Harvest Monday - 5 October 2020

 Autumn greetings from Eight Gate Farm! The week started off surprisingly warm, even humid. On Tuesday we took a day off from garden chores and drove two hours up to The North Country. We went through Franconia Notch and stopped where the famous New Hampshire icon “The Old Man of the Mountains” once could be viewed. The mist made it look gloomy.

The rocks making up the stone face fell in 2003. A helpful sign showed how it suddenly happened on that fateful night.

Continuing on, we took a pleasant hike to Cherry Pond in the Conte National Wildlife Refuge. The water was low because of the drought, but still made a pretty picture, with Mount Starr King in the background.

There were only two new harvests this week. These are hybrid Thai hot peppers called “Full Moon” and “Vesuvius.” Again, these plants came from my gardener friend who loves growing unusual peppers as much as I do.

Full Moon and Vesuvius

In non-new harvests, I picked all the Poblano peppers. These were stuffed with meat loaf (!), wrapped with bacon, and smoked. We ate what we could, and the rest went into the freezer.

Poblano peppers

I picked a bunch more ripe hot peppers. In the top row are Anaheims, then cayenne and Sugar Rush Peach, then Habaneros and Hot Lemons.

Hot to very hot peppers

I also picked a few seasoning peppers. Here’s an Alma Paprika, and some Arroz con Pollo.

We decided it was time to replenish the spice drawer. I picked all the remaining Anaheims, smoked them, and we finished drying them in the oven.

Smoked Anaheims prior to drying

The Kitchen Goddess then ground them in her dedicated spice mill.

Smoked Anaheim pepper powder

All the Alma Paprika peppers were dried and ground.

Paprika

And all the hot red chiles had the same treatment. This produced chile powder and some flakes.

I’m sure glad did that late-summer planting of spinach. Another thinning produced a good quantity of fresh greens for us. When I was a boy, spinach was my favorite vegetable; in fact, maybe the only one I ate (probably Popeye propaganda). Now it mainly goes into our morning smoothies; a thing unknown back then.

Spinach

It’s nice to still have flowers to cut and brighten the home.

That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading. It looks like we may get a frost overnight on Thursday. If so, that day should be busy! If we make it through that, it warms back up again for the rest of the forecast. Thanks as always to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday!