Here's another Harvest Monday update from Eight Gate Farm. This week, the "first harvests" were all about peppers and onions, which are two of my favorite crops to grow.
I took the first red-ripe "Ace" sweet bell peppers. The plants are not large, but they have a good number of fruit in various stages of ripening.
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| Ace (F1) bell peppers |
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| Lunchbox Red (F1) sweet peppers |
Snacking pepper? I picture this:
- Kid: "Can I have a snack?"
- Mom: "Have a tiny pepper."
- Kid: "No, I said a SNACK."
Now for the alliums, which are all very early this year. These are first and entire harvests. I intentionally grew much fewer compared to prior years.
Here's the yellow onion "Talon," which I've grown for many years with good success. It stores well.
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| Talon (F1) onions |
Here's the red onion "Barolo," another I've had previous success with. They store extremely well; we still have a few from last year.
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| Barolo (F1) onions |
Here's the white, large variety called "Alicia Craig." They are flavorful but don't store well, so they're the first ones we'll be using.
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| Alicia Craig (OP) onions |
Finally, here's "Ambition," a shallot. They also store well.
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| Ambition (F1) shallots |
Turning to general harvests, here was Monday's.
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| Monday general harvest |
Here was Wednesday's.
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| Wednesday's general harvest |
And here was Friday's. You may notice that I am picking some very green tomatoes. This is intentional. They are Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye, one of our favorites. But it also seems to be the favorite of some small animal, which samples them just as they are starting to vine-ripen. Even though they are green, they are still maturing well indoors.
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| Friday general harvest |
The Kitchen Goddess was busy this week, making many wonderful things. She made tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes, not for canning but for immediate use. She made stuffed bell peppers, and chiles rellenos (which is a much different stuffed pepper). She also took three pounds of jalapenos and cayenne peppers....
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| 3 lbs. hot peppers |
...and made and canned eight jelly jars of "Cowboy Candy," an old favorite around here. It's a hot pepper relish whose sweetness perfectly compliments the heat of the peppers.
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| Cowboy Candy |
That's all for this week. Thanks for reading, and thanks once again to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.
I also pick my tomatoes a little underripe and as you note, they ripen well indoors. I'm hoping to allow tomatoes coming on to ripen before the plants give up the ghost, which may be soon.
ReplyDeleteThat is a big harvest of hot peppers! Your Cowboy Candy sounds tasty, though I would have to eat it all myself since spicy food doesn't agree with my wife. Bummer about the critter, and I can identify. I'm trapping skunks here now, which are doing a lot of damage digging things up - including transplants I set out in the veggie garden.
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