Harvest Monday - October 29, 2018

Peppers are back for Harvest Monday this week. The sweet pepper harvests are starting to wind down after these harvests although they are still quite a way from being finished. This year I'm lacto-fermenting a lot of peppers after experimenting with the process late in the season last year when I found that I LOVE what fermenting does to peppers. I made a couple of batches of fermented sweet pepper paste last year and really wished that I had a lot more of the stuff so this year I'm devoting a large portion of the harvests to the process. One thing that I figured out this year is that the thickest fleshed peppers make the best paste because thin fleshed peppers have a higher ratio of skin to flesh which makes for a less smooth paste. I also like to ferment the peppers that I dehydrate and grind into flakes, like Aji Angelo, Aji Amarillo, Aji Golden, and Ethiopian Brown. And then I also ferment the peppers that I turn into hot sauce, the newest addition to the hot sauce line-up being Sugar Rush Peach and before that a green Jalapeno sauce.

My newest experiment in progress is with that basketful of Long Sweet Turkish peppers shown below, I cut them in half and removed the seeds and am fermenting them for a week and then I will dehydrate them. I also have one batch of them that I sun-dried and another batch that I dehydrated. Those plants were really prolific.

Long Turkish Sweet

I made a batch of fermented pepper paste with previous harvests of Gogosar peppers so some of these were used in a baked stuffed pepper dish and then I seeded, sliced, and dehydrated the rest of them.

Gogosar

These Topepo Giallo peppers got the same treatment as the Gogosar peppers, stuffed or dehydrated. My latest stuffing for the peppers was a mix of eggplant, cheese, tomato, and breadcrumbs seasoned with parsley, oregano, capers, and anchovies. Big Yum! I'll have to write up the recipe on my recipe blog because it was a mashup of a couple of recipes and it was definitely good enough to make again.

Topepo Giallo

Odessa Market is very sweet and crisp and is my favorite variety for snacking on fresh and that has been the fate for most of the crop this year.

Odessa Market

This is the second harvest of Aleppo peppers and I think I'm going to try fermenting them before drying them. The first round got sun-dried and ground into flakes. Oh my, are they delicious. They have a sweet and fruity flavor and are not too spicy since I removed the seeds and cores before drying them. 

Aleppo

The Urfa Biber plants have not been as prolific as the Aleppo plants, here's my second harvest of them. The previous harvest was quite nice though and I got enough to fill an 8-ounce jar with sun-dried ground flakes. 

Urfa Biber

You can see that I seeded the peppers before drying them so the flakes are only mildly spicy. These too have a wonderful sweet and fruity flavor. They won't last long.

Urfa Biber

I've used most of the Mehmet's Sweet Turkish peppers as a frying/roasting pepper. Most of the time I roast them in the oven in a cast iron skillet but the latest dish I used them in was a saute with some Castandel beans with some tomato paste and fermented pepper paste and capers, garlic, and parsley. 

Mehmet's Sweet Turkish

Turkish Pimentos look quite a bit like Odessa Market but they have tougher skins and aren't as sweet but have a nice flavor. I made one small batch of fermented paste with them which is when I figured out that the thicker and juicier peppers are better suited for turning into paste. The pimento paste is tasty but I like the smoother results from thicker fleshed peppers. I've been dehydrating the rest and will use them to make paprika powder.

Turkish Pimento

Florina is a big juicy thick fleshed pepper that is perfect for roasting. I used a big bunch of these to make a few jars of preserved sweet peppers and then turned another couple of pounds into a batch of fermented pepper paste, they're perfect for that too.

Florina

Spicy and not. Yellow Pointy is a hot chinense habanero cousin. Caribbean Seasoning and Habanada are in the same family but are totally sweet. Last year I found that Habanada makes great fermented pepper flakes. I think that the Caribbean Seasoning peppers might also make great fermented flakes but they are very shy producers so I'll probably end up using all of them fresh. 

Yellow Pointy
Caribbean Seasoning, Habanada

Last year I dehydrated my pepper pastes on parchment lined baking sheets but this year I switched to unlined Pyrex baking dishes with good results. You can see how much the pureed peppers reduce down to make a paste. This photo was taken when the paste was about 90% dehydrated.

Fermented Ajvarski Paste

OK, enough of the peppers for this week. The Castandel beans were in high gear this week and I harvested 2 baskets of beans like this, actually the second harvest was even bigger than this one. We've been eating a lot of beans but not enough to get through the lot so I'll have to do some blanching and freezing. There aren't a lot of beans left on the bushes and the plants are now pretty heavily infested with spider mites so I'll have to cut them down soon.

Castandel Beans

The fennel has been quite happy this fall. These are 2 more bulbs from the spring sown plants and I need to cut some of the summer sown bulbs because they've suddenly got to be quite large. And the Pink Plume celery is super happy also. That's well over a pound of trimmed stalks and I could easily cut twice that amount again and the plants would still be quite lush looking.

Orion Fennel
Pink Plume Celery

The carrots that I'm thinning out are getting to be a respectable size, that was about a pound of carrots after trimming off the tops.

Short Stuff Carrots

And finally, the bees love the saffron blossoms and this one got stuck outside late and spent the night clinging to one of the plants. Click on the photo for a larger view and you can see that the bee is dusted with a nice load of pollen. After the sun finally came out and the bee warmed up she flew off.

Sleepy Bee and Saffron

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.

Harvest Monday - October 22, 2018

I won't bore you with more photos of peppers this week because I didn't take any. But I did get the camera out to snap a couple of shots of some new stuff from the garden.

The first saffron flowers appeared. One of the flowers had been attacked by something and I lost one stigma, I hope that the attacker found saffron to not be tasty and will leave the rest of the blossoms alone. I tried growing saffron once before in pots but had marginal success. So this time I'm devoting space in one of the garden beds to the bulbs. I've given up growing enough veggies that there's plenty of space available now. The bulbs will get to stay put for the next couple of years or more before they need to be lifted and divided. The 20 25 bulbs that I planted are capable of providing enough saffron to season a couple of dishes this year and next year should produce even more. So far each plant that has bloomed has popped up 2 flowers. So do the math, 2 flowers each from 20 25 plants at 3 stigmas per blossom potentially equals 120 150 stigmas. After drying those 120 150 stigmas there won't be enough to register on my scale that weighs in 1 gram increments.  Did you know that saffron has been cultivated for over 3500 years and has been selected and bred to the point where it is sterile and can no longer produce sexually and must be propagated by dividing and planting bulbs (technically corms). Think of the countless number of corms that have passed through generations of human hands back to those first cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean.  What's really mind boggling is that all of those flowers and stigmas have to be plucked by human hands. Think of that the next time you use a pinch of the precious stuff and don't whine about the price of the most expensive spice in the world.

Saffron Crocus Blossoms

Speedy arugula is back in the harvest basket again. This has become the only variety of arugula that I grow now. It is quick to crop as the name implies and it has a mild flavor that I prefer to spicier varieties and I like the feathery shaped leaves. Speedy rules!

Speedy Arugula

The Castandel beans are still producing. This variety seems to be a generous producer, there's still lots of small beans left on the plants that should size up over the next 2 or 3 weeks.

Castandel Beans

Other than some more generous harvests of peppers (over 90 pounds so far this season) the only other things I harvested this week were some scrawny broccoli shoots.

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.

Harvest Monday - October 15, 2018

There's not a lot of diversity in my harvests at the moment but I'm not really complaining because the harvests have primarily been LOTS of peppers. I've spent the last week preserving most of them. There's now a few pints of Preserved Sweet Peppers in the fridge and there's a few quarts of peppers fermenting and I've continued my experiments with sun drying peppers.

Florina

Florina and Ajvarski are a couple of my favorite peppers for roasting, they are large and thick fleshed and both are quite sweet. They make great preserved peppers.

Ajvarski

Turkish Pimento

Rosso Dolce da Appendere is also a good roasting pepper and suitable for preserving like Ajvarski and Florina. I made one batch of pepper paste with Criolla de Cocina and have a couple of batches in process made with Turkish Pimentos. I'm going to dry some of the fermented Turkish Pimentos and grind those into paprika.

Criolla de Cocina
Rosso Dolce da Appendere

Urfa Biber

I sun-dried all of the Aleppo peppers and Urfa Biber peppers are in progress. The sun-dried peppers do come out a bit different than peppers dried in a dehydrator. They don't become as brittle and they seem to be more aromatic.

Aleppo

I cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds and cores to both speed the drying process and to reduce the spiciness. It took about 4 days to get the peppers almost all completely dry, there were just a few peppers at the end of day 4 that had some moist spots so I finished those in the dehydrator.

Aleppo Peppers Drying in the Sun

I also tried drying the long sweet Turkish peppers in the sun but I had a problem with them curling up which inhibited the drying process so after 4 days when many of the still had soft moist spots I finished them off in the dehydrator.

Turkish Sweet Peppers Drying in the Sun

All of the sweet peppers are also great eaten fresh or cooked. We have been enjoying a lot of freshly cut up pepper sticks and I've been putting them in salads and we've enjoyed a few batches of cast iron skillet roasted peppers.

I didn't get around to photographing the smaller peppers like the Aji's and Jalapeños. I fermented a batch of Aji Angelo peppers and then dried them and those will be turned into flakes. And there's still more that I haven't gotten around to doing anything with yet. So many peppers and so little time!

The basil is still quite happy and I have to give it a good trim now and then to keep it from getting too overgrown. I cut it down quite hard and usually end up with more basil than I know what to do with. I used to make pesto and freeze it but found that I didn't really like the frozen product and didn't end up using it. Last week I came across a new and unusual way to preserve basil and could not resist giving it a try because it uses one of my favorite preserving techniques - fermentation. Check out this article about Whole Leaf Fermented Basil. I've got a batch on the counter now but it's not ready yet so I reserve judgement of the end result.

It looks like it's going to be a good season for fennel bulbs this fall. The spring sown plants are giving me bulbs and more plants that I started this summer are also producing bulbs.

Orion Fennel

I'm still amazed at the size bulbs that can come from the root of a plant that I cut to the ground already. This one got away from me a bit and started to split at the base of the plant but all it needed was a bit of trimming. The root that this bulb came from is already producing a new shoot so it will be interesting to see how many harvests I can get from it.

That's the latest from my garden, head on over to Our Happy Acres where Dave is hosting Harvest Monday and check out what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - October 8, 2018

There wasn't really anything different from the garden this past week.

I picked peppers again but less of them because we spent the weekend away and I didn't get a chance to really get into Fort Pepper before we went.

Turkish Sweet

One of my favorite things to do with the Topepo and Gogosar peppers is to bake them with a stuffing. This time I stuffed them with a mixture of bulk pork sausage and rice with onion, celery, celeriac and herbs which came out delicious and as usual I didn't get around to photographing the finished product.

Topepo Giallo
Gogosar

Another handful of Castandel beans.

More stalks of Pink Plume celery. This time I did a hand shot to give a better perspective of  the good sized stalks that the plants are producing this year.

The old battered broccoli plants gave me a few shoots and I thinned the parsnips and carrots.

I made a farro salad last week that used some veggies from the garden but what got me excited about the salad was that I used one of my new preserved veggies for the first time and they were such a success that it makes me wish I had made more. Corn chicos are dried kernels of roasted sweet corn and they are so good it makes me wish I could grow corn again. And they are so good that they deserve their own post so stay tuned.

That was it for the week. 

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.

Harvest Monday - October 1, 2018

I hate to jinx myself by saying that my increased protection around Fort Pepper is actually working. (Knock wood). I'm not really superstitious, but every time I publish a post that claims that such and such efforts against marauding rodents is effective they decide to prove me wrong. Anyway, the rodents have left the pepper buffet alone for a while and to my relief and delight I was able to bring in a beautiful assortment of ripe peppers.

Long Sweet Turkish

Turkish Pimento

Florina

Topepo Giallo

Gogosar

Odessa Market

Urfa Biber

Ajvarski

Criolla de Cocina

Aji Angelo
Rosso Dolce da Appendere

Here's what I resorted to doing to make it more difficult for the rodents to get in.

I covered the entire enclosure with lightweight Agribon fabric. The major downside to covering the entire bed is that it makes it a cozier spot for pests and diseases. I cut down one pepper plant, a baccatum variety called Queen Laurie, because it was a disgusting mess of aphids and ants. But even if Queen Laurie wasn't a mess of aphids I would have dethroned her because she seems to be daylight sensitive and had just barely started to form flower buds and there isn't any chance of getting ripe peppers in the months to come if she hasn't even bloomed by now. And I also found a number of plants to be infected powdery mildew. 

There were a couple of other firsts in the harvest basket.

Prinz Celeriac

The largest root on the right trimmed down to about a pound. These were the first a dozen plants in the garden.

Castandel Beans

And then a couple of continuing harvests.

Orion Fennel
Pink Plume Celery

The Pink Plume celery plants are producing some nice stalks this year. And the Orion fennel bulbs are nicer than I expected considering they are second shoots from the spring planting. Six of the eight plants that I started in the spring are producing a second round of shoots and most of the plants are giving me 2 or 3 new shoots. So far I've only been thinning down to one bulb per plant so I hope the remaining bulbs fatten up even more.

Pink Plume Celery

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.