantrell's German Red
Green Zebra
Jaune De Flamme
Marianna's Peace
Peach Blow Sutton
Peron
Pink Berkley Tie-Dye
Super Marmande
Yellow Brandywine


Sweet Pepper List
Ajvarski
Boldog Hungarian
Corno Rosso
Corno di Toro
Corno di Toro Giallo
Figitelli Sicilia
Melrose
Red Marconi
Sweet Happy Yummy (F7)

Hot Pepper List
Aji Angelo
Aji Golden
Guajillo
Kimchi

Harvest Monday, 7/2/18

June 25th was the first picking from the bush bean beds. The earliest and most prolific bean so far is Triomphe de Farcy beans, too bad it's the stringiest bean ever. The strings are so tough and difficult to get off they actually make my fingers sore. Thank goodness Landreth's Stringless is making up for it.

Dark Brandywine is the first large tomato I picked. (Berkley Tie-Dye would've been the first ripe but a critter ate half of it.) On the left are three Jaune Flamme tomatoes, they produce large trusses of fruit.

On June 27th I only got half the bush bean bed picked before it threatened to rain again. A mixture of Triomphe de Farcy, Contender, and Tendergreen.

I started picking the tomatoes early just to keep them from splitting too badly with all the rain we'd been getting.

The other half of the bush bean bed got picked on the June 28th. Mostly Landreth's Stringless and Derby.

In the back is a Berkley Tie-Dye tomato and a small Green Zebra.

Out of the 4 cucumber varieties I'm growing, only Salad Slicer and Heike have produced. The other two have yet to make female blooms.

On Sunday, July 1st, I harvested more green beans, cucumbers and tomatoes.

I mad a chicken, onion, and green bean dish yesterday using Aldi's Harissa Simmer Sauce and it was fabulous. Spicy and delicious over a bed of rice with fresh herbs and a dollop of homemade cucumber yogurt sauce. Yum.

A plate of homegrown Mrs. Burn's Lemon basil, Siam Queen basil, Gigante d'Italia parsley, and cucumbers with some store bought cilantro. This was served with the chicken and green bean harissa sauce dish.

We got 8 days in a row of heavy rainfall. The wind was so bad on June 28th it made me worry about a tornado. Lots of tree damage in the neighborhood and power went out for a little bit. But it looks like that stormy weather pattern has finally broken. All this rain means disease is running rampant in the tomato beds, and half the onions were lost. I've decided I'm done growing onions, it's a lot of work starting them so early in February only to have most of them die or not do well because of the amount of water we tend to get.

The bush bean bed will probably be done in another week or two, Gilfeather turnips will be directly sown in that bed. Broccoli and Brussels sprouts will get planted in the early Buhl sweet corn once it's done in few weeks. It'll probably be late before the Morado corn is finished so fava beans/broad beans probably won't be planted until October or November in those beds.

I might try a planting of peas along the fence in the Buhl corn bed. The only reason I've been able to keep up with the weeding this year is because the kiddo is vacationing with the grandparents. They've been going to the beach and out cherry picking, so lots of fun stuff.

Join us for Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres. A place where garden drama unfolds as gardeners share their trials and triumphs, as well as their weekly harvests.

Tomato Blooms and Potatoes Sprouting From The Soil

Pink Berkley Tie-Dye blossom. A few of the large fruited tomato plants are forming blooms already including Granny Cantrell's German Red, Peach Blow Sutton, and Jaune Flamme.

Black Vernissage cherry are very large plants, they're easily the largest in the greenhouse and they're all forming blooms.

Sun Gold cherry tomatoes are starting to form their trusses of blossoms. I also saw blossoms on Be My Baby cherry.

A few of the tomato plants have been showing signs of nutrient deficiency with pale spots that eventually darken. Tomorrow I'll feed them, but a bunch of them will need to be potted up soon.

This Jaune Flamme plant is the worst off for nutrient deficiency. Some of the pepper plants are actually very pale, which tells me they probably need to be fed.

The seed potatoes I just sowed last weekend have emerged.

I love the way potatoes push up the soil and finally break through. I think this must be Adirondak Blue but I can't be sure until the potatoes in the other planter pop up.

The purple sweet potato was a bust, it started showing signs of disease. Aw well, next time. I've begun rooting the Beauregard sweet potato slips.

My husband tilled the garden on Wednesday evening and we were planning to plant everything out the next day. But it dumped rain unexpectedly on Thursday, it was at least an inch and they're now predicting rain for the rest of the weekend. So it's looking like we will probably be planting mid-month just like last year.

Since planting is definitely delayed for a week or two that means the tomato plants will need to be potted up into quart containers the next couple of days.

Harvest Monday, 8/21/17

Monday is the day of the eclipse and we should have a good view of it here in Western Kentucky. I have to work today, but our supervisor has scoped out a good place to see it and we should be able to take a peak during lunch. People have been buying up all the eclipse glasses, I figure quite a few of them are planning to sell these items for exorbitant prices. Bottled water and bread has been bought out at stores, it's like Y2K all over again. Not sure how the eclipse is supposed to effect water service...

In other news, we have cut down all the tomato plants and cleared out their cages on Saturday. The plan is to till the garden in preparation for fall planting in the next week or two. It took less than an hour to cut down the plants and clear out the cages. There were lots of green tomatoes and ripe tomatoes still left in the garden, but I was ready to move on.

Everything listed below was picked on Saturday.

With my husband's penchant for speed during the big tomato cleanup, I did not get a chance to pick any of their fruit. I managed to get a handful gleaned from the ground afterward.

Some green ground tomatoes.

And lots of hot peppers were picked. This is a mixture of Anaheim, jalapeno, Hungarian Hot Wax, Lemon Drop, and Santa Fe Grande. None of the peppers were especially hot this year, probably because of a mild and extra long spring.

The peppers were under-performers this year. Numex Joe E. Parker an Anaheim type has consistently been unproductive the last 2 years with only a few peppers per plant, although the peppers can get huge. Numex Big Jim is much more productive for me.

The hot peppers will probably get made into pickles, and maybe I'll try freezing a bunch in the form of poppers.

Queensland Blue has massive leaves for a winter squash. We had lots of squash vine borers this year plus the ever present squash bugs. Actually there were lots of new and unusual stink bugs with the majority of whom I've never seen before. Queensland showed signs of vine borer troubles early on.

 And here's that telltale sign of a vine borer, a bit of "sawdust" at the bottom of the stem.

Yokohama was the most productive having produced 6 pumpkins. They're all in various stages of ripeness with even a tiny green one on the upper left.

Thai Rai Kaw Tok also only produced three pumpkins. I think all of the varieties grown this year were susceptible to vine borer damage.

Black Futsu only produced one pumpkin from 3 plants. Next year I'll mainly grow cushaws and butternuts which are supposed to be more resistant to borers. 

And the two tiniest Delicata squashes ever. They were definitely overrun by the other winter squashes, but I've grown them before and only ever get a couple of fruit.

I ended up canning about 500 pounds of tomatoes and giving away close to 500 pounds this year. This last week I've been playing the avoidance game with the garden. I just couldn't deal anymore. I canned enough quarts of salsa to last us years, then there's tomato juice, quartered tomatoes in their own juice, and green tomato pickles.

We ended up with 38 quarts of green tomato pickles. It was actually fun experimenting with different flavorings for the pickles and making vinegary syrups. I was going to wait a month or two before opening them up and giving our opinions on them.

Some thoughts on this year's varieties. All the tomatoes were early this year by a month and with lots of consistent rain and cooler weather the flavors weren't the most intense, but they were still wonderfully delicious. We were picking large varieties like Pink Brandywine and Black Brandywine by the last week of June. Smaller varieties like Taxi and Black Prince ripened the same week as Sun Gold.

The two latest varieties to ripen were Yellow Brandywine and Aunt Ruby's German Green. Yellow Brandywine is delicious and very productive, Aunt Ruby's is less productive but the flavor is outstanding a mixture of citrus, melon and good tomato flavor. But keep in mind, they set fruit late and ripen late.

Cherokee Purple and Pilcer Vesy are the least productive tomato varieties for us. I probably won't grow either varieties again after trying these last few years. A couple years we didn't even get a single Cherokee Purple tomato from their plants.

There were lots of scary giant spiders in the garden during the dry part of August. A couple female Black Widows with their round distended bellies and I even saw a smaller male black widow in one of the female's web. The male and female were actually found on the bottom of a winter squash, which is why I always check what's going on underneath those ground dwelling squashes.

But the most interesting spider is pictured down below. So be warned, it is a close-up of a gigantic spider. I was crawling between the tomato beds when I looked up and saw a massive web and this hanging from the middle of it.

Giant spider picture below...



Wait for it....



And here's the spider.

You can even see the tiny hairs on its bottom leg segments.

Please join us at Dave's Our Happy Acres to join in on Harvest Monday. A fun and exciting place where gardeners share their experiences in vegetable gardening.

An Epic Year in the Vegetable Garden

Apologies for not posting, but we have been having the best year in the garden ever. I have been gardening for over twenty years, and I have never seen anything like this. Yesterday I gave away 90 pounds of tomatoes between family, neighbors, and coworkers. And yet, there are still tomatoes on the counter. So far we have canned 44 quarts of salsa and 14 quarts of tomato juice.

I have even started picking green tomatoes for people to fry up, which I never do. The plan is to pressure can the rest of the tomatoes in juice and make some green tomato pickles. A friend of mine says she has canned so far, 130 quarts of snap beans and last year they had only canned 50 quarts. And it's not even the end of the season yet. People in our area are abandoning their gardens and telling neighbors to come pick what they want because they're done canning for the year.

Months ago I scheduled to be off the last week of July for canning because that's usually when tomatoes start coming in strong. Instead I'll be pulling out the bush beans since rust is moving quickly through the patch and rabbits are nesting there. And I'll be clearing out most of the zucchini and summer squashes, and the greenhouse.

So here's a few pictures of what we've been harvesting.

I ordered a Victorio food strainer to help with making juices and sauces, and found it much more efficient than a food mill.

The winter squash beds are inaccessible but a few are growing along the fence. I'm hoping there's lots of them hiding in their patch.

This year we're growing Queensland Blue winter squash, Black Futsu pumpkin, Thai Rai Kaw Tok pumpkin, and Yokohama winter squash,

We won't be having any melons this year, since they're all overshadowed by the massive tomato plants. And the leeks were squished by the rampaging zucchini plants, but maybe they'll recover once the zucchini gets pulled.