Harvest Monday - 16 September 2013

 

Welcome to another Harvest Monday. brought to you by Daphne's Dandelions.

Our fall-blooming clematis. I think it's called "Traveler's Joy." It fills the garden with a jasmine-like scent.

It actually delights three of your senses: sight, smell, and sound, the latter from the bees that swarm it.

Okay, I promised no more tomato pictures. But here at 8GF we aren't harvesting too much else now.

I've mentioned that some of the Rutgers tomatoes are much larger than expected. Here you see an 11.5 oz. (325g.) beauty flanked by more normal 5 oz. siblings.

On Wednesday, 18 lbs. (8+ kg.) of tomatoes. All our production has come from 12 determinate plants in the raised beds: 4 Roma, 4 Martino's Roma, 2 Rutgers, 2 Incas F1. Based on the good yields this year, good for us anyway, I might scale that back to 8 plants. I'm not sure yet what varieties, except not the Martino, as I mentioned a few weeks ago. And I'm out of Incas seeds. Does anybody have a favorite, prolific, determinate paste tomato to recommend?

On Friday, 8 lbs. (3.6 kg.) of tomatoes.We have a few indeterminate plants in what I call the "row garden," but they have done hardly anything. Just one Caspian Pink so far, and a few "Sugar Plum" grape tomatoes (shown below). I don't think the soil is beefed up enough there yet.

Two volunteer tomato plants in the compost. One is a plum, and the other looks like some kind of heirloom. I really don't think there's enough warm weather left to have them ripen, which is too bad, as they are so big and healthy. All our other tomatoes are looking mighty blighty.

I chopped down the last of the corn, scavenging a few small ears. It's not a total loss, I guess. We have lots of corn stalks for fall decorations. You pay good money for them at a farmstand!

A tiny harvest of fall crops:

The seedless red raspberries went into yummy buckwheat pancakes, served with our own maple syrup.

And a slightly larger pick:

The hot "Cherry Bomb" peppers were destined for salsa. The Chinese Cabbage was frozen. The "Magic Lantern" pumpkin, about 5.5 pounds (2.5 kg.), was brought in because it had a blemish that might have rotted in the field.

The entire crop of scarlet runner beans. I really grow them for their ornamental value, and have never eaten them. This year we might have enough to eat some and still have seed for next year. I love the purple and pink color of the beans.

On Sunday, another 15 lbs (6.8 kg.) of tomatoes. The weekly total is 41 lbs., good but not as good as last week's 65.

The long-suffering Kitchen Goddess made 8 pints of sauce, and 8 jars of spicy salsa. That makes 62 pints of sauce for the season. I detect many meals of comfort food for those chilly winter nights. We still have a lot of unprocessed tomatoes left, never mind those still ripening in the garden. Whew!

And she had enough energy left to turn 5 fresh picked apples into my favorite apple dessert, Eve's Pudding.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Daphne. I hope you had a great gardening week!