On Sunday night I stepped into the garden before a strong rainstorm and harvested two 8-ball zucchini (which went with a third we'd harvested on Monday), three more green sweet peppers, a bright red Yum Yum pepper, and a few unexpected handfulls of Juliet tomatoes, along with more Sungolds and the first Sweet 100s. Getting tomatoes before the end of July here is a real treat. I'm sure I'll be drowning in tomatoes before long (I have 20 paste tomato plants, two cherries, and two slicers).
Two of the peppers and all three of the zucchini were immediately used for dinner. I stuffed the zucchini with a mixture of onions, peppers, cooked radish and kohlrabi greens, black beans, brown rice, Penzey's fajita seasoning and shredded cheese. We have lots of leftovers; each of us ate about half of one and an ear of sweetcorn from our CSA.
I'm also getting a CSA this year, so that's where a lot of our veggies come from. We've been rolling in the greens though, because in addition to the CSA I've been pulling radishes from the garden and trying to use their leaves, and I've thinned just one row of beets (I have 4 more to go) and used the greens in a variety of dishes. I tried my hand at fermenting radish greens for about a week and used them in fried rice. The beet greens mainly end up in egg dishes and pastas. The reason I had leftover cooked greens to put in our stuffed zucchini was because I cleaned and chopped all the radish and kohlrabi greens we had and put them on a pizza. Using a store-bought crust, I used basil pesto for sauce (I found the pesto—from 2014—buried in the freezer and it still tastes fine), then piled the pizza with greens, mozzarella cheese, more greens, and then curls of zucchini tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Finished it off with some fresh basil from the garden. We'll definitely make this again. (I was inspired by this recipe.)
I took some garden photos on July 5, before I'd finished most of my mulching. These are three weeks old now, but they'll help establish the layout of my barden.
In the foreground of the first photo (past the weeds) from right to left is: melons (Minnesota Midget and Banana), beets (pre-thinning), rhutabaga (pre-thinning), and some irregularly seeded rows of carrots with radish markers.
On the opposite side of the black path on the right are my determinant tomatoes (20 plants), and on the left is my pepper patch (both sweet and hot), and some fledgling kale and sweet chard seedlings (that are doing much better now).
From another point of view, you can see the four determinant tomatoes climbing up rebar, with the rhubarb plant behind them. To the right of the tomatoes is a small basil patch, and moving right from there is fennel, celery, zucchini, and winter squash (Red Kuri and Waltham Butternut).
This post is a part of Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at Happy Acres. Head over to his post to see what gardeners around the world are harvesting.
I love the sound of those stuffed zucchini! I use Penzey's fajita seasoning (and their taco seasoning) all the time. And I thought I was over-planting with a dozen paste tomatoes, and you have 20! I make sauce with most of mine. What do you do with all of yours?
ReplyDeleteI try to get my husband to use the fajita seasoning instead of taco when he's making omelets, burritos, etc., or we'll always be running out of taco seasoning. We like our tacos around here. :)
DeleteI'll certainly make some sauce. I often find myself roasting giant pans of tomatoes, sometimes alongside summer squash, onions, garlic, and/or carrots until everything is carmelized and delicious, then blending it up in our Vitamix and freezing it in quart bags. Only once have I actually sauce that's safe for canning; I'm usually not patient enough.
I love having home-canned crushed or quartered tomatoes and hope to do a lot of those. Also, salsa. I'll want to make 2-3 canner batches of salsa to get us through a year or two. I also will dry plenty; shooting for 1-2 gallons. Once upon a time I canned the taco sauce recipe from Ball and really enjoyed it. If I have time I'll try that again.
Worst case - if I get a glut of them I'll just wash/core, throw in freezer bags, and freeze them until I'm able to can them for crushed tomatoes or sauce. A few years ago I canned tomatoes on Christmas Eve using this method.
Lovely harvests and a beautiful property. I'm looking forward to your future posts.
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeleteI agree, lovely harvests and the garden is gorgeous. You have some constraints in zone 5a (from one who used to garden in 5b in Massachusetts). Hope you join us regularly.
ReplyDeleteIt was only when I started reading garden blogs that I even realized there were constraints on our growing season! I grew up a bit north of where I am now, in zone 4b, and my dad often had a small backyard vegetable garden, so that's what I grew up with. I was recently chatting with family who moved from northern Illinois to the Bay Area, and their daughter was telling me how they'll be harvesting through November/December, and potentially year-round. I actually welcome the break we get in winter; more time to plan and be in the kitchen when it's not so hot.
DeleteI hope to stick around; I was a semi-regularly on Harvest Monday years ago, but moves, life, and starting a new business took priority over blogging, and sometimes gardening. I hope the forced slow-down from the pandemic brings me back to it.
Your peppers and zucchini look great, so many peppers already. I'm going to try your stuffed zucchini as well as the pesto pizza. They both sound wonderful.
ReplyDelete