Harvest Monday - August 27, 2012

August 27, already! When the heck is summer going to start around here, or is it going to skip us this year, again. It was 44ºF when I got up this morning. The "heat wave" last week, or was it the week before, brought a sizzling high of 87ºF one afternoon. The tomatoes are pouting, just sitting there loaded, somewhat loaded, with green rocks, reluctantly offering an occasional treat, waiting like the rest of us for the heat to start. At least the rest of the vegetables, with the notable exception of the edamame soy beans are ignoring the coolness and pumping out the produce.

Here is the star performer, really an over performer, I can't go into the garden without looking at the vines and thinking, sheesh, I need to pick beans again. Here's the latest basketful of Neckarkönigin green beans. This looks like quite a few, but wait...

It looks HUGE in profile. It's hard to get the proper perspective on these, each bean is 8- to 10-inches long. That basketful is 2 ounces shy of 9 pounds from one harvest. And I harvested over 3 pounds 2 days before. The vines pumped out over 16 pounds of beans in 12 days, and I should have harvested more yesterday but didn't get around to it. This variety of bean seems to have a rather short and intense harvest period. If I grow them again I will have to succession sow a series of smaller plantings since I really don't want to have to deal with piles of produce that need to be preserved. I like to have a little bit in the freezer to add to winter soups, but this is ridiculous. They are a very tasty bean, I guess I shouldn't be complaining about over production. The vines are also very healthy looking, they have escaped the usual scourge of spider mites so far, so perhaps the vines will be able to bloom and set a second crop.

The cucumber vines are happily producing a steady stream of fruits. The plants are staying healthy so far, it really helps that both varieties are resistant to powdery mildew.

Zucchini, zucchini, I forgot to weigh one harvest of zucchini last week so the numbers look down, but they most decidedly are not. The oldest leaves on the zucchini plants are getting powdery mildew and rather than trying to treat the mildew I just cut off the leaves before the infection gets too bad. That seems to help to keep the infection from spreading too quickly and the plants are vigorous enough otherwise so they don't seem to be set back by the loss of the older leaves. Removing the big old leaves is probably actually helping to prevent the infection from getting worse since it helps to increase air circulation around the plants. And there was also a last little trickle of Apollo broccoli which isn't in the harvest totals because this basket of produce got photographed but not weighed. I managed to accumulate enough broccoli to make another overstuffed 10 egg frittata.

And here is the first "bounty" of tomatoes. Mostly Fiaschetto, a few Sunshine Cherry, 2 tiny little Wheatly's Frost Resistant Cherry, one Rosabec, and one Nyagous. I harvested one little Jaune Flamme yesterday which did not get photographed. The Rosabec seems to be susceptible to blossom end rot, the first 5 tomatoes to show color all had it, and I keep finding more, how disappointing.

I started harvesting the first dried pods of the Gigante beans. These will be included in the harvest totals when the beans are fully dried.

And I can't believe that I didn't get around to photographing the pile of Pimento de Padron peppers that started to come out of the garden last week! Oh have they been good. I'm so happy that the ailment that is stunting the leaves on the pepper plants is not affecting the quality of the peppers, it looks like it will be a good season for the Padrons. I'm still withholding judgement on the rest of the pepper crop.

Here's the harvest totals for the past week (what I remembered to weigh):

Neckarkönigin beans - 12 lb., 2.5 oz.
Green Fingers Persian cucumbers - 1 lb., 14.9 oz.
Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers - 3 lb., 1 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 14.9 oz.
Fiaschetto tomatoes - 2 lb., 4.8 oz.
Jaune Flamme tomato - 1.3 oz.
Nyagous tomato - 2.2 oz.
Rosabec tomato - 4.2 oz.
Sunshine Cherry tomatoes - 4.4 oz.
Wheatly's Frost Resistant cherry tomatoes - .2 oz.
Da Fiore zucchini - 12.8 oz.

The total harvests last week came to - 21 lb., 15.2 oz.
Which brings the totals harvests for the year up to - 131 lb., 6.9 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.