Harvest Monday - 29 July 2019

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm. We were very pleased with this week's harvests.

Starting with the underground dwellers, we harvested all the garlic, 30 heads. Once they have cured and been cleaned I will show them and describe the varieties. Now they just look like dirt.

We dug the whole crop of Red Norland potatoes; three 4-foot rows yielded about nine pounds of these attractive spuds.

Above ground, my wish last week for ripe tomatoes was granted, albeit in a limited way.

Taxi and Oregon Spring tomatoes

We also got the first cucumbers. This variety, "Dar" produces small blocky fruit that has a unique taste in my opinion. Although they look like it, they aren't considered picklers.

Dar cucumbers

We got the first eggplant, Ping Tung. The Kitchen Goddess prepared them that night by sauteing with crumbled sweet Italian sausage in a butter/EVOO blend, with finely chopped garlic scapes and winter savory. Simple and delicious!

Ping Tung eggplant

I picked the first jalapenos. This variety is Early Jalapeno. It sounds like a hybrid but actually it's an open-pollinated strain with earlier maturity than the normal ones.

Early Jalapeno

We got the first green zucchini, Cocozelle di Napoli.

Also the first yellow wax beans, "Carson." Only three seeds germinated successfully this year.

For ongoing harvests, we got more artichokes.

Green Globe

And shishito peppers.

A trifecta of berries: blueberry, jostaberry, and raspberry. There were many similar pickings this week.

Kohlrabi, broccoli, and filet beans.

And we're still picking salad greens and snap peas.

TKG and her mom are again sharing a plot at the community garden. Mom went home with a nice harvest of leeks, cucumbers, ground-cherries, kohlrabi, peas, beets, carrots, celery, tomatoes, beans, and new potatoes.

Finally, here's something interesting from Notes From the Field. I went metal-detecting in our woods and unearthed this cool axe-head up against a stone wall. I don't know what vintage it is, but I think it's pretty old (still sharp though!). The bigger question is, how did it get there? I can imagine an old-timer giving a mighty whack, and the head flying off never to be seen again (by him).

Thanks for reading this long post! Please check out HappyAcres.blog for more Harvest Monday reports from around the world. Thanks for hosting it, Dave!

Harvest Monday - 22 July 2019

Like much of the eastern US, we had a three-day heat wave over the weekend. For us, it meant temps in the mid-90s, not as bad as other parts, but still pretty warm by our standards. I think overall it had a good effect on the gardens.

We had a number of first harvests this week. Leading off is the star of our gardens, the noble artichoke! Petite in size, it had great flavor, and we shared it equitably!

Green Globe artichoke

We had several pickings of bush beans.

Calima filet beans

The first Arcadia broccoli. All the broccoli is only making fist-sized head this year.

The first White Egg turnip.

One of the onions started bolting, so I pulled it.

Immature Stuttgarter onion

I'm growing Red Norland potatoes for the first time this year, along with my old standby, Kennebec. Norland clearly matures faster, as the leaves started dying back this week. The Kitchen Goddess robbed a plant to see what was there: three lovely potatoes. We had these chopped along with the above onion, doused with EVOO, and put in foil on the grill. Delicious! Somewhat starchier than Kennebec.

Red Norland potatoes

We got the first jostaberries, racing the birds to them.

Jostaberry

And the first red raspberries.

For a sampling of continuing harvests, here's a Yellowfin zucchini along with a Purple Top White Globe turnip and a Fiesta broccoli head.

Finally enough shishito peppers to indulge ourselves. This time, instead of grilling and sprinkling with sea salt, TKG made a soy-ginger sauce to drizzle over them after grilling. Wonderful!

The kohlrabi is getting bigger and bigger, but there's only a few left.

Kolibri Purple F1

More salad mix for our nightly meals. No bitterness yet.

And lastly a very decent picking of blueberries, 1 1/4 pounds.

That's it for this week. Maybe this coming week we will finally get tomatoes! Sure would be nice. Thanks for reading, and thanks as always to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday - 15 July 2019

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm. We had a number of first harvests this week, and continuing ones too.

The first blueberries were picked. More pickings like this every couple of days. It adds up!

We got the first Fiesta broccoli, shown here with some side-shoots from Blue Wind.

The first Yellowfin zucchini.

And the first Cubanelle pepper, shown here before picking so you can see it was almost bigger than plant itself!

For continuing harvests, we took the last of the pak choi.

More cherries. The birds can have the rest.

Snow and snap peas. The warm weather looks to be shutting the vines down.

More kohlrabi.

And lastly, our favorite, shishito peppers.

All in all, a good week! Hope yours was too. Thanks for reading, and thanks to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for continuing to host Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday - 8 July 2019

We've had such a string of warm days, I told The Kitchen Goddess I could hear the corn grow (she scoffed). To see if it lived up to the old adage "knee-high by the Fourth of July," I went out on Independence Day to stand in the flour corn patch. It did! And I've got long legs!

Painted Mountain flour corn and skinny old-man legs

But that's a harvest for another day. This past week we had several first harvests, and continuing ones. The most exciting was our first shishito peppers...just enough to tantalize us.

We also got our first picking of Sputniks, I mean kohlrabi.

Kolibri Purple F1 kohlrabi

We had a generous first harvest of pak choi.

Brisk Green pak choi

And we took a couple of turnips for salad.

Purple Top White Globe turnips

We have two large (too large) cherry trees in the small orchard, that were planted long before we got here. Most years they give us nothing, but this is one of the years they do. I don't really know what the variety is, but it looks like Montmorency. The birds get most of them. But we are getting some ourselves.

For continuing harvests, the edible-podded peas are coming on strong, giving us a picking like this every other day.

Super Sugar Snap and Avalanche

And continuing cuttings from the salad mix. We enjoy grilling up some kind of meat, eating it hot that night, and then slicing it for our salads for the next few nights.

The Kitchen Goddess was given a large quantity of rhubarb, and she boiled it down for syrup.

Rhubarb syrup

A very pleasing week for us. I hope yours was too! I'll find out by reading the Harvest Monday posts on HappyAcres.blog. Thanks to Dave, the talented host.

Harvest Monday - 1 July 2019

This week it finally started becoming summer-like. We reached 90 F (38 C) on Friday. This was followed by a short but intense thunderstorm on Saturday night, which not only cooled things off but also flattened my prized flour corn patch. It's a real pain to straighten out the stalks again. Fortunately that was the extent of the damage.

The warmth has jazzed up many of the crops we've had our eyes on. The first broccoli head was harvested. It's Blue Wind, which is always the earliest of the three varieties I grow.

Blue Wind broccoli

The first small picking of edible-podded peas was achieved. This is something we really look forward to.

L.: Avalanche (snow), R: Super Sugar Snap

Last year I started six caraway plants from seed. They really didn't do much that year, but this year they were among the first plants to emerge in spring, and really took off. Flowers formed very quickly on tall stalks. Tiny pollinators seem to love the small white flowers.

Caraway plants flowering in herb garden

This week the green seeds had plumped-up, so I cut them and will dry them indoors. I sampled a few, and they have the intense nutty flavor I like so much.

Caraway seeds on stalks

It's been the best year for cilantro for us, but they were starting to bolt, so we cut most of the crop, over a pound. I replanted two more short rows in the shadiest bed, hoping they will grow despite summer heat.

Cilantro

Continuing harvests this week were mixed greens and the last of the radishes, slightly woody.

And strawberries.

That's the report for this week. Thanks for reading, and as always thanks to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.