Greetings from Eight Gate Farm! We got some much-needed rain this week, capped off on Friday by the remnants of Hurricane Debby (now tropical depression), which skirted us to the west while heading to the Canadian Maritimes. It brought rain and some wind gusts, but nothing damaging. Between the showers over the week I was able to go out a few times and bring back heavy harvest baskets, including a number of firsts.
I lead off with the second batch of sweet corn. This is another Supersweet (sh2) called Eden RMN. No, I don't know what the initials stand for. This is an all-white variety, so you can see from the picture that a bit of cross-pollination occurred with my first batch of bicolor corn. I thought I had timed the maturities appropriately, but I was wrong. Regardless, the taste is not affected, and it was delicious.
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| Eden RMN Supersweet corn |
Well, that was Friday. Saturday morning we discovered this:
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| Corn crop destruction |
Something quite large, a raccoon or a porcupine, scaled the fence and destroyed the crop of this second batch of corn. I was able to find only two undamaged ears on the 30+ stalks.
While I am saddened, it is not the tragedy you'd think it would be. For I had truly reached my limit for eating corn, and my "system" told me so. But I hope the villain is suffering worse indigestion than I did. I thought it was prudent to cut down and remove all the stalks, in case it decided to return and finish off the half-eaten cobs.
A number of first harvests were recorded for the nightshade family. This is BlushingStar, a true pink tomato that I first tried last year. It has a bold, balanced flavor.
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| BlushingStar (F1) tomato |
I cut the first "Black King" eggplant. It looks a lot like the Midnight Queen I harvested previously, and is a bit later, but may turn out to be more productive.
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| Black King (F1) eggplant |
I also cut a couple of "Bride" eggplants. I think it is the prettiest eggplant I grow.
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| Bride (F1) eggplant |
On the pepper side, I took the first slightly-hot Anaheim peppers. Actually quite a few before this looked promising, but rotted, perhaps from sunscald.
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| Anaheim (OP) hot peppers |
I also picked most of the first crops of dry (soup) beans. This is Jacob's Cattle. I got a lot more than I did last year, where I barely filled a jelly jar with beans.
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| Jacob's Cattle beans |
Later I picked Black Coco (a new variety to me).
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| Black Coco beans |
Both varieties are spread out and further drying in the sun room. I'll show the results when they are ready.
Turning to continuing harvests, here was Tuesday's. Note the two grotesquely large kohlrabi.
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| Tuesday general harvest |
Wednesday's harvest had the last of the Solstice corn. Most of that went into a spicy corn dip The Kitchen Goddess made for a garden party. I confined myself only to a taste of it, and it was delicious.
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| Wednesday general harvest |
Friday's harvest was more varied. That's the last of the artichokes. I can't believe we harvested 40 of these little gems this year.
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| Friday general harvest |
Now for "using the harvest." I had accumulated 20 of the large Red Ember cayennes, so I made cayenne powder, an all-day, sneeze-inducing process.
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| Cayenne powder |
And TKG salvaged what she could from the aforesaid kohlrabi, and started fermenting it for kimchi.
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| Kimchi science project |
Sorry, went a bit long this week. Thanks for sticking with it. Thanks also to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.
I sneezed just thinking about grinding up those peppers! Red Ember always did well for me, but was a bit too hot for my tastes. The corn attack is a bummer for sure. We've got skunks digging up our plants, and after getting sprayed a few years back there is no love lost between me and them!
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