Harvest Monday 9/13/10

The tomatoes are still coming this week with over 29 pounds of slicing tomatoes. I made another batch of Annie's Salsa this week and plant to make tomato sauce next week.
I also harvested more arugula, carrots, dried beans, leeks, chard, tomatillios and the first winter squash( a buttercup).
The large pile of dried beans have not yet made it in to my totals because I weigh them after I shuck them. The forecast calls for rain tomorrow so I figured I should pick them while they are semi dry.

Total this week: 36.12 pounds
Total this year: 239.2 pounds

You can see what other gardeners harvested this week at Daphne's Dandelions.

First Winter Squash

There is a Fall chill in the air and so Friday night I had a craving for winter squash. I'd been trying to resist picking one for a week or more and instead enjoy the tomatoes we're still getting for a few more weeks. I finally succumbed and picked a Buttercup Squash for dinner last night. I choose this one because it looked like someone else was starting to nibble on it.
Inside it was dense, orange and wonderful. We scooped out the seeds. We baked it for about 45 minutes in the oven, topped it with nutmeg and butter and enjoyed it. The flesh almost melts in your mouth. No photos of it baked, we sat down and ate it too quickly.

Harvest Monday 9/6/10

This was the week of the tomatoes. Here's Tuesday's harvest. I've started picking some of the Amish Paste as soon as they get color because the slugs are getting to the low hanging fruit.
On Wednesday, I picked over 6 pounds of chard to blanch and freeze. It was a big pile but it cooked down to about 3 quarts once it was blanched. I also harvested over one pound of pineapple tomatillos because some of the plants fell over and rather than tie them up, I just cut off the plants. I didn't weigh the green ones because I'm not sure if they are going to ripen. I picked the ones that felt plump off the plants I cut down.
Thursday was even more tomatoes which allowed me to take my tomato photos. I harvested 32 pounds of tomatoes this week. This week I got enough tomatoes to make a double batch of Annie's Salsa. It made 11 jars. Mmmmm it is good. It looks like it will continue into next week at and I'll have enough to make some more salsa and even some sauce.

On Friday I picked some nice large beets, over 2 pounds. They'd been forgotten for a while and sure have grown in size. Not all the ones out there are this large though. I also picked some shelling beans, and of course, more tomatoes. I ended up with two photos because I didn't pick enough beets for the recipe the first time ;)
Saturday's harvest has some arugula hiding at the bottom, with a few cucumbers, and tomatoes.The hot peppers went into my salsa.
Sunday brought more tomatoes and some dried beans, both black and scarlet runner. The light brown are from the dragon tongue beans.
The weather has turned this weekend and it feels like Fall. I'm tempted to go out and pick some winter squash. However, the season in my garden is still summer for just a few more weeks. The peppers are finally setting more and more. The eggplants are blooming again and setting also. The tomatoes will bear heavily this next week too. We have just a few weeks until our first frost date. Winter squash will have to wait their turn.

Total this week: 47.08 pounds
Total this year: 203.12 pounds (Yay! I crossed the 200 lb mark!)

You can see what other gardeners harvested this week at Daphne's Dandelions.

Seed Bouquet

Encouraged by Ottawa Gardener, I made a seed bouquet. She's challenging people to post a photo of a seed-saving bouquet on blogs. It was just the motivation I needed to clip some seeds that I've been meaning to harvest.In my bouquet are cilantro/coriander seeds,
Carrot seeds (look like queen anne's lace), and winterbor kale seeds (gray and spiky seed pods).
I won't get many seeds from the kale as I left them in the garden too long. Many fell apart as I picked them. That's not such a bad thing as I may get volunteer plants. I still have plenty of seeds from the original seed packet and since these were only saved from one plant I may just use them for making sprouts to eat this winter.

Since the seeds were so fragile, I put each variety in it's own paper bag to hang to dry in my attic. You can find out the contest details here.

Beautiful Beans

I don't know what these beans are called. I called them a French Shell Bean. A quick internet photo search came up with one listing for "Tongue of Fire" beans. I bought some at the grocery store last fall as a fresh shelling bean. We enjoyed them so I set a few pods aside and dried them to plant this spring. We got another meal out of them and I've set aside a few more for next year. I found that they are best harvested when the pod is pink and white, then the beans inside are more mature. The pods that had more green, had pale green beans. They all turned white when we cooked them with some tomatoes. They were lovely and tender.
These are Scarlet Runner Beans. When I planted them I don't remember noticing that the beans were purple and black. I think they will fade as they dry. It was a wonderful surprise to open the first brown pod and find lovely lavender and black beans. There will be more of these soon.

Here's an article about cooking shell beans. It makes me think that maybe I should cook seed and cook my pole beans that have gotten too tough to eat as green beans.

Tomatoes!

Yesterday I finally had enough tomatoes to do a 'tomato photo-shoot'. I really wanted a photo of a basket full of a variety of tomatoes. So I picked what was ripe and took some photos.
Then I brought out the rest of the tomatoes from the house and artfully arranged them in the basket. That gave a little more depth of color since the just harvested ones were on the orange side.
I decided to also try in the shade to reduce the glare.
While I was at it, I decided I should photograph the different varieties so that when I'm trying to decide what seeds to plant I can look back at the pictures. It will also help with my seed saving when I don't know the tomato type. Some of my plants came from an heirloom mix and I'm having to play detective with the Fedco catalog to figure out what they are.

Here are some individual shots. Unknown Tomatoes are shown first. Please feel free to give any guesses in the comments.

Unknown 1- Pink/Yellow Fruit	Unknown 1
Unknown 2- Very Large Orange	Unknown 3-Round Deep Pink
Unknown 4- Large pink/red lobed fruit, has ripened further.	Unknown 4
Market Miracle	Purple Calabash
Cherokee Purple	Amish Paste
Green Zebra	Red Zebra