Harvest Monday - 19 October 2020

 Sad to say but our first frost arrived early Sunday morning here in southern New Hampshire. Not necessarily sad from a harvest perspective, but for what it portends (winter, with no gardening). I'll talk more about it later.

I started the harvest week by cutting all the remaining winter squash from the mostly dead vines. I've shown all of these before, except for the lone Chirimen squash (a Yokohama-type) in the bottom right corner of the photo. It was an exceptional year for squash, and we've enjoyed all we've tried so far. The one with the long neck is a surprise Neck Pumpkin that formed late in the season.

Raspberries are continuing to gift us with an abundance. I'm not sure what effect the brief frost will have on them.

Early in the week we started the fermentation process on several types of peppers. From left, here are Habanero, Sugar Rush Peach (roasted first), and Hot Lemon. Two of them have airlock lids, but the Sugar Rush in the middle has to be burped daily. These should be ready in two weeks.

I sorted through the tomatoes ripening indoors and picked out the ones that were ready. 

There was enough to make another batch of thick, unseasoned sauce. The result filled four quart freezer bags.

Now about the frost. The temperature just touched freezing around dawn, held there for awhile, then started to climb. I was pretty sure that when I went out to the garden I would find damage, but that wasn't really the case...yet. Nonetheless, I felt it was time to take down the indeterminate tomatoes and peppers. I didn't try to salvage any tomatoes; it's already been a fabulous year for them and with what we already have ripening inside, we didn't need any more. I did want to harvest all the peppers though. So here's what I brought in.

On the left are all the Hot Lemon peppers; on the right, all the Sugar Rush Peach. There are also a few Serranos.  My plan is to roast the Sugar Rush and make an unfermented hot sauce. Not sure yet about the Hot Lemon. The Serranos are excellent for salsas.

In this picture are the Habaneros, the Madame Jeanette (Suriname), and the Thai hot peppers Full Moon and Vesuvius. I'm pretty sure I will make additional unfermented sauces with them.

And in this picture are all the cayenne and the sweet(ish) Mad Hatter peppers. The Mad Hatter will get chopped and frozen. 

I set up the smoker and smoked all the cayennes for drying and grinding. Since they are so thin, it took only a short time to smoke them.

Cayenne peppers on the smoker

So with that, we said goodbye to all the summer crops. Future Harvest Monday posts will be a lot less colorful! Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.