Harvest Monday - 1 September 2025

 Today is Labor Day in the US, a holiday that traditionally marks the end of summer here, even though the true calendar start to Autumn is still three weeks away. As if to prove it, the weather has been thoroughly fall-like, with pleasant days and chilly mornings. A little rain, but only enough to "settle the dust" as they say. We got back from the garlic festival yesterday (more on that below).

I got only one "first of the season" harvest this past week, and that is Chinese cabbage. I planted six in early summer, three for us and three for The Kitchen Goddess's mother. I grew them completely under fleece to deter the caterpillars, and it worked well, producing very dense heads.

Minuet Chinese cabbage (F1)

Besides continuously cutting zucchini, I got just one "general harvest," but it was large enough to require two photos.

General harvest (sweet and hot peppers)

General harvest (tomatoes and zucchini)

I don't think I've talked about it before, but TKG's mom is using the in-ground portion of our fenced garden, and is growing lots of things she is pleased with. Here's a harvest she went home with. Note the Tromboncino squash she wanted to grow.

Mom's harvest

For "using the harvest," I pickled all the Trapadeira Werner hot cherry peppers I had harvested so far. I sampled one the next day and "pow!" It was much hotter than I was expecting.

Pickled hot cherry peppers

I also dehydrated all the other hot peppers I had accumulated. When I was done, they looked like this.

Dehydrated hot peppers

TKG took that and put it through a sieve. This resulted in two useful things, chile powder and red pepper flakes.

In non-harvest notes, I've always been fond of hollyhocks but never grew them for some reason. This year I bought a packet of seeds from the Botanical Interests company. They call it the "Outhouse Flower." This intrigued me, so I looked it up. According to the legend, hollyhocks were planted both to screen and identify the privy, so shy, genteel people wouldn't have to ask where it was. 

"Outhouse Flower" (hollyhock)

The garlic festival, now called "Garlic Town USA," is held in the town of Bennington, Vermont (2.5 hours west of us) on the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend. We spent two lovely nights in the area. The festival sadly seems to be shrinking in size, why I don't know. But one nice thing they did this year was to put the garlic growers' booths in one area, instead of scattering among all the other types of vendors at the fair. This made comparison shopping much easier.

Mountains of garlic

We ended up not buying from this vendor, but instead found one who was selling cloves by the pound in addition to whole bulbs. We now have all our seed garlic, for our own garden and the two education gardens we volunteer at.

So, we feel like we are already in Autumn. I've noticed that the pepper plants, while still loaded with ripening fruit, don't seem to be setting any new ones. That's sad.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.