Harvest Monday - 4 September 2017

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm. We are still getting "first harvests" of the year, so I lead off with them.

We took the entire crop of onions, which I raised from seed. It's kind of a disappointing haul, as we use a lot of onions over the year. I keep telling myself "more onions, less leeks" but the leek seedlings just seem to do better.

Stuttgarter onions

Speaking of leeks, one of them sent up a flower stalk (looking like a non-curvy garlic scape) so we pulled it, and used it fresh that night in a stir-fry.

Carentan leek

The first Halona muskmelon slipped from the vine. Inside, pure heaven!

Halona

And a Sugar Baby watermelon was picked, cannonball-sized. How do I know? Here it is next to an actual cannonball. What? You don't have a cannonball in your home? Weird!

The first chard was cut, and also the first intentionally-grown Red Russian kale. They are on the right in this picture. The other kale shown is what's left from the mesclun mix planted in spring.

For continuing harvests, we discovered voles had destroyed a dozen carrots, so to protect the crop we pulled all the rest, about five pounds. The Kitchen Goddess kept the nicest-looking ones out for fresh eating, and froze or dehydrated the rest.

A mid-week assortment:

We didn't do any gardening over the weekend. Instead, we made our yearly overnight jaunt to the Vermont Garlic Festival to pick up our seed garlic for the year, and just have fun.

I wrote a post about the event last year, entitled Vermont Stinks!.

Sunday morning we drove home in what Accuweather called a "tropical rainstorm," which lasted all day. It's the remnant of Hurricane Harvey, which sadly devastated the Houston area. Well, in my book "tropical" does not mean lighting the wood stove to get the chill out of the house, but we had to.

Here's the garlic we will be planting in the fall. From left, Turkish Red, Music, Katterman, Italian Purple Stripe, and Marengo. They cost between $1 and $3 a bulb, well worth it. Marengo is a soft-neck, so it's an experiment for me.

We dashed between the raindrops to pick sweet corn for our dinner on Sunday. Again, you can see how much bigger and better the Honey Select is compared to Sugar Buns.

Here's our hop vine in the rain. I've more or less decided not to take the time to pick them this year, as we have so many other pressing chores and we have so much left from last year. It's a waste, I know, but we really can't use them, and the local brewers use only pelletized hops, which we can't produce without getting specialized equipment. I'm just glad I didn't plant more vines, like I once considered doing.

Mt. Hood hops

So today is Labor Day in the US, which we will spend getting to the chores we neglected over the weekend. But it's a nice way to spend a holiday! I hope yours is good, too. But please take time to read all the terrific Harvest Monday posts you'll find at Our Happy Acres.