Harvest Monday - 30 August 2021

Here's another Harvest Monday update from Eight Gate Farm in southern New Hampshire, USA. A number of vegetables made their first appearance this week, and as usual I will lead off with them.

This is Nadia, a hybrid Italian-type eggplant. The Kitchen Goddess sliced the bigger one and made me a wonderful Eggplant Parmesan, using gluten-free panko bread crumbs, and served it over gluten-free pasta with our own tomato sauce. Delicious!

Nadia

Here we have two sweet peppers, the hybrid Cornito Rosso, along with the heirloom Jimmy Nardello's. Sad to say, many of my larger peppers are rotting on the vines. This may be due to the extreme rainfall we've had recently, or perhaps I overcrowded them.

L: Cornito Rosso, R: Jimmy Nardello's

The second planting of sweet corn came in this week. This is Temptress, a bi-color synergistic hybrid. Though tip-fill was a little disappointing, the kernels are extra-sweet and crunchy. I love it!

Temptress

I haven't grown dry corn in a few years, but I had an older packet of seeds so I tried it again this year. Surprisingly, they germinated very well. Growth was subdued, however, and pollination was poor. Still, I got a small colorful harvest that we will eventually grind for corn meal.

Painted Mountain flour corn

I set a goal to grow bigger onions this year, and I think I'm getting on track. This is Patterson, a yellow hybrid with good storage potential. Onion seed is notoriously short-lived, and the seed companies seem to give you much more than you can use in a year. So I tried keeping the extra from last year in the freezer. They germinated very well. I transplanted these in bunches, as separating the wispy seedlings got too tedious. Still, a pretty good harvest. I think the extra fertilizer I applied did the trick.

Patterson

For continuing harvests, here is Monday's:

Monday

Here is Wednesday's, only tomatoes:

Wednesday tomato haul

On Friday, no tomatoes! The red thing at the bottom is a Cheese Pepper.

Friday tomato-free haul

A couple of things to note about this harvest. The Blue Wind broccoli plants, whose main heads were cut weeks ago, continue to give a generous amount of side-shoots. The Imperial broccoli gives nothing. Also, the dark green peppers on the right are Poblanos. TKG halved, cored, and stuffed them with different types of sausage; some Sweet Italian, some Chorizo, some Hot Italian, and some chicken/garlic. Some also had cheese. You didn't know ahead of time what you were biting into! All were wrapped with bacon (nitrate-free), and smoked for about an hour and a half. Here's what they looked like pre-smoking. They are absolutely delicious, and are good cold too, fortunately, as there is an awful lot of them.

Stuffed poblano peppers pre-smoking

I'm always amused when volunteer tomato plants spring up in the unlikeliest locations. This year, one popped up in the summer squash bed. It looks to be a Yellow Pear tomato, which I did not intentionally grow this year. Another unknown variety sprouted in the middle bin of my 3-bin composter. It is growing unbelievably. And it is absolutely disease-free so far.

Volunteer mystery tomato plant

Contrast that with the sad state of the plants in the determinate beds. You will be hard-pressed to find any green foliage now.

Mostly dead tomato plants

Is there a lesson here? I'm thinking on it. Thanks for reading, and thanks once again to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday!