Harvest Monday - August 31, 2015

There's some new goodies in the harvest basket this week. The first sweet peppers to fully ripen are the Yummy Belles. There were a couple of accidental harvests. The pepper on the left is a sweet frying pepper called Rosso Dolce da Appendere that ripens to bright red. Fortunately it is also tasty as a green pepper. The plants are growing next to the Anaheim peppers which I like to harvest green and I pulled the Rosso Dolce pepper thinking it was a ripening Anaheim. That was fine because I was making another batch of gazpacho and need a sweet pepper in the mix. Craig's Grande jalapeño is growing next to the Sonora peppers and I knocked a couple of young peppers off the plants, which worked out fine as well, I used them in the dish that I harvested the Sonoras for. I roasted and peeled the Sonoras and the jalapeños to incorporate into a stew that featured home processed posole (hominy) made from last year's Cascade Ruby Gold flint corn. The stew also had some Tromba D'Albenga squash, onions, and garlic. I made a very simple salsa of fresh tomatoes, avocado, Tropea onions, and lime juice to top off each bowl of stew. I'm working on a post at the moment about my home processed posole.

Rosso Dolce Appendere, Yummy Belle, Padron, Craig's Grande Jalapeño, Sonora Anaheim

Some of the Red Candy Apple onion starts turned out to be Tropea onions and here's the first of them that have finished curing. I have been using these to make what I call "instant pickled onions" - I cut them into thin slices using my handy little Benriner mandolin, then toss the slices with a pinch of salt and a splash of wine vinegar. They are ready in moments to top whatever you like to have pickled onions on.

Tropea onions

New crop Purgatory Beans! My best harvest in years. I wrote a spotlight post about them last week if you want to learn more about them. While finding space on my pantry shelf for the new jar of beans I unearthed the last of the 2013 harvest, about 6 ounces of beans, just enough to whip up a salad with tomatoes, tuna and pickled Tropea onions. The Camp Joy cherry tomatoes were perfect in the salad, they aren't as assertive as the sweet-tart Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes and I thought their savory flavor was a good compliment to the beans.

Purgatory beans

I've been harvesting the Tromba D'Albenga squash a bit large. The larger ones are perfect for making Zucchini Sott'Olio and the firm flesh of the large ones are also great for stews like the posole stew I mentioned before.

Tromba D'Albenga squash

A couple more harvests of Amish Paste tomatoes means I now have 10 pounds of canned tomatoes in the pantry.

Amish Paste

I'm not sure if there will be more cucumber harvests like this one. There's plenty of Green Fingers still coming in, but one of the Tasty Treat plants collapsed from wilt and the other may be on the way out. There would have been more cucumbers in the tally if I hadn't gotten tired of harvesting them. A number of them got to be huge and went straight to the compost from the garden.

Green Fingers and Tasty Treat

This was one of the Superstar onions that bolted. I've got all of them still hanging upside down on the curing rack outside. Most of them are keeping pretty well as their fat flowerstalks slowly dry out. I don't want to cut all the flower stalks off because they are hollow and cutting them makes the bulb more prone to getting some sort of infection. So I take them from the rack as I need them and trim them and tally them one at a time. This one is big enough to cook with for the better part of the week - about 1 3/4 pounds after I trimmed it. All of my Red Candy Apple onions have finished curing and I've trimmed them and brought them inside, but I haven't gotten around to weighing them yet.

Superstar

This is not in the tally yet, but it was too pretty to not show off.

Mandan Parching Lavender corn

There were a few harvests that I didn't get around to photographing, they're included in the details below.

Speedy arugula - 7 oz.
Purgatroy beans - 3 lb., .9 oz.
Purple pole beans - 2.6 oz.
Stortino di Trento beans - 3.6 oz.
Green Fingers cucumbers - 3 lb., 6.6 oz.
Tasty Treat cucumbers - 4.3 oz.
Sicilian eggplant - 1 lb, 10.8 oz.
Candy onion - 1 lb., 11.9 oz.
Tropea onions - 2 lb., 7.1 oz.
Craig's Grande Jalapeño peppers - .7 oz.
Padron peppers - 8.4 oz.
Rosso Dolce da Appendere pepper - 4.2 oz.
Sonora Anaheim peppers - 8.7 oz.
Yummy Belle peppers - 9.7 oz.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 6 lb., 2.1 oz.
Caspian Pink tomatoes - 1 lb., 10 oz.
Jaune Flamme tomatoes - 1.9 oz.
Mavritanskite tomatoes - 1 lb., 9.8 oz.
Pantano tomatoes - 7.4 oz.
Tromba D'Albenga squash - 8 lb., 2 oz.

Total harvests for the week - 35 lb., 14.4 oz.
2015 YTD - 590 lb., 2.5 oz.

If I had gotten around to tallying the Red Candy Apple onions I would have passed the 600 lb. mark this week. I'll do it today so I can hit the mark this month.

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.

Totally off topic - 

I want to give a heads up to US readers who are nature lovers to watch the first segment of Big Blue Live tonight. It is being broadcast live from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a place I love and where I spend every Thursday afternoon as a volunteer guide. You will get a glimpse of something that I too often take for granted - the incredible wildlife that inhabits or visits Monterey Bay. UK viewers already got their shot at it, now it's our turn.