Harvest Monday - 23 October 2023

Harvesting has slowed to a crawl, but we did get an interesting "first harvest": saffron!

Saffron crocus flowers

 Last year The Kitchen Goddess got a good deal on a box of 200(!) saffron crocus corms. She took over a small section of the fenced garden and planted them. They emerge in the spring, then go completely dormant for the summer. In fall, they re-emerge and start to flower. She's been keeping count, and so far has picked 21 flowers and carefully plucked out the red stamens, which dry for a few days indoors, then are safely locked away in an airtight container. Just a few stamens drying will perfume the kitchen.

She also did a nice picking of raspberries, which have slowed down, but this harvest weighed over 1.5 pounds.

Fall raspberries

As for me, I picked a good quantity of habanero peppers, the group on the right below. On the left were the ones already in the fridge.

Habanero peppers

We made eight bottles of hot sauce with this lot. I think we're now up to 18 bottles of this variety, using the simple, unfermented method. That should be enough.

Habanero sauce

I also picked all the ripe cayenne and Hot Lemon peppers, and took the last of the eggplant, about fist sized.

Various Italian-stlye eggplants, cayenne peppers, Hot Lemon peppers

Saturday was rainy, so we made more hot sauce using all of the peppers we have accumulated since the last effort. The group on the left is four bottles of Hot Lemon and two of cayenne. On the right are three bottles of fermented habanero sauce, and three of fermented cayenne sauce, which were finally ready for the bottle. Fermentation is supposed to reduce the heat of the peppers, and give a more "nuanced" flavor. The question in my mind is whether it is worth it or not, since I can make simple sauce in minutes.

Simple sauce and fermented sauce (the labeled ones)

I suppose you might be wondering what in the world we do with all this sauce. Truth is, we love hot sauce and use it sparingly in a lot of dishes and as a condiment. But most of the bottles are packaged up and sent to friends as holiday gifts "from the farm." We enjoy this a lot, and it's fun to hear the reactions people have.

So in that vein, I'm not done with sauces yet (except maybe habanero). If we get a frost I will cut the plants and hang them somewhere, as I observed they continue to ripen on the cut plants. Witness this Habanada plant that I cut days ago and threw into the long-term compost pile. You can see the fruits are continuing to ripen even though the plant is wilted.

Ripening peppers on wilted plant

I guess it would be a good control experiment to pick some of the peppers and see if they also ripen indoors off the vine.

Oh, and I planted garlic this week: 48 cloves of hardneck, and 8 of Elephant "Garlic" that were given to me by a friend. Elephant is actually in the leek family, but functions like a garlic, and has really huge cloves as the name implies. I'm interested to see how it does here.

That's all for this week. It's supposed to warm up considerably this coming week. But then it goes back to our normal cool autumn conditions. As it looks now, we might get our first frost around Nov. 1. I hope to be ready for it. Thanks for reading, and thanks once again to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.