Harvest Monday - 20 July 2020

Greetings from Eight Gate Farm. We had a few cool days last week, then the heat returned with a vengeance. Yesterday topped 97 (36 C). Other parts of the country get heat worse than this, but we're not used to it, and it just saps us of energy and ambition.

But the crops had to be picked. We got a first harvest of one of our favorites, artichokes.

'Tavor' artichokes

And our first picking of bush filet beans.

'Calima' filet beans

Our first "Arcadia" broccoli.

'Arcadia' broccoli

And our first "Imperial" broccoli. Imperial is supposed to stand up to summer better than others. We will see.

'Imperial' broccoli

We got the first Cubanelle pepper, on the left below. We had it that night in our salad. It is not at all hot, but has a sharpness that pleasantly sets it off from something like a bell pepper.

Cubanelle pepper and two shishito peppers

And our first summer raspberries.

For continuing harvests, more blueberries. These are disappearing into our breakfast smoothies.

More "Yaya" carrots, including an extra-wonky one looking like a perverse lobster claw.

The last of the Iceberg lettuce.

Iceberg lettuce

And more from the two salad mix rows.

More side shoots from the "Blue Wind" broccoli.

A few more pea pods.

And more cucumbers and zucchini.

More turnip greens. This is a variety called "Seven Top" that is bred for greens production, not roots.

Lastly, from the community garden plot for The Kitchen Goddess's mom, came fennel and summer squash.

Just in case you've never grown artichokes or have never seen the plants, here's what they look like. In our zone (5b), they won't survive the winter so we grow them as annuals.

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