Harvest Report

October 3, 2010 By 8 Comments

There has been so much that has needed harvesting with the cool and super wet weather that we have been having that I just can’t keep up with it all.  This is a collection from my home garden and my community garden plot: many tomatoes, fairy tale eggplant, leeks, small wonder spaghetti squash, zucchini, a baby cinderella pumpkin, and hops from the community plot (what the heck am I going to do with the hops???)

 

 

I also needed to pull out some carrots from the home garden before the dreaded rust fly burrowed in.

 

 

 

 

And I’ve been pulling beets for almost 8 weeks now, whenever we want them for dinner.

 

 

 

 Needless to say our dinner plates have been very colourful the past few weeks!

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First Harvest of September

September 6, 2010 By 9 Comments

It’s harvest season.  There are piles of produce filling my fridge, tabletop, counters, bootroom and basement.  I have bags and bowls and boxes of fresh food overtaking the house, overflowing the allotted foodstuff spaces, making it so I need to step over it all to just get through a doorway.  It’s definitely harvest season. 

Here is what I’ve harvested from my community garden and home gardens.  While I don’t grow a lot of any one thing, I grow a few of a lot of things.  Over 100 varieties of edibles making this definitive season of plenty.

From my community garden plot:

  • Potatoes: Red Chief, mystery white variety

  • Tomatoes: Black Russian and La Roma
  • Beans: Kentucky Wonder Brown, Kentucky Wonder Wax, Fortex Filet, Orca, and Purple Peacock
  • Grapes

 

  • Mammoth Melting Sugar Snow Peas (the last of them this week due to powdery mildew taking over)
  • Beets: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden
  • Squash: Small Wonder spaghetti, yellow spaghetti, Little October pumpkins

From my home garden:

  • Tomatoes: Siletz, La Roma, Green Zebra, Red Zebra, Sungold Cherry, Sweetheart Grape, Isis Candy, Gold Nugget, Patio, and Moneymaker.  I recently saw a recipe for roasting them in a dutch oven and now I have one on my kitchen gadget wish list along with a food strainer for making roasted tomato sauce.

 

 

  • Fairy Tale eggplant
  • Basil: Organic Sweet Basil, Thai Basil
  • Peppers: Filius Blue, Thai Dragon, and Garden Salsa
  • Aunt Molly’s ground cherries

  • Wild arugula and lettuce
  • Rainbow chard
  • Soybeans

I took some time this week to reflect on this abundance and the colder months to come.  While the days are long and busy now, I’m growing as tired as my plants are from a healthy growing season.  But the glut of produce is available now to enjoy.  The rainbow of colours and fresh flavours will soon be a fond memory so I best savour this season.  With these thoughts I planted my winter seeds and regained my energy for picking and packing away summer’s bounty.

thanks to Daphne’s Dandelions for hosting another wonderful Harvest Monday.

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Harvesting in Early August

August 9, 2010 By 8 Comments

This month my neighbours and I have more growing than we can harvest and eat so there is quite a bit of food sharing going around.  Almost daily I get a delivery of somthing, like a giant bowl of fresh figs, that I turn into some lucious creation.  I have also now organized a farm fresh egg delivery in my city neighbourhood and been out picking wild berries – all making for a crazy first few weeks in August.

I’m currently harvesting the following veg from my home garden and the community garden plot:

Beans: Purple Peacock, French Filet

Peas: MammothMelting Snow Peas

Tomatoes: Black Russian, Siletz, Sweetheart Grape, Gold Nugget Cherry, Sungold Cherry, Isis Candy Cherry, Red Zebra, Tumbler

Sema Fino Florence Fennel

Beets: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden

Chard: Rainbow, Fordhook Giant, Rhubarb

Peppers: Filius Blue, Garden Salsa

Basil: Organic Sweet Basil, Thai Basil

Squash: one Gold Nugget was ready at the community garden

Potatoes: Red Chief, French Fingerlings

All this has made for some interesting recipes like carmelized figs, fig ginger jam, walnut pesto, and mixed veggies ragu.  I’ll be sure to share very soon.  If I can get out of the kitchen long enough.  help.

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Harvest Monday: The First Tomatoes

July 26, 2010 By 16 Comments

This week the first slicer tomatoes ripened suddenly.  I grow these Siletz organic seeds because they are dependably early on the coast and will withstand cooler temperatures so they can be set out in April.  They are nice tidy shrubs with about 8-12 large tomatoes each ripening right now, and hopefully a long and productive season ahead.  I have 3 plants at the house and one at the community garden plot.

The toms were amazing with fresh basil and some olive sourdough I made from my starter. 

There are many peppers ready to be eaten green (or purple as with the Filius Blue peppers), some are picked to encourage more flowers, and the others will get left to allow the peppers to turn red and spicy.

There are still lots of blueberries on the shrubs out front, and now that I have divided my yellow alpine strawberries into a lot more room, I’m getting heaps of those as well (thanks for the advice, Laura!)  And with all the kale growing at the community garden, I just had to have more kale chips.

 

I thinned out a bunch of small beets this week for both the sauteed greens and the roots.  I’m growing at least 4 types this year: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden.

 

 

It has also been a big week for flower harvests.  With so many cutting blooms growing, my house is filled with colour both inside and out.  The crocosmia below is one of my favourites – both the firey orange crocosmia and the larger upright lucifer crocosmia look just a good indoors as outside from my hammock.

 

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