Harvest Monday - December 7, 2015

The harvests have really slowed down, but there's a couple of stragglers to keep things interesting for this report. I was trimming back the Tromba D'Albenga vines which were zinged by a few frosty nights but not entirely done in. I found these during the cleanup...

Tromba D'Albenga squash

It seems that the frosty nights weren't severe enough to kill off the squash vines, some of the leaves were zinged but the vines and some lingering baby squash came through ok.

Another straggler is the dried Rattlesnake beans. I grew the Rattlesnake beans for fresh snap beans. The vines were incredibly vigorous and productive - the 6 plants that shared a trellis with the Purple and Stortino di Trento beans produced 7 pounds of snap beans. When all three varieties started to produce a second round of beans I decided to allow the Rattlesnake beans to produce dry beans and they turned out to be surprisingly productive again - I got just over a pound of dried beans.

Rattlesnake beans

After this week this is pretty much what will be appearing in the harvest basket for a while. Broccoli and weather permitting some more snow peas. I have the snow peas on a trellis covered with mesh to protect them from the birds and I've got some Agribon frost cloth handy in case the nighttime temperatures dip below freezing again. The vines will usually tolerate some light frost but the flowers and peas get ruined, the frost cloth provides just enough protection to keep the flowers and peas from being damaged, but if we get a hard freeze that lasts for more than a few hours I don't think the peas will pull through.

Apollo brokali, Batavia and Di Ciccio broccoli, Golden Sweet snow peas

And there's a few more parsnips in the garden so these will definitely be showing up in the next few weeks. They've gotten to be big enough that I only need to harvest one or two at a time. This one went into a pot of soup with some leftover turkey, that volunteer carrot shown next, some fresh sweet peppers from earlier harvests, fresh (still!) Tromba squash, dried Tarbais beans from a year ago, frozen tomato puree, onions from my stash. It's such a good feeling to be able to put together a meal that is chock full of goodies from the garden.

Gladiator parsnip

I grew some Spanish Black carrots a couple of years a go and let some of them go to seed. A fair amount of the seeds ended up scattered around the garden and in the compost and ever since then they have been volunteering around the garden. I let them grow if they're not in the way of other veggies so every once in a while I get to pull a nice specimen.  They aren't the sweetest carrots but they do have a good "carroty" flavor and they are pretty and I've found that I really like them in soup. This one was volunteering on the edge of the squash patch - all trimmed up like this it weighed in at nearly a quarter pound - not bad.

Spanish Black carrot

That's it for the harvests this week, here's the details:

Rattlesnake beans - 18.3 oz.
Apollo brokali - 7.6 oz.
Batavia broccoli - 7.1 oz.
Di Ciccio broccoli - 5.4 oz.
Spanish Black carrot - 3.8 oz.
Golden Sweet snow peas - .5 oz.
Gladiator parsnip - 9.4 oz.
Tromba D'Albenga squash - 7.8 oz.

Total harvests for the week - 3 lb., 11.9 oz. (1.7 kg.)
2015 YTD - 1223 lb., 6.8 oz. (554.9 kg.)

Harvest Monday is hosted by Dave on his blog Our Happy Acres, head on over there to be inspired by what other garden bloggers have been harvesting and cooking up lately.