Monday, November 26, 2012

Harvest Monday - November 26, 2012

It has been easy to pretend that it is still summer around here. The weather has been sunny and mild, at times downright delightful, but then darkness descends early and I know it's not real, winter is coming. But the tomatoes have been lingering and we're still enjoying Caprese salads (in November!).

I was able to harvest another 5 pounds of Martian Giant tomatoes, which brings the production from the one plant up to 67 pounds for the season. I am so pleased with this variety. It has been healthy, productive, resistant to cracking, and it tastes good.

Martian Giant

The Amish Paste plants yielded nearly 2 1/2 more pounds of ripe fruits, and there were a few more tomatoes from the Nyagous, Rosabec, and Jaune Flamme plants as well. These have been small and the skins a bit tough, but they have still been delicious. And the Fiaschetto plants also eked out another 1 1/2 pounds of ripe tomatoes as well. Not photographed was the 1/2 pound of cherry tomatoes - more lunch treats for my husband.

Amish Paste, Nyagous, Rosabec, Jaune Flamme and Fiaschetto

One of my favorite Capsicum baccatuum varieties is Christmas Bell and I have three plants this year, but they did not do well. The plants were not happy and did not get very large so I got a very small crop. This was the miserly harvest of 3.3 ounces from last week.

Christmas Bell

Aji Pineaple is another favorite baccatuum variety that didn't do well this year. Those few yellow pods brought my harvest total up to 1.4 ounces for the year. But yet another favorite baccatuum that does exceptionally well in my garden has not disappointed. The red chiles are Aji Angelo, a mild pepper that I like to oven dry and grind into flakes. I've harvested over a pound of these and there are still some ripening on the plant.

Aji Pineapple and Aji Angelo

That's my first harvest of the fall planting of Lacinato kale. I braised that bunch with Gigante beans in turkey broth seasoned with tomatoes, garlic, and ground dried Sigaretta Dolce peppers - big yum. The Apollo broccoli produced a few more harvestable shoots which I'll save for now until I can harvest a few more shoots. And the Pimento de Padron plants produced a few more pods. It's a bit of a roulette game with the Padrons now - there's a few more spicy ones in the mix!

Lacinato kale, Apollo Broccoli, Pimento de Padron

I pulled all the dry pods from the Fagiolo del Purgatorio plants. This bunch yielded a pint jar of beans that I've not weighed yet. I will wait until the rest of the pods are harvested and dried and then weigh them all together. A lot of the beans are smaller than usual because the plants died an early spider mite induced death. Next year I'll grow them again, earlier, and more of them, and keep a sharper eye out for the evil mites.

Fagioli del Purgatorio

So, the weather report. It may not look like summer weather for a lot of you, but this is about as good as it gets around here. Highs up to the mid-70's and lows staying above 40ºF and best of all - no fog! It's helping the garden to continue giving. We are due for a couple more mild days and then a wet storm is supposed to hang around for a few days - no more summer. :(



Here's the harvests for the past week:

Apollo broccoli - 2.8 oz.
Dorato di Asti celery - 4 oz.
Lacinato kale - 10.7 oz.
Red Salad Bowl lettuce - 1.3 oz.
Parade "Scallions" - 2 lb.
Aji Angelo peppers - 9.7 oz.
Aji Pineapple peppers - .8 oz.
Christmas Bell peppers - 3.3 oz.
Large Sweet Antigua pepper - 3.2 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 4.7 oz.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 2 lb., 9.7 oz.
Fiaschetto tomatoes - 1 lb., 8.8 oz.
Jaune Flamme tomatoes - 4.1 oz.
Martian Giant tomatoes - 5 lb., .8 oz.
Nyagous tomatoes - 5.9 oz.
Rosabec tomatoes - 9 oz.
Sunshine Cherry tomatoes - 3.2 oz.
Wheatly's Frost Resistant cherry tomatoes - 6.4 oz.

The total harvests for the past week came to- 15 lb., 8.4 oz.
Which boosts the totals for the year up to - 718 lb., 12.1 oz.

That's a lot to be thankful for! 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.

10 comments:

  1. Ah to have 70s during the day again. I'm stuck with 40s and 20s for the lows.

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  2. Wow! 67 pounds off of one plant! That's awesome! Congrats on another week of wonderful harvests!

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  3. Oh those kale and white beans look splendid. (Tomatoes too, of course...)

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  4. I grow something very similar to those Christmas bell peppers (could well be the same chilli), the plants seem pretty hardy as they overwinter well here. Lovely tomatoes as always.

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  5. You grow the most fabulous variety of vegetables, I always learn something new when I visit! I was especially intrigued by the fagioli del purgatorio. There's so much out there to explore, how do you decided what to plant?

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    1. Good question, how do I decide... every time a seed catalog comes I'm like a kid in a candy store! I used to try to grow every unusual or pretty vegetable that I could get the seeds for. Too often though I would end up with something that I didn't eat or something that didn't grow well in my garden. So these days I decide based on what I want to eat, what I have room for in my garden and what my climate and the prevalent diseases will allow. I also don't bother to grow things that the local farmers do so well, like artichokes, brussels sprouts, and corn. But I still like to experiment. This year I devoted a lot of space to a number of different varieties and types of sweet peppers to find some that would do well in my climate. And I keep trying different cool climate tomatoes. I'm not sure what I'll be experimenting with next year - the seed catalogs have just started to arrive.

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  6. Wow, 67 pounds from one tomato plant. Clearly your season is longer than the 10-12 weeks I got in NYS from transplanting to death from late blight. When did you plant and when does harvest end? Do you have numbers from any other varieties? I've always wondered what the potential of a tomato plant is.

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    1. I sowed my seeds on March 30 and planted the seedlings in the garden on May 21. My first ripe tomato was harvested on August 17 although I didn't harvest the first Martian Giant until September 23, the latest of the bunch. So, my tomato harvests lasted 3 full months, I just ripped out half the plants two days ago and the rest are soon to go. The yields for each variety were wildly different - from 12.7 pounds for the Wheatly's Frost Resistant cherry to the amazing 67 pounds for the Martian Giant (with a few left on the vine!), the rest of them came it at 15, 23, 28, 38, and 40 pounds per plant, although I have some half ripe and green tomatoes that may ripen up, those haven't been tallied yet. So the potential for each plant is really quite variable, depending on variety. I'll post the latest YTD chart on my Harvests page.

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  7. Thanks for all the numbers. We started on the same schedule and ended up so different. I do wish I'd weighed harvest back in the years before late blight and annual hurricanes, because back then I was getting 10 -12 weeks of harvest.

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  8. Always find I'm drawn to the gardens where the grower weighs the production of each variety. Must make it easier to select varieties for the next year, no doubt.

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