Harvest Monday - July 27, 2015

I always look forward to Harvest Monday, not just the opportunity to show off the bounty (hopefully) from my garden, but to see what is being produced in other gardens. It's always interesting and inspiring or envy inducing.

So, on to the latest harvests. There's a couple of new items. The first harvest of Padron Peppers, pretty much on schedule, last year the first ones appear in my tally on July 20, and in 2013 on July 26. That's actually the second harvest of Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes.

Padron peppers and Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes

Here's the first few cherry tomatoes from earlier in the week. The floodgates haven't exactly opened on the tomato harvest, but these few are a welcome treat. They came in earlier than last year but neck-and-neck with the first 2013 harvest. You can see that the cucumbers are coming in at a steady pace now.

Tasty Treat and Green Fingers cucumbers, Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes

I've been enjoying the cucumbers in salads, or thickly sliced with a sprinkle of coarse salt, smoked paprika, and olive oil. One day I topped cucumber slices instead of crackers with dollops of Burrata.

Green Fingers cucumbers

The bush beans produced another couple of harvests. They are starting to slow down now and the sow bug (pill bug, roly poly) population has exploded in the bean patch and the boogers are climbing up into the plants and eating the young beans. The pole snap beans are just starting to produce so I'm going to clear out the bush beans, they did a great job of producing so I'm not too sorry to see them go. The Romanesco zucchini production is slowing down, the plant looks like it's not very happy anymore. That's ok, it will make it much easier to pull the plant out when the Tromba squash starts producing, which will be any day now...

Slenderette beans and Romanesco zucchini

Royal Burgundy beans

 Red Baron beets have returned, this is the first of the summer planting.

Red Baron beets

The Spadona chicory produced another flush of leaves, 3 1/2 pounds in just a little over two weeks. I blanched the leaves and then sauteed some of them with pancetta and some garlic cream. I thought it was delicious, just mildly bitter, but Dave is much less tolerant of bitter flavors than I am, he ate what I served him but said the leftovers were all mine.

Spadona chicory and Romanesco zucchini

The onion harvest this year is not exactly a beauty pageant. There's bolters, and splitters (doubles and triples), and cracked onions. I've been trying to use up the worst of the bunch first and here's a few of them.  

Most of the Red Candy apple onions looked good as I lifted them, but not this one. And that's not another torpedo onion, it's a huge shallot that pretty much harvested itself as I went through the shallot patch bending the necks to hasten their maturing process. That Red Candy Apple onion weighs over a pound which should give you an idea of how huge that shallot is.

Zebrune shallot and Red Candy Apple onion

This is my second Rosso Lunga di Firenze torpedo type onion. These are turning out better than I expected. Even though a number of them have split into two or even three bulbs, the splits are clean and each bulb has a good wrapper. Only a couple have bolted so far.

Rosso Lunga di Firenze onion

The second variety of Spigariello broccoli that I'm trying this year is starting to produce nice shoots. This is similar to the Liscia (smooth leaf) broccoli that I grew earlier, the only real difference is that the leaves are more frilly. This bunch was blanched and paired with zucchini in a fritatta.

Spigariello Foglia Riccia broccoli

There's a few things to show this week that did not end up in the tally. This is what the Romanesco zucchini plant produced while I was on vacation. That big one weighed about 4 pounds (1.8 kg.). I didn't include them in the tally because I didn't use them. I had intended on making a batch of Preserved Zucchini (Zucchini Sott'Olio) but I just didn't have the energy for it while fighting a cold.

I did a taste test of a mature green chickpea and found them to be tastier than expected, more like a fresh raw shelling pea than a bean. Can a vegetable be cute? I think these are.

Pico Pardal chickpea

These are a bonus crop that I'm enjoying but not putting in the tally. I interplanted a few Pink Punch radishes in my patch of Purgatory beans. When the radishes started to bolt I let a few of them stay and bloom to help attract beneficial bugs into the garden. Now the plants are producing seed pods and it turns out that the pods on this variety are good eating. They are crisp, not fibrous, a bit sweet with a hint of radish bite. I snack on them in the garden and have been putting them in my salads. I've grown rat-tailed radishes before, which are grown for the seed pods and not the roots, and in my opinion these are better. The rat-tailed radish plants get to be huge and require a lot of space. The Pink Beauty plants were smaller and I think pods are better tasting. I'm sure that not all radish pods are good eating, but these turned out to be.

Pink Punch radish seed pods

The only harvest last week that wasn't photographed was the first few Rattlesnake beans.

Here's the details of the harvests last week:

Rattlesnake beans - 1.7 oz. (48 g.)
Royal Burgundy beans - 1 lb., 6.9 oz. (649 g.)
Slenderette beans - 2 lb., 2.5 oz. (978 g.)
Red Baron beets - 13.5 oz. (383 g.)
Beet greens - 11.4 oz. (323 g.)
Spigariello Riccia broccoli - 9 oz. (255 g.)
Spadona chicory - 3 lb., 7.4 oz. (1571 g.)
Green Fingers cucumbers - 1 lb., 10.9 oz. (763 g.)
Tasty Treat cucumbers - 2 lb., 3.8 oz. (1015 g.)
Red Candy Apple onion - 1 lb., 3.3 oz. (547 g.)
Rossa Lunga di Firenze onion - 1 lb., .4 oz. (465 g.)
Padron peppers - 4.4 oz. (125 g.)
Zebrune shallot (trimmed) - 12.3 oz. (349 g.)
Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes - 3.1 oz. (88 g.)
Romanesco zucchini - 4 lb., 7.9 oz. (2038 g.)

Total harvests for the week - 23 lb., 9.2 oz. (10.69 kg.)
2015 YTD - 411 lb., .9 oz. (186.45 kg.)

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