Harvest Monday: August 31

I made a new friend in the garden this week. Although she startled me when I first met her, now I like to look for her when I'm out there. I've learned she's a common Yellow Garden Spider, but this is the first time I've seen one. She's woven her web right among the Juliet tomato plants.

This week's harvests were still very tomato-centric; I brought in over 30 pounds, and so far I've canned 9 pints of salsa, 6 quarts of crushed tomatoes, and 7 half pints of tomato juice. I did another dehydrator full of Juliet tomatoes, adding another quart+ to the pantry, and I still have two large bowls of slightly underripe tomatoes on the counter. It seems like it will never end, but I'm not complaining. Our weather appears to be turning this week, with lows dipping down into the 50s and highs in the 70s most days. I think we'll have one or two more 80 degree days this year, but we're definitely on the path to fall. As long as this weather holds for the next 30 days or so, I'll be happy. Fall is my favorite season.

Although the seasons are starting to change, Juliet shows no signs of stopping. look at these lovely tomato clusters!

The Romas are just about done, and the Celebrities are chugging along but slowing down. My indeterminate tomatoes are still setting blossoms; they seem more optimistic about the season than I do.

I harvested some bell peppers and hot peppers, although something seems to be causing rot in the red bells, which is disappointing because they finally got enough color to pick this week. I picked my first Chocolate bell pepper though, and those plants appear healthy. This was one of a number of first harvests.

I hardly use celery in the summer—in my kitchen it shows up most in soups and stews, fall - spring. So when I grow it, it's almost entirely for the freezer. I took my first cutting this week; I should have picked it earlier to encourage more growth, but I'll still get plenty this year. This was a nice bouquet for an afternoon before it was chopped and frozen.

Another first harvest was a Minnesota Midget melon - a short season variety of cantaloupe that grows to be about softball size. This is my first year growing melons in the home garden, and I've been anxious to see if they will ripen (they were planted a bit late, direct-seeded, with very old seed). I'd read about "the slip" with melons—you know they're ripe when the fruit slips right off the vine without any resistance. I picked up a melon that had changed color to inspect it, and I gasped when it slipped! I think I should have let it go for a few more days, as it still had plenty of yellow on it and it was a bit bland tasting. I have one more of these that should ripen (along with lots of Banana Melons), so I'll try to let that one go longer.

Some of my Jacob's Cattle bean pods were dry, so I harvested and shelled those. I'm surprised I got any at all, as this entire row was eaten almost down to the dirt by something right after I planted it, but it was resilient. I'll be lucky if I fill this jar this year with the entire row, but I look forward to eating my first home-cooked dried beans.

My last "harvest" was something I was threatening my husband with all week and had all but decided not to do. We have purslane everywhere in the garden, growing as a weed. Particularly in the area we've cleared to expand the garden for next year (I still need to write about those plans), we have a bumper "crop." The more I read about it, though, the more I wanted to try it. So I grabbed some and brought it in to add to a green smoothie, after snacking on it in the garden to see what it tasted like. I blended it with a tart apple, cucumber, almond milk, and a little light honey syrup left from canning peaches. It made a great smoothie! There's a chance it won't all end up in the compost pile next year.

Here's a photo of some purslane, held up over a field of purslane.

The field of purslane is no more, though. I made it out there with just enough time before sunset on Sunday and tilled the entire space. The plan is to have the layout for the new garden planned over the next week so I can cover some areas with cardboard mulch, mark out the space for the garlic beds, and seed the rest with a cover crop to enrich the soil before next spring's planting.

As for last harvests, I picked two 8-ball zucchinis that may end up on the compost pile (although still small, they were turning from green to yellow like a fall squash would) and then pulled the squash beetle ravaged plants. In a big of spitefulness, I tossed one of the squash beetles into the spider's web.

The rest of my weekend was filled with non-garden food projects, including rendering lard for the first time (somewhat successful) and taking delivery of bulk meat from a local farmer. I wrote about our process of buying a whole hog, if you're interested.

Harvest Monday is a time for gardeners around the world to share their harvest and other garden activities. It's hosted by Dave at Happy Acres; head on over to the Harvest Monday hub at the bottom of his posts to see what he and other gardeners are doing.

Harvest Monday: First Tomatoes of 2020

The garden is looking lovely, although honestly I feel like I've been neglecting it since I'm only out there a couple of times per week. My plant selections anticipated that behavior, so I think it should be ok. On Monday (no photo) we harvested our first full-size green sweet pepper, some basil and a single Sungold tomato, which tasted like heaven.

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.

Garden Lessons

The garden season is not entirely over (it better not be - there are a lot of green tomatoes on my plants), but I've gotten through enough of it to reflect on things I want to do differently next year. Some of my readers who are more experienced gardeners may say "duh," but this is only my third year of gardening (fourth if you include containers). Hopefully, I have about 50 years of gardening ahead of me. My husband has urged me to write these things down so I don't have the same frustrations next year.

We need to learn how to deal with pests.

Whether flying, crawling, or scampering, this year's mild winter has made every pest invasion more extreme. There are a variety of measures I can take to keep the pests out of my garden.

• Dig our chicken wire barrier down into the ground.
• Last year, when I put up the chicken wire along our chain link fence that encloses the garden, I didn't dig it into the ground. I knew I should have, but we had already felled 4 trees, added 4 large beds, hauled in garden soil, and constructed a serious trellis/gate. I needed to get plants in the ground, not dig in the chicken wire—or so I thought. The ground-level barrier worked for a year, but this year I've seen mice and chipmunks running free through the garden. They've definitely learned to burrow. Either this fall or early next spring, we're going to have to invest some serious sweat equity - digging in approximately 125 feet of chicken wire.
• Invest in some hoops and cover fabric.
• If the mice do end up getting in, I don't want to let them have my beet harvest again. I know the hoops aren't 100% necessary, but I think I'd like to have them to extend the growing season anyway. I wish I would have purchased some immediately after I discovered the devastation in the beet patch - the entire fall bed (beets, chard, turnips) has had all of its leaves eaten by some type of critter. I dont' think it's going to make it. Hopefully this covering will also keep our plants protected from the bugs that infested our garden this year - at least until they're established enough to need pollinating.
• Figure out how to outsmart the slugs.
• We've tried beer traps. We've tried treating with Sluggo (maybe not frequently enough?) The fact is slugs are still decimating many of our crops. They seem to love our soil, and I need to find a way to get rid of them.
• Pay more attention to my summer squash and cucumbers, and Aaron's hops.
• I think these need to be sprayed much more often than we did (we use pyrethrin). That, or I need to plan to have two rotations of these plants so I have more maturing after the first planting is lost to the bugs.

We need to make better use of our available space.

• After harvesting the early bed, most of it stayed empty (except 4 rows of pole beans on 2 trellises) because it was too late to plant the melons I had planned for that bed. I could have, however, planted more summer squash in that space—it would have started producing fruit right as we started severely cutting back our powdery-mildew and squash vine borer infested leaves and stems.
• Some things can be planted closer together (garlic), while others need to be farther apart (onions, tomatoes, beets).
• I need to give up on planting in the ground on the back fence line (it's overrun with weeds from all the neighbors) and add a few smaller raised beds back there. They'll be perfect for determinant tomatoes, bush beans, or smaller root veggies like beets and turnips.

I need to build better tomato cages.

• I have these great tomato cages that store flat (they're made up of 3 poles and 9 connectors/supports each), but I consistently assemble them backwards. I face the supports the wrong way, so as the plant grows it busts out of the cages. Simply snapping on the supports facing the correct direction will fix this problem—yet I've managed to screw it up for 2 years.

I've got to make the basil last.

• Believe it or not, I think this means planting less of it. I have a tendency to plant too much basil, which results in my inability to keep up with harvests and the premature yellowing of the plants. I need to be ruthless when I harvest so the regrowth continues until the tomatoes are all ripe.
• Related - when I have a glut of basil, I need to make pesto, even if there is a bunch in the freezer. I'm looking at a pesto-free winter because I didn't make pesto in June when I should have.

It's time to start identifying my preferred varieties.

• This is most important for me in regards to the plants I grow a lot of and put up for the winter—tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, zucchini, garlic.
• Tomatoes: I started growing exclusively heirloom tomatoes because it seemed the most authentic type to grow. Don't get me wrong - they're delicious. But, I need a large portion of my tomatoes to be suitable for canning. Most of the heirlooms I grow are delicious slicers, but they don't put out the volume to give me enough for canning.
• This was the first year I grew some determinant varieties, and Polbig (an early hybrid) is definitely a keeper. It put out tons of fist-sized tomatoes that are perfect for canning, sauce, salsa, etc.
• Blondkopfchen, an heirloom cherry tomato, is definitely a keeper. It takes longer to ripen than some other cherries, but its huge clusters give me an enormous amount of tomatoes at once - they're perfect for roasting, fresh eating, and soon I hope to give them a try in my newly-purchased dehydrator.
• Moonshine is my favorite slicer, so that heirloom will still find a place in my garden.
• Amish Paste, however, is on its way out. The huge tomatoes would be great, except they always split on me, and I end up cutting off way to much to get rid of the damaged parts. Also, I only get a few ripe tomatoes a day - not enough at once to put up anything of consequence.
• Matt's Wild Cherry tastes delicious, but it sprawls way too much for me (the plant is so tall I can't pick the highest clusters) and it annoys me that the fruits seem to ripen in a set order on the cluster - those closest to the stem ripen much faster than the fruits at the end of the cluster. This means more time spent picking, as you can only pick one or two fruits from each cluster at a time. I appreciated that they ripened the earliest, though - so I'm on the hunt for another early-ripening cherry tomato.
• Heinz was on trial in my garden this year, and it will probably get another year. The fruits are small, but they take longer than the Polbig's to ripen, meaning I have an extended canning/preserving season.
• According to this list, I might end up with only 5 or 6 tomato varieties each year (assuming I try something new every year). I need to realize that that's ok. I've got lots of other fish (veggies?) to fry.
• Beans
• I've only been growing beans for 2 years, but I've learned a variety of lessons. 1) Don't plant a double row in front of the trellis - the leaves will grow so thick you'll never find the beans! 2) Don't freak out about getting them in the ground as soon as we're clear of the last frost. Better for them to get a start to grow healthy stems than to be set back by cold, wet weather. 3) I need to stagger my bean planting. This year I planted up until July and I think I'll get everything harvested before the first frost.
• Ideal Market tastes delicious, but it's hard to find in the mess of beans. I'm going to stick with beans that have some sort of color to them so they're easier to pick.
• Using that criteria, I think Rattlesnake and Purple Trionfo Violetto are keepers.
• I'm going to actually grow my pole beans on poles (teepees) next year. The beautiful trellises my father in law makes keep getting blown over in the wind.
• I'll likely try growing edamame again next year, although every single seed failed to come up this year.
• I'll need another year of trials on growing dry beans. The bugs and slugs were so ruthless this year, they didn't get a fair shot.
• Cucumbers
• Actually labeling my cucumbers will likely help me determine which ones I like :) I had a hard time with germination this year, then ended up planting them way too close together. Next year will be better. My husband loves pickles, so I need to plant a lot of pickling cucs and just a few slicers.
• Zucchini & Summer Squash
• I'll probably just stick with black beauty and yellow summer squash. They're solid producers, I can freeze a bunch, and they're easy to process.
• Garlic
• This was the first year of growing garlic, so it won't actually be until the fall 2013 planting that I can make intelligent choices based on their storage qualities. However, based on what I've seen from our Music variety and what I've heard about its storage qualities, it's a keeper. In fact, it might be the only one I plant this fall. We'll see.

I'm sure there's more......but there are another 6 weeks left in the garden season to get it all out of my head and onto the blog, right?

Garden Challenges: Zucchini & Cucumbers

Zucchini and cucumbers are supposed to be easy vegetables to grow. If you let them go for a couple of days, both plants give you baseball-bat size fruit that many people end up pushing off on unsuspecting neighbors. While I've gotten a decent yield from both plants this year, I'm also finding some challenges.

In addition to black beauty zucchini (which seems to be growing wonderfully, but my two plants are only giving me 3-4 squash per week), I planted eight-ball and papaya squash. The eight-ball was prolific early, but quickly became infested by what I assume is a squash vine borer. The stems are turning to yellow mush, and investigation finds a lot of small worms eating their way through the plant. I lost one plant completely to this pest a few weeks ago. The papaya took longer to mature, but it also shows signs of damage from the evil worms now. I think I've harvested four squash from three plants.

Both the eight-ball and the papaya squash plants are also starting to get what I assume is powdery mildew (gray spots that look like mold on their leaves). I pulled a papaya plant today that succumbed and failed to produce any fruit. While cleaning up the eight-ball plants today, I found a hidden squash that was the perfect size to harvest. It had somehow managed to find a way to sit on uncovered soil. I brought it in and noticed it was soft. I sliced it open to find a brown mess of rot. I sure hope that was an isolated incident.

Other than a yellowing leaf here and there, the black beauty plants are, well...beautiful. Still, I've mostly been able to keep up with harvests. We've eaten quite a few zucchini-based meals, I've given maybe 8 away to friends, and I've frozen 13 cups of shredded zucchini. I need more, as I have a killer veggie chili recipe that gets thicker (and more tasty) with the addition of zucchini.

The cucumbers also are starting to have their issues. Some leaves are withering and turning gray on the trellis. I feel that I planted too many plants too close together. I followed square foot gardening guidelines and planted 6 seeds per square foot along each side of my A-frame trellis. The vigorous plants (which have already provided many quarts of pickles) seem more interested in tangling with each other than climbing the trellis. I really hope they keep producing for another month...my husband has a strong taste for pickles and I've only canned five quarts - the rest have been refrigerator pickles.

Of course, I'll do some googling, but I'm wondering - what do you, oh gardeners of the internet, do to keep your summer squash and cucumber plants healthy and vigorous as long as possible? I haven't gone to any drastic methods - plant, water, mulch, one watering of fish emulsion, and a few sprays of pyrethrin to keep the cucumber beetles away.

First Zucchini

I've planted three kinds of summer squash this year, and two gave me their first harvest today - 8-ball zucchini and black beauty zucchini. They 8-balls were delicious in a zucchini quesadilla. The fate of the black beauty is yet to be decided.

There are already more baby squash on these plants, so I'm sure we'll be drowning in zucchini soon! I have three 8-ball and two black beauty plants. The three papaya pear squash plants are a little behind, but I'm sure they'll be producing soon.