Harvest Monday - 7 August 2017

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm! As before, I will lead off this Harvest Monday post with the "first" harvests from this week.

The first "Nadia" eggplant:

Nadia

The first "Cherry Bomb" hot peppers:

Cherry Bomb

And the first peaches. We bought a marked-down end-of-season "Reliance" peach sapling at Tractor Supply last fall, with no great expectations. Surprisingly, it flowered its first year in the ground, and set fruit. Now, these are just walnut-sized, but they were of perfect color and starting to soften and smell like peaches, so we took four to see how they ripen indoors.

Reliance Peach

And on to continuing harvests. A few more grape tomatoes:

Sugar Plum

Another "Maule's Red Hot" cayenne, and a Ping Tung eggplant:

Ping Tung, Maule's Red Hot

The Kitchen Goddess took a rare night off from cooking, so I demonstrated my stir-fry powers, using zucchini, eggplant, snow peas, broccoli, and all the hot peppers. I added Virginia peanuts, and made a sauce from chicken broth thickened with corn starch. It was served over thin Chinese noodles.

The hot peppers were extremely spicy raw, but they toned down in the stir-fry to add a pleasant richness. Funny thing though. I cut and seeded the peppers without gloves. Even after repeated hand-washings and a morning shower next day, putting in my contact lenses was a literal "eye-opening experience."

TKG cleaned the now-cured harneck garlic from a few weeks ago. Here they are, all nice and pretty. Clockwise from top, Katterman, Turkish Red, Killarney Red, and Vietnamese Purple, which are very colorful. You'll note she left extra-long handles this time, presumably for easier hurling at vampires.

The beans are producing nicely, though they look like they may be starting to take a break. I continue to be impressed with the "Calima" filet bean, which tastes outstanding.

L: Calima, R: Carson

Here's a true fact. TKG loves sharing our produce with family/friends/people walking by on the road. But there are three things she will not share. Can you guess them?

One: Diva cucumbers.

Diva

Two: artichokes.

Imperial Star

Three: sweet corn.

No, this is not our corn. Ours is still not ready. But TKG was craving corn, and in a clear insult to my masculinity, made me go to the local farm stand for their first-of-the-season corn. At 70 cents an ear, it seemed expensive, but it was sure flying out the door. I wondered what kind it was, but the cashier only said "butter and sugar," which was the extent of her knowledge I guess. It actually was pretty good.

A representative harvest of zucchini, beans, snap peas (vines taken down this weekend), and more Divas. 

The zucchini looks pretty normal in the above picture, but it actually was one that almost got away from us.

Cocozella Di Napoli

Using that and another large one, TKG got to show off her new spiralizer attachment for the KitchenAid and made a big batch of zoodles.

Now for some wildlife notes. A few years ago I planted several Swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) plants from seed. They did well, and have actually seeded themselves in several other places. It is a nice plant, with lovely pink flowers with a vanilla scent. Being a milkweed, it is attractive to monarch butterflies. This week we noticed a half-dozen monarch caterpillars happily munching on the leaves. This big guy is hanging upside down and sawing away on a leaf.

Here's another big guy and his baby brother. Off to the left, you can see the strange bright yellow aphids that also love this plant. Normally I would spray them with Neem, but I dare not, for fear of harming our monarchs. I'm just happy we are doing a tiny part in the effort to conserve this threatened butterfly.

Thanks for reading this week's overly-long post. Now join me in viewing all the posts on Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres. Thanks again, Dave!

Harvest Monday - 31 July 2017

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm. Continuing the pattern, we will lead off with the "first" harvests of this week.

The first tomatoes, finally! Although small and few, they were most welcome. This is the grape variety called Sugar Plum. I've had the same seeds since 2012, and they are a delightful blend of sweet and acidic. I've only found a single source for these seeds (Harris, I think).

Sugar Plum grape tomatoes

The first of several pickings of "Diva" cucumbers, again a delightful variety.

Diva

The first "Maule's Red Hot" cayenne. Perfectly ripe, but what do you do with a single hot pepper?

Maule's Red Hot

The first "Calima" filet beans. This is the first time I'm growing them, and they are fantastic in every way.

Calima filet beans

The first "Carson" wax beans. This has been a reliable producer for us in the past.

Carson yellow wax beans

Now for continuing harvests. We took more lovely artichokes.

Imperial Star artichokes

The last of the broccoli. It looked like they weren't going to give us much in the way of side-shoots, so the plants were taken out. I planted a hill of yellow zucchini in their place. I'm not sure if there will be enough time in the season to get much of anything from it, but it's a good experiment.

Fiesta and Arcadia broccoli

I wrote last week about the voles destroying 5 of our 10 potato plants. This week they took two more, leaving us with potato husks underground. We decided we should just salvage what was left, and this was the result. Though it is weeks before we would normally harvest potatoes, we're going to cure these and try to store as much as we can.

Kennebec potatoes

The last of the Blauwschokkers peas for soup. The vines had the worst case of powdery mildew I've ever seen. I wiped as much of it off the pods as I could.

Desiree Dwarf Blauwschokkers

The Mammoth Melting Sugar snow peas had also developed PM, but not as bad. Here are some on the right, plus more Super Sugar Snaps, which showed no PM at all. We later pulled the MMS vines.

Super Sugar Snap and Mammoth Melting Sugar

Every so often The Kitchen Goddess's mother comes over to help with garden chores, and we are pleased to send her home with as much produce as she wants. So here are two pictures of what we call the "Mom CSA."

An end of the week harvest basket:

And finally, two more artichokes. This time, I'm showing what they looked like before clipping, in case you were curious.

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading, and thanks as always to Dave at Our Happy Acres for hosting Harvest Monday. Please join me in seeing what other gardeners around the world are bringing in now.

Harvest Monday - 24 July 2017

Welcome to another Harvest Monday update from Eight Gate Farm. It was an exciting and fulfilling week, with many first-of-the-year harvests.

We lead off with the Queen of the Garden, our first artichoke:

Imperial Star artichoke

The garlic looked ready, so out it came. From left, in bunches of six, Katterman, Killarney Red, Vietnamese Purple, and Turkish Red.

The Katterman was the star, with super-large bulbs.

Katterman garlic

These dwarfed the Killarney Red next to them. This variety won't make the cut next year. But then, whoever heard of Irish garlic?

Our first zucchini:

Cocozella Di Napoli zucchini

Our first eggplants:

Ping Tung eggplant

Our first Anaheim chile:

The first beets:

This sight greeted us in the potato bed one morning:

A sad, unexpected first "harvest." Voles have tunneled into the bed and devoured from underground five of the ten potato plants. We depend on potatoes, so this is a loss. Here's all I could salvage from the destroyed plants.

The first jostaberries. The birds love them, so it's good to get at least some.

Jostaberries

We also had many "continuing" harvests. First, several pickings of mangetouts (I love that word).

Snow and snap peas

Several pickings of lettuce like this:

Yes, it's strange to be harvesting these "spring" crops in late July!

Some broccoli side-shoots:

Hot Hungarian Wax and shishito peppers:

Turnips and carrots:

A fragrant bouquet of volunteer cilantro:

Blauwschokkers peas for winter soups:

Desiree Dwarf Blauwschokkers

Lastly, blueberries and a few raspberries:

If you've made it this far, thank you for your stamina! It felt really great to finally start hauling in the goods. I hope you had bountiful harvests this week too. Please see all the lovely posts on Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.

Harvest Monday - 17 July 2017

Welcome to another Harvest Monday post from Eight Gate Farm. Harvest Monday, as you know, is graciously hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres, and is the place to go to see what people are presently harvesting around the world. Thanks, Dave!

For "first harvests" this week, we had a nice head of Fiesta broccoli.

Followed up a day or two later with a head of Arcadia.

For continuing harvests, we had near-daily pickings of Super Sugar Snap (left), and Mammoth Melting Sugar.

Several people have asked my opinion of the heirloom MMS. Well, I have to say they are good, but must be picked very young (2 inches or so), or the pods get tough. Maybe "mammoth" refers to the vines. They are now over 7 feet tall and still growing--despite the catalogs saying they only get to 4 - 5 feet. I might be looking for another snow pea variety next year.

We did another picking of fat Blauwschokkers pods, again with the off-type green ones present.

They got put with the earlier picking on this screen in the sunroom to thoroughly dry. It takes awhile, but I found in previous years leaving them on the vines leads to mold issues.

We continue to take a few carrots for our immediate use, leaving the rest to size up. Boy, do we love fresh carrots!

The kale component of the mesculin mix was so large it got its own picking. It was blanched and frozen.

Thus, we got a separate picking of the more lettuce-y components of the mix.

The adorable fox family I showed last week has sadly moved on it appears. Perhaps not coincidentally, a groundhog was spotted making its way toward the Survival Garden out back, and shortly after that, it was "re-homed to heaven" as we say. Severe, I know, but you should hear the grim stories from local gardeners about their beloved crops disappearing overnight to these destructive beasts.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Fennel?

I'm not partial to fennel root. So why would I grow it? It started out for one reason, and ended up being another.

When I was a youngster living in California, wild fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) was a plant I was very familiar with. We called it "anise," and chewing its seeds were just the thing for freshening up your breath before you got home to face suspicious parents. I still like the flavor of those seeds, and I think the plant itself is attractive. Of course, in western states, fennel is considered invasive, and certainly does grow everywhere, especially coastal environments. Being the wild variety, it isn't the cultivar used for root production, but they are similar.

A few years ago, on a trip back to California, I gathered some seeds and brought them back home. Last year I started a plant with them, and transplanted it to the Kitchen Herb Garden. It was really just for fun and nostalgia. It grew pretty well, but was munched by caterpillars down to just stems. It rebounded by the end of the growing season. I was pretty sure fennel would not overwinter here, so I started another plant this year. It turns out the original plant did regenerate this year, so I have two in the herb garden.

Once again, caterpillars found them.

This is the larvae of the familiar Black Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio polyxenes). Gardeners know them as consumers of dill, parsley, and the like, but we tolerate them, since the butterfly itself is so beautiful.

So my fennel is serving as a "trap crop" for the parsley and dill in the herb garden, and I don't really care if they demolish it, which they did. I watched them get fatter and fatter, and would poke them now and then just to see those yellow feeler things pop out and distribute a pungent odor (their natural protection). I actually did find one on parsley, and re-homed it to the fennel. But I guess I have the home version of the children's book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, because they weren't done eating, and moved on to a nearby dill. It too is now stripped down to mostly stems, except for the flower.

I still wonder if the fennel will truly be a perennial here. It will be an interesting experiment. I think there's very little chance of it becoming invasive, as I don't plan to let any seeds get away if it ever does set them.