Harvest Monday August 16th 2010

Tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes! We also harvested the beautiful orange wax pepper in my last post, as well as the first green bell pepper! I had to pull up a few of the potato plant due to crowding/space issues! All in all a productive week!

This Week's Harvest Totals:

11.790 lbs Tomatoes

2.5 oz Cranberry Beans

4.25 oz Bell Pepper

1.24 oz Wax Pepper

14.25 oz Potato

12 oz Basil

.03 oz Mint

Weekly Total: 13.932 lbs/6.319 kg

Seasonal Total: 30.13 lbs/13.667 kg

Harvest Totals have been updated.

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of Harvest Monday.

Some Color from the Garden - Shades of Red edition

A short trip to the plot today showed that shades of red are really standing out these days!

The sunflowers are exploding with color. This one in particular caught my eye:

I've been leaving a few Hungarian Wax peppers on the plant to ripen in the hopes that I can get a few red ones for seed. This one is the first to turn orange. In the back right of the photo another wax pepper from the same plant is still in the greenish-yellow stage:
I picked these Cherry Tomatoes this afternoon. They are black cherry, have a slightly sweet taste and are a wonderful dark almost purple color:
One pod of the Ottawa Cranberry Beans produced beans that were more red then the usual mix of cream and red the beans usually end up:
The Cranberry Bean jar (note the new jar) is filling up more and more each day:

Harvest Monday August 9th 2010

A great week weather wise! The tomatoes are coming in full force. Here is a nice picture of some of sundays harvest:

The beautiful bouquet of sunflowers was part of the harvest. We also finally got a few Scarlet Nantes carrots that had reached a good size! The hungarian pepper was just starting to turn from yellow to a more orange, it was picked to add a little zing to a homemade pasta sauce.

Last week we had eeked out 4 cranberry beans, but this week they really came strong! Each trip to the garden resulted in more beans being harvested:

Harvest totals for this week:

3.77 lbs Tomatoes

8 oz Basil

5.45 oz Cranberry Beans

2 oz Carrots

1.10 oz Wax Pepper

Weekly Total: 4.80 lbs/2.177 kg

Seasonal Total: 16.198 lbs/7.347 kg

Harvest Totals have been updated.

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of Harvest Monday.

What's growing for the fall?

As planting spaces open up throughout the plot we are slowly transitioning/planting fall crops. Here's what we have in the ground as of Sunday:
Kale - We were gifted 5 seedlings from fellow community gardener Marie (who provided our leeks at the start of the season). 4 of the 5 are doing really well!
Bush Beans - We planted a row of organic Fresh Pick bush beans. These are a Jade type green bean.
Butterhead lettuce - The Romaine was incredibly successful at the start of the season. Hopefully the Red Cross butterhead we planted will produce as well. Red Cross produces a mix of crimson and green heads.
Mesclun/Baby Greens - A mixed bed of Johnny's Selected Seeds Elegance Greens Mix, additional Ruby Streaks mustard greens, and Surrey (Arugula/Rocket with a 'wild arugula' look)
Onions- Egyptian/Walking Onions of course!
Beets - more Detroit Dark Red Beets! They were slow to mature and undersized in the spring because we planted late, hopefully this crop will yield larger end results.
Radish- A few interspersed plantings of Champion Radish
Spinach- A 2nd attempt at Bloomsdale Longstanding Spinach. Our spring/early planting suffered from our lack of experience and weed identification skills. Trying again in the hopes of better results.

As more space opens up I'll fill it with more greens/fall type crops.
What's to come in your fall garden?

Harvest Monday - August 2nd 2010

This week was an explosive week in the harvesting department! The first full sized tomatoes were picked on Wednesday. 2 Early Girl and 3 Striped Roman tomatoes:

We headed to the garden to do some major weeding and prep work for the fall on Saturday. When we got there we had discovered one of the striped roman tomatoes was collapsing out of it's cage under the weight of all the tomatoes that were on it! For the sake of the rest of the tomato plants we pulled the plant and took home all of the green tomatoes. We also grabbed a few cranberry red potatoes, some baby onions, 3 more ripe tomatoes, and a hungarian wax pepper:

We ended up picking 2 more ripe tomatoes, and some small bunches of Basil, Chives, and Sage yesterday which didn't make it into a photo.

Harvest Totals this week:

1.55 oz Cherry Tomatoes (including the first cherry tomatoes from 7/22)

2.84 lbs Tomatoes

3.44 lbs Green Tomatoes

4.25 oz Potato

1.05 oz Onion

.50 oz Hungarian Pepper

.55 oz Sage

.65 oz Basil

.45 oz Chives

Weekly Total: 6.75 lbs/3.06 kg

Seasonal Total: 11.394 lbs/5.168 kg

Harvest Totals have been updated.

Now that full sized tomatoes have certainly been harvested, the tomato watch is over. I'll note the first harvests and keep track for next year!

Another First harvest this week:

2 undersized Cranberry Bean pods had already dried out, yielding 4 Ottawa Cranberry Beans. The beans came from Daphne by way of Ottawa Gardener.

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of Harvest Monday.