It's time once again for a Harvest Monday update from Eight Gate Farm. Hurricane Ida slammed into the Gulf Coast at the beginning of the week, and roared up the eastern seaboard leaving destruction in its wake. Lucky for us, we were at its northern edge, and only received heavy rain Wednesday night. I have a friend in New Orleans, and he's been without power for days, with no firm date when it will be restored. Not a pleasant situation in a very hot and humid climate!
I'll start as usual with the "first harvests" of the season. Biquinho peppers are a Brazillian delicacy, and I love growing them here as they are so adorable. They are traditionally served pickled, and that's what we'll do when we get enough.
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| Biquinho red and yellow |
I cut the first Chinese cabbage. This is the hybrid Minuet, weighing just over two pounds, and so considered "personal size." Only a few of the hole-y outer leaves had to be snapped off.
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| Minuet cabbage |
I pulled the entire crop of "Talon" yellow storage onions. This is my first time growing this variety, and I have to say I'm impressed. It takes two photographs to show it all.
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| Talon onions |
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| More Talon onions |
It was my goal to grow bigger onions this year, and I pleased with the result. Here's one of the largest.
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| Talon onion |
If any of you follow the UK market gardener Charles Dowding on YouTube, you might have seen how he multi-sows his onions and gets great results. But then again, he grows in pure compost. I don't have access to that much compost. For me, the single-sown onions got pretty consistently larger than the multi-sowing I did. It is a pain to separate the seedlings, though.
I also pulled all the shallots. In the past I've only grown them from sets, and this is the first time I started from seed. Though a number of the fragile seedlings didn't make it after transplanting, the ones that did got much larger than I've ever experienced. They should keep well.
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| Ambition F1 shallots |
Now on to continuing harvests. This was Monday's picking, only tomatoes.
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| Monday tomato harvest |
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| Tuesday harvest |
The Kitchen Goddess dried the round Hungarian Cheese peppers to make paprika. They have thick walls, so it took 10 hours in a very low oven, and another 2 in the dehydrator. Then they were ground in her dedicated spice mill. The result has wonderful color, and smells heavenly. I guess it shows that any sweet red pepper can make paprika.
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| Paprika |
TKG, with me helping a little, canned seven quarts of chopped tomatoes using the ripe ones living in trays on the dining room table. It's a good thing we did, because Wednesday, in anticipation of the storm, I picked more tomatoes.
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| Wednesday tomato harvest |
Finally, here's Friday's harvest. Notable are the collards, which were snapped from just one plant, and the bush beans, which put on a second flush despite looking rather tired.
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| Friday harvest |
That's all for this week. Thanks for reading, and Happy Labor Day! Please join me in reading all the fine Harvest Monday posts, thanks to our great host, Dave, at HappyAcres.blog.
Wow on those onions! It looks like you are set for a while. I do like homemade paprika, and I have to say some of the so-called 'paprika' peppers I have grown didn't make all that tasty a paprika. Yours has a great color to it, and I can almost smell those peppers in the oven. I was thinking about growing the Biquinho peppers here but didn't know how hot they were. Then again I am already growing too many peppers as it it!
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DeleteThanks Dave. The Biquinhos are not at all hot in my opinion. I'm growing them in containers, so they don't take up any real space.
DeleteThe onions are impressive. I've never considered making homemade paprika. I'll have to check it out since I usually have lots of red peppers in October.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sue. We use a lot of paprika, so it's great to have homemade.
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