Monday, August 27, 2012

Harvest Monday–27 August 2012

Sunday was a beautiful day and we are running out of summer, so we decided to take advantage and take a short trip to Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. The Museum contains an area of historic houses in the Puddle Dock area of Portsmouth along the Piscataqua River, one dating back to 1690. The entire area was blighted and scheduled to be torn down in the late 1950s as part of the urban renewal craze that spread across the country. Some citizens of the town realized the historic value of the area and were able to preserve a section which became the museum. The houses have been carefully restored and furnished with period furniture. What I found particularly interesting were the gardens surrounding each house. Besides decorative gardens, everyone had a kitchen garden and an herb bed.

Late August isn’t the prime time to be viewing a kitchen garden around here, but I found a few things interesting. First there were okra plants everywhere and it looked like they were just starting to flower. The first ones I encountered were in a vegetable bed alongside the Goodwin mansion. They had spikes of large, pale yellow flowers with dark red centers, very striking. I have read complaints that okra only produces a pod at a time but this one looked like it had set fruit all along the spike below the open flowers.

Okra blossom

Okra was also used frequently as an ornamental. Here is a cluster of okra plants that anchored the center of a circular flower bed in the public gardens across the street from the museum.

Okra blossoms in park

Bees and butterflies were everywhere, including a large flock of Monarchs.

Butterfly

An interesting item we found in  one of the herb gardens was this watering jug. This brown earthenware is of the type that was manufactured in Portsmouth, so I assume this is a reproduction of an original. It has a small opening on top, with the handle positioned so you can easily cover the opening. The bottom is covered with small holes. You use it by setting it in a bucket of water and allow it to fill. By placing your thumb over the top opening, you can lift it out of the bucket and easily carry it to the garden bed for watering.

Filling water jugDispensing water from the jug

Getting back to the purpose of this post, the harvest from the garden was mostly cucumbers and zucchini, with a few volunteer tomatoes and my first red onion. I should be pulling more onions this week or next. I also picked some Fortex pole beans and harvested a head of escarole and one of endive.

IMG_1411Cucumbers, tomatoes and a red onion
Pole beans, zucchini, and broccoliCucumbers and Juliet tomatoes

Escarole and endive

That’s what I was doing last week. If you want to see what other gardeners around the world are harvesting from their gardens, head over to Daphne’s Dandelions, our host for Harvest Monday.

14 comments:

  1. Strawberry Banke is a great museum! Nice to see your harvest; you are another gardener with late summer lettuce. Wishing I had some, but I still haven't been able to do well with late lettuce yet. It looks so nice!

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    1. These were a second planting I put in sometime in June. They were shaded out by the first plants until those were harvested, so growth has been slower. But they are getting to look like they are going to bolt, so time to enjoy them.

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  2. Clever watering jug design. Nice looking escarole and endive.

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  3. One of these days I'm going to have to grow some real onions like that beauty you harvested, not just the easy scallions that I've got going. I love that watering jug, it's beautiful and functional. I think that the butterfly that you photographed is a Painted Lady, they are often mistaken for Monarchs, and they have a very interesting migration also.

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    1. Could be, I'm no butterfly expert. I was just trying to get one to stay still long enough to snap the picture!

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  4. Lovely pictures, and nice harvest. Wish I had red onions this year. Next year I guess.

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    1. Last year my red onions were tiny so I pretended I was growing shallots instead.

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  5. We were hoping to get some onions this year, but no luck. Not even "shallots". ;-)

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  6. That looks like a fun place to visit; I love historic stuff like that. Like that water jug too! Lovely harvest you have this week

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  7. Great looking harvest this week. That water jug looks fun, I need a new one so maybe well have to look around for a "vintage" one like that!!

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  8. I love visiting gardens (and homesteads) like that. It's amazing the lessons to be learned from how things were managed so efficiently for daily use and all with a minimum of equipment.

    You sure have been getting a nice bunch of cucumbers!

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  9. very insteresting idea of a watering jug.

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  10. Nice to see someone else growing Endives. They are not very commonly encountered in the domestic garden these days - at least not here in the UK. Do you also grow chicories?

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    1. My dad used to grow it so I'm familiar with it. It's good with a hot bacon dressing, and as you suggested, a little crumbled blue cheese. The other chicory-family thing I grow is escarole, which I guess is considered a broad-leaved endive. We like it sauteed with garlic in olive oil and butter. It's good with a boiled potato mashed into it with a little extra butter.

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