Harvest Monday - October 17, 2016

I skipped Harvest Monday last week because I was too tired Sunday night after an overnight backpack trip to put the post together and then too busy Monday morning. So here's two weeks of veggies, starting with a parade of tomatoes.

Orange Jazz and Pantano

L to R, Mavritanskite, Lime Green Salad, Chianti Rose

Reisetomate from Transylvania and Jaune Flamme

Sweet Gold

L to R, Piccolo Dattero, Pomme d'Amour, Camp Joy

L to R, Orange Jazz, Mavritanskite, Chianti Rose (top), and Pantano

Camp Joy (top) and Piccolo Dattero

Sweet Gold

That's not a duplicate photo of the first basket of Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes, it's another basketful, my one plant has been terrifically productive. That one plant has produced 29.5 pounds of tomatoes so far which makes it the single most productive tomato variety in the garden this year.

The parade started to thin out last week, most of the large and medium sized tomatoes are about done and the cherry tomatoes are slowing down.

This year I decided to dehydrate a lot of the tomatoes. That actually turned out to be the best use for the Pomme d'Amour tomatoes which I found to be not very tasty raw, but the flavor improved a lot when I dried them. And I continued my experiments with drying the Sweet Gold tomatoes with a salted spice blend. A mixture of fennel, smoked sweet onion, smoked peppers, and Red Boat salt has become the favorite. They were a really nice treat on the trail so I plan on making more. I combined the bulk of the Reisetomate tomatoes and a number of Pantano tomatoes to produce 4 cups of tomato paste which is probably enough to see me through the year. And I really like the flavor of tomato sauces made with the Mavritanskite tomatoes so I turned a bunch of them into sauce.

The Calabrese broccoli is only putting out a few shoots here and there.

Discus Buttercup

I had to harvest a number of the Discus Buttercup squash because of damage from sunburn and/or sowbugs. And then I found that the sowbugs were starting in on the Candystick Dessert Delicata squash that were in contact with the soil so I harvested a couple of those also (not photographed).

The Tromba d'Albenga squash had a big flush of fruits. I used the bulb ends to make baked rice stuffed squash, no recipe, I just winged it and they came out delicious. The long solid necks got turned into Zucchini Sott'Olio.

The Bonica and Sicilian eggplants eked out a few fruits. I used the Bonica to make a batch of caponata, which also used up some celery, capers, tomatoes, and onions from the garden.

Zuni Tomatillos

I cut down the Zuni tomatillo plants the other day. They were severely infected with powdery mildew and had to go. I was somewhat inclined to toss the plants complete with the tiny tomatillos but relented when it became clear that there was quite a load of them, 5.5 pounds in the husks. They are fairly easy to remove from the husks, otherwise they might indeed have gone into the compost. There are a lot of fruits that are barely the size of a large pea, more that are about the size of a grape, a just a few larger ones.

If I had waited any longer to harvest the kohlrabi I would have had to cut the protective sleeves off of them.

Kolibri

Kolibri and Kongo

Jericho Romaine Babies

I thinned out the Jericho Romaine lettuce to give the main planting room to size up.

Good news to report on the Soberanes fire. On October 12, day 83,  it was declared 100% contained. The bad news now is that we've had some significant rainfall. Rain is bad for the fire? Yes, when there's too much. Just enough would extinguish remaining hot spots and nurture new plant growth, but too much causes erosion, landslides, mud flows, and flooding. The crews that are working on suppression repair can't work when it rains. On Sunday my phone buzzed with an emergency alert that turned out to be a flash flood warning. I'm ok where I sit but Tassajara was included in the area affected by the warning, along with a number of other communities in or near the burn scar. They escaped the fire but now they are in danger of being flooded.  What a mess. I haven't heard any news of floods or problems this morning and the rain is clearing so they escaped the bullet for now.

Other harvests that I didn't photograph included a few and probably the last cucumbers, Mouse Melons, some peppers that got cleared out of the garden awhile ago, and the Zebrune shallots that have been sitting in a basket waiting to be weighed.

I ended up dehydrating a lot of the peppers I grew this year. Most of them were harvested (rescued from the rats) underripe and not as sweet and flavorful as they can be. Dehydrating improves the flavor quite a bit. A lot of the peppers did not get tallied since I lost track of what did or did not get weighed in after they were harvested.

Here's the details of the harvests for the past 2 weeks:

Calabrese broccoli - 6.9 oz.
Green Fingers cucumbers - 3.6 oz.
Mouse Melons - 8.8 oz.
Bonica eggplant - 1.6 lb.
Sicilian eggplant - 8.7 oz.
Kolibri kohlrabi - 6.8 lb.
Kongo kohlravi - 1.9 lb.
Jericho Romaine lettuce - 4.7 oz.
Craig's Grande Jalapeno peppers - 16.2 oz.
IPK P 557 (Italy) peppers (Yellow Bell) - 2.6 lb.
Rosso Dolce da Appendere peppers - 8.3 oz.
Zebrune shallots - 23.7 lb.
Zuni tomatillos - 5.5 lb.
Camp Joy cherry tomatoes - 5.5 lb.
Chianti Rose tomatoes - 9 lb.
Jaune Flamme tomatoes - 5.6 lb.
Lime Green Salad tomatoes - 1.3 lb.
Mavritanskite tomatoes - 9.1 lb.
Orange Jazz tomatoes - 9.6 lb.
Pantano tomatoes - 12.8 lb.
Piccolo Dattero cherry tomatoes - 3.5 lb.
Pomme d'Amour tomatoes - 3.4 lb.
Reisetomate from Transylvania tomatoes - 1.4 lb.
Sweet Gold cherry tomatoes - 12.2 lb.
Romanesco zucchini - 2.4 lb.
Tromba d'Albenga squash - 9.1 lb.

Total harvests for the past 2 weeks - 130.6 lb. (59.3 kg.)
2016 YTD -  800.7 lb. (363.2 kg.)

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