Harvest Monday - October 1, 2012

Yesterday was my single largest harvest day of the year. I was just starting to get to the bottom of the mound of tomatoes and eggplants that I harvested last week and now I get to start all over again, not that I'm complaining, I'm thrilled!

First up though is a harvest from earlier in the week. Shown above is the harvest from Wednesday, a couple of Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers, a few zucchini, ripe Melrose sweet peppers, Pimento de Padrons, and a large handful of Rolande filet beans. I think the Padrons hit their peak the week before last but the plants are still producing enough peppers that we eat a bowlful of them at least every other night. The Japanese cucumbers are producing in manageable amounts but the Persian cukes have come to almost a dead stop. And the zucchini is producing enough that I've been experimenting with drying them to preserve them.

So, on to the harvest on Sunday.

Sunshine Cherry and Wheatly's Frost Resistant Cherry tomatoes

Fiaschetto tomatoes

Upon looking at the tired old Fiaschetto tomato plants I figured that the harvest this week would be much less than the harvest on Sunday of last week. Surprise, down but not by much, I harvested 17 pounds on the 23rd and  almost 13 pounds yesterday. I'm rather amazed that the three plants have collectively produced 51 pounds of tomatoes so far and there's a few more left to ripen up. I've dried enough to fill 8 pint jars and I canned 8 pints and I made sauce to stash in the freezer. But I haven't touched an ounce of the current harvest...

Amish Paste

The Amish Paste tomatoes are starting to ripen in quantity now. Last week I accumulated enough to cook down to make a couple of quarts of puree to stash in the freezer. This week I'll probably use most  of the harvest to make into paste.

Left to Right: Rosabec, Nyagous, and Jaune Flamme

We have been managing to wrap ourselves around the rest of the tomatoes in salads and other preparations. I used about 5 pounds of tomatoes yesterday to make tomato Gazpacho, just in time for the first truly hot day of the year. But they are starting to accumulate so I'm going to have to devise some way to preserve the bulk of them this week.

Clockwise from the left:
Moroccan, Liebesapfel, Wisconsin Lakes, Sigaretta Dolce

I harvested the first Moroccan peppers, aka PI593480 (Morocco). I've tried to grow these in the past but had less than stellar results. This year the plants are producing good peppers in spite of being afflicted with some sort of leaf stunting disease (probably a strain of cucumber mosaic virus). I haven't had a chance to sample the ripe peppers yet. And those are the 2nd and 3rd Liebesapfel peppers, sweet and tasty with medium thick flesh. Those and the first ripe Wisconsin Lakes bell peppers went into the Gazpacho yesterday. The long thin peppers and the curvy peppers in the center are all Sigaretta Dolce. One of my three plants is producing the off shaped peppers. I haven't tasted the curvy peppers yet, it will be interesting to see if the flavor and spice are not true to type either.

Clockwise from upper left:
Sunnybrook Pimento, Jimmy Nardello's, Flamingo Bell,
Martian Giant tomato, and Shepard's Ramshorn

More peppers are slowly starting to ripen. The sweet frying peppers have been producing for a few weeks but the bells and pimento types are just getting started. And the only beefsteak tomato that I'm growing this year, the Martian Giant is also just getting started.

Diamond and Salangana eggplant

Wow, I'm really happy with how the eggplant is producing this year, in spite of a cool summer. Diamond has always been a reliable producer in my garden. Salangana is new in my garden this year and it is doing well enough that it would be tough to have to choose between the two varieties if I could only have one. Both varieties are delicious and productive, Salangana has only a slight edge on the Diamond so far in terms of production, 10.1 pounds versus 9.4 pounds. But it looks like Salangana will outproduce Diamond in the end, it has more baby fruits on the plants now. Not photographed is another harvest of Kamo eggplant. It's in the middle of the production pack at 9.9 pounds to date. It's a delicious and tender round purple eggplant and I'm loving it as well. I just didn't get around to photographing it yesterday.

Other things not photographed yesterday was another large handful of filet beans, more zucchini, a couple more cucumbers, the first ripe Large Sweet Antigua pepper, and more Padrons. So the grand total harvest yesterday weighed in at over 64 pounds! Oh, and I forgot that I harvested another round of Manzano chile peppers the other day.

And another first yesterday, the hottest day of the year. I laugh every time I look at this chart of the temperatures for the past week. The low last night was higher than the high five days ago, it got up to 62ºF last Wednesday and down to 65ºF last night. We swung from a low of 45ºF on the morning of the 25th to a high of 98ºF yesterday. We're in for another hot day today but should get back to the usual weather is a couple of days. This summer has been, um, was so cool that I realized last night that I never had to pull my fan out of storage to put in the bedroom. We don't have air-conditioning and don't need it, when we have warm weather we just keep the house closed up during the day and open the windows at night to cool things off. On the warmest nights I set up a fan to pull cool air from outside into the bedroom. This year I never needed to set up the fan, until last night, but I wasn't going to go rummaging around in storage at 3:00 in the morning. We are so out of warm weather practice that we forgot to open windows in the rest of the house to cool it off last night!

Here's the harvest totals for the past week:

Rolande filet beans - 1 lb., 3.8 oz.
Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers - 2 lb., 3.1 oz.
Diamond eggplant - 2 lb., .8 oz.
Kamo eggplant - 2 lb., 4.4 oz.
Salangana eggplant - 2 lb., 11 oz.
Flamingo bell pepper - 5.4 oz.
Jimmy Nardello peppers - 1 lb., 6.8 oz.
Large Sweet Antigua pepper - 5 oz.
Liebesapfel peppers - 4.8 oz.
Melrose peppers - 12 oz.
Moroccan peppers - 4.6 oz.
Padron peppers - 15.7 oz.
Shephard's Ramshorn pepper - 3.8 oz.
Sigaretta Dolce peppers - 6.9 oz.
Sunnybrook Pimento peppers - 13.7 oz.
Wisconsin Lakes peppers - 11.3 oz.
Yellow Manzano chile peppers - 1 lb.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 9 lb., 2.4 oz.
Fiaschetto tomatoes - 12 lb., 13 oz.
Jaune Flamme tomatoes - 2 lb., 12.3 oz.
Martian Giant tomato - 8.4 oz.
Nyagous tomatoes - 7 lb., 9.9 oz.
Rosabec tomatoes - 7 lb., 10.3 oz.
Sunshine Cherry tomatoes - 6 lb., 1.4 oz.
Wheatly's Frost Resistant cherry tomatoes - 2 lb., 4.6 oz.
Da Fiore zucchini - 4 lb., 3.7 oz.

The total harvests for the week came to - 71 lb., 3.1 oz.
Which brings the harvest totals for the year up to - 381 lb., 3.8 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.