Monday, September 24, 2018

Harvest Monday - 24 September 2018

Autumn is here, and you can feel it in the air. Harvests are slowing way down. We got the remnants of Hurricane Florence on Tuesday, delivering 4 inches of rain in basically half a day. That of course is nothing compared to what the poor folks in the Carolinas got.

We still are getting some new harvests, however. First up is the Paradicsom Alaku Sarga Szentes sweet pepper. This is probably the only one that will get ripe in time. Our Harvest Monday host, Dave, showed them off a couple of weeks ago. He's getting more than I will, as always.

Paradicsom Alaku Sarga Szentes
It's a name that's hard to pronounce and even harder to spell. I think it loosely translates to "Aggravatingly Slow To Ripen." It is attractive, though.

The first "Calabrese" hot peppers matured. These are from the seeds of a pepper given to me by a nice man at a winery in Northern California a couple of years ago. It looks like just another cherry pepper, but it is fiery hot.

Calabrese
I got the first harvest of the flat-podded bush bean "Romano." These were planted at the end of July, and I wasn't sure we'd have enough time before frost to get any, but they did well.

Romano bush beans
Also new this week is the spaghetti squash "Sugaretti Hybrid." It's a 2017 AAS Selection, and is a short-vined variety. The fruits are small, about one and a half pounds. It sure does look like Delicata, which I'm guessing is in its parentage.

Sugaretti Hybrid
Also the first Early Butternut Hybrid, another short-vined variety. It's on the right, below, joined by a conventional butternut The Kitchen Goddess brought home from her community garden plot. So it's not really all that early, is it?


I planted "Painted Mountain" flour corn this year, and had high hopes. It germinated beautifully and grew quickly. Unfortunately squirrels developed a taste for it, and I couldn't control them sufficiently to prevent them from ruining basically the whole crop. Here's all I could salvage. After drying and shelling, it fills a pie dish.

Painted Mountain dry corn
I took the last two "Soloist" Chinese cabbage. The outer leaves were being eaten, but the inner cores were fine, and weighed out to about 3 pounds each.


Some late summer harvests:

Bottom: Jilo eggplants

TKG canned 6 pints of thick all-purpose tomato sauce.


More summer crops trickled in. There won't be enough tomatoes left to justify a canning (to TKG's relief), but we will get some more sauce for the fridge.


And on the weekend I took all the remaining spring-planted beets, and some of the remaining carrots.


Helpful me scrubbed them and laid them out to dry on one of TKG's precious dish towels. Boy did I get in trouble for that. Who knew beets stain? Well I did, but unfortunately forgot.

In wildlife notes, I went out into the woods to change the memory card in the Game-Cam. Here's a nice 8-point buck who seems to be inhabiting the area. The image was captured in early September, but he's still around, as I spooked him when I got to the edge of the woods. Maybe I'll have an "appointment" with him come November.


That's all for this week. Thanks for reading! Please join me in viewing all the posts on Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at HappyAcres.blog.

6 comments:

  1. Great looking Chinese cabbage! Three pounds is larger than I can usually grow them. Those Calabrese peppers looks like one I grew a few years back, and they were fiery hot too. My P.A.S.S. peppers though are not that prolific, and I hope yours taste better than mine which were kind of blah. I also grew Sugaretti last year and it was a great keeper. I'll bet TKG does appreciate a break from the canning! You all must be well stocked up by now with tomato-ey good things.

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    1. Thanks, Dave. Sad that the PASS peppers are not very tasty. I'll taste mine before deciding if it makes the cut. Yes, we do have a lot of tomato stuff, which gives me a good feeling.

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  2. Those dang squirrels. The last time I grew corn the rodents were attacking it so fiercely that I ended up wrapping each and every ear in hardware cloth. That kept the corn safe but it was such a PITA that I decided to stop growing corn.

    Beautiful buck. There's 3 bucks that hang around the neighborhood here, one has 6 points, another 4, and the youngest just has a couple of stubs. And then there's the does and the fawns. It makes for quite a gathering at times.

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    1. I remember seeing the hardware cloth around your corn ears and thinking "at least I don't have to do that." Well, so much for that. Nice to have deer poking around provided they behave themselves. Are they mule deer, or the other kind you have?

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  3. Good luck with that buck! And great harvest. You still have so much going on!

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  4. A break from canning will be welcome in your kitchen I'm sure, although you still have lots of harvests .Hope the beetroot stains came out of the towel lol

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