Harvest Monday - 29 August 2016

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm. Here is this week's Harvest Monday update.

First-of-the-season harvests:

"Aruba" (Cubanelle-type) peppers. I thought having a kitchen knife would give them scale, but how big is the knife? Better to say they were hand-sized. They would eventually turn red, but I got tired of waiting, and worried they'd get damaged.

Perfect size for chiles rellenos. Yum!

We pulled all our onions (Stuttgarter). We only got 85, though I started with many more seedlings. And few were big. I think next year I'll go back to planting from sets--the tiny, weak seedlings are fragile and hard to handle, and sets are much easier to plant.

We judged it was time to pick our hops. Here you can see how daunting the task was.

Here's the result. Two window screens' worth. We had to spread the picking out over two days, especially since the first day was in the hot sun. Better to finish in the cool morning.

All this from a small vine planted four years ago. It just keeps coming back stronger and stronger, from the ground up. The variety is Mt. Hood, which is an aroma hop, as compared to a bittering hop. We added some to a sub-batch of our hard cider last year, and the result is very different and enjoyable. Of course, this is far more than we can possibly use ourselves. I'm going to see if I can trade the majority with one or the other of the local micro-breweries, for (what else?) beer!

Now, a last harvest. We bid so-long to Espresso corn, taking all the remaining small ears.

Some were starchy, but others were surprisingly good. Of course we couldn't eat them all in one sitting. The rest went into the freezer for the makings of corn chowder. I'm still hunting for an early (~70 day), cool-soil tolerant sweet corn.

Continuing harvests: Honey Select corn, Diva cucumbers, an artichoke, yellow wax beans, and zucchini.

I just had to show a picture of the Honey Select to compare with the Espresso above. I know I go on and on about how good it is, but it really is the best.

Tomatoes, eggplant, and more zucchini and Divas.

A colorful assortment of solanacea:

We had another batch of broiled shishito peppers. Again, no hot ones in the lot. And The Kitchen Goddess made Cowboy Candy with all our accumulated hot peppers.

She thought she had enough for three jars, but it was only two. What to do with the other jar of sauce? juice? whatever the heck you call the stuff the peppers were cooked in? We used some for a delicious sweet/spicy glaze for charcoal-grilled pork tenderloin.

And end-of week harvest. It's really nice that we still have lettuce this late in the season.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please visit all the lovely Harvest Monday posts at Our Happy Acres, hosted by Dave. Thanks, Dave!