Harvest Monday 24 August 2015

We had a week of unsettled weather, but at least it rained a couple of times, which really helped with the drought. Again, not much time spent in the garden. Besides the lingering cold, I had a partial nail removal for a pincer toenail (about as much fun as it sounds) which required me to stay off my feet for a couple of days. The good news is I have carrot seeds germinating, which is pretty much a first for me. What I did different this time is plant them deeper so seeds would be less likely to dry out.

 

 

Lots of peppers are becoming ready to harvest. The bell peppers are Revolution and are the only bell peppers that will produce for me. The other peppers are Carmen and Jimmy Nardello. The JN peppers are often red on one side and green on the other. You really have to do a total scan of the fruit before you pick if you want your peppers completely red on all sides.

 

 

More squash, some too big and some just right. and a Tasty Jade cucumber. The brown objects are very small Poona Kheera cucumbers, an heirloom from India. None of the cucumbers are doing well this year, despite having ducked the wilt bug so far. It has probably been too dry for their liking and I can not get to the garden every day to water.

 

 

Lots of tomatoes now coming in. This is a basket of small tomatoes including Jaune Flamme, Juliet, Esterina, Sweet Treats, and Chocolate Pear.

 

 

More squash and peppers, plus two more Tasty Jade cucumbers. I have the makings of gazpacho with the harvests this week.

 

 

The two pink tomatoes at the top are Pruden’s Purple, and it is turning out to be a nice tomato. Despite some early yellowing on the bottom, the plant has continued to grow and set fruit even in the raised bed, and is now over the top of the 6 foot trellis. It does crack easily. The larger tomato (at 1 pound 1 ounce) cracked on the bottom and became Sunday dinner’s side dish. The orange tomatoes are Sunkist and they are a great tomato. The fruits are usually completely blemish free and look like the catalog photo.

 

 

Here is a Sunkist sliced for BLT sandwiches.  Flesh is meaty and juicy with small seed cavities and flavor is very good.

 

 

The paste tomatoes are starting to ripen in large enough quantities to start doing something with them. Chili sauce is first on the list. The Roma tomatoes of unknown variety are interesting. Seeds came from one fruit but the resultant plants are producing fruit of two different shapes. Two of the plants have the long, slim profile of the tomatoes on top, while other plants are producing the egg shaped fruit in the middle. Shapes are not mixed on a plant and each plant bears only one shape of fruit.

 

 

More small tomatoes, so it is time to fire up the dehydrator again. The Sweet Treats are really tasty when dried. The color balance is off in this photo, since none of the Esterina cherries were green when picked.

 

That is what happened in my garden last week. To see what other gardeners around the world are doing, visit Daphne’s Dandelions, our host for Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday 29 June 2015

 

 

The kohlrabies are sizing up quickly so I harvested a few more. These are Winner, but the Azur Star are also putting on size and will be ready soon. I may leave one or two of the Azur Star plants to see how big I can get them. The ones I saw at Tower Hill were the size of a large grapefruit and apparently remain edible at that size. Just more to enjoy. I also pulled another Red Candy and a couple of the Tropea onions to make room for the pole beans.

 

 

The snow peas and snap peas are in full production now. And I definitely had a green snow pea mixed in with my Sugar Snap peas, so that adds a little unexpected variety.

 

 

More peas. It is time to start freezing snow peas. The snap peas, if they make it home, are being used with kohlrabi and radish slices and some hummus for quick lunches.

 

There is plenty more to harvest from the garden but weather and my schedule have not aligned. It has rained a lot and temperatures are colder, with some nights in the 50s, and it is rained Saturday night and Sunday. I hope we don’t go into some long rainy stretch here which will just promote the spread of disease. All this rain is coming from tropical storms and Midwest weather and I hope this is not some prolonged pattern. However, looking at the forecast, it rained Sunday and is forecasted to rain Wednesday and Friday, so that is looking like a pattern. Time to start preventive spraying in between storms.

 

On Saturday I did get to check on the garden, pinch a few suckers from the tomatoes, and harvest the peas above. So far everything looks healthy. I noted some of my peppers are starting to set fruit, which is always an encouraging sign.

 

 

Above is the large Jimmy Nardello pepper I showed last week along with its puny siblings. You can see 3 sizeable fruit in the photo but if you blow it up, I count 11 peppers visible. Above the frame the plant is loaded with blossoms. Wish I had 6 of these. I’ll just have to be patient and wait for the rest to grow up and become productive citizens of the garden.

 

 

Another nice view is this one of an Hungarian Paprika plant. Wish I had six of these like I planned but I only got two to germinate after a lengthy battle. The seed was sourced from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and they say their seed originated in Hungary but do not provide a local name for it or even say what village or even county it came from. The “sweet, spicy” peppers are described to be slender, 4.5 inches long and they ripen to a dark red color. I have fantasies of making my own Paprika but how do you dry these peppers? Air dry or dehydrator? Does it help to split them open before dehydrating?

 

That’s what happened in my garden last week. To see what other gardeners around the world are doing, visit Daphne’s Dandelions, our host for Harvest Monday.

 

Tomato-Pepper Update–July 2013

So far it has been a mixed year in the garden, but not bad given the crazy weather. I had lots of germination problems, most with new seed stock seeded directly in the garden. One of 54 kohlrabi germinated, no mustard seeds despite planting them twice, 3 of 54 Jade bean seeds (and one was promptly eaten by something), half my Summer Dance cucumber, and all of the squash had spotty germination. One bright spot is the peppers and tomatoes, despite some disease problems. All of these were started indoors, of course.

 

A few weeks ago I was worried that I would lose all of my peppers to some disease that is still unidentified, but probably bacterial in origin according to the UMass extension. Whatever it was, copper spray fixed it and I have continued to spray weekly hoping to ward off the late blight that hit some of my tomatoes last year. I had to remove and destroy a lot of foliage but the peppers have bounced back nicely. Below I will show you how they are doing and I have a few questions for the varietal experts.

 

The picture below shows four Jimmy Nardello peppers in the lower left corner of the photo, with a row of Copra onions behind them and then a row of tomatoes trained up a trellis. Two of the Jimmy Nardellos are loaded with good sized peppers. and are still flowering. This is my first year with these peppers, so I assume I am going to let these turn red before harvesting them and doing that is not going to inhibit them from setting more fruit, right?

 

 

 

Look at the pepper in the back corner of the group, the one closest to the onions. Its foliage is a darker green than the other JN peppers, and here is what the fruit kooks like:

 

 

Even I know that is not a JN, maybe a sweet red cherry, which is another variety I started from seed. Hopefully it is not a Padron, because if I wait for it to turn red I will have an unpleasant surprise. My Padron have not yet set fruit so I have nothing to compare to, but I think the Padron pepper is slenderer and more yellow-green.

 

Here is another surprise. I started four Black Cherry tomatoes, selected the best two for myself and gave the rest away at the garden seed swap. One of the plants is much larger and setting cherries like crazy. The other, more petite, plant has now set some fruit and this is what they look like (and yes, I took care of that sucker in the foreground). I think this is Gilbertie, a paste tomato that produces 8-10 inch long fruit, which I am trying for the first time this year. You can also see some flea beetle damage on the lower leaves, something I have never encountered before with tomatoes.

 

 

I may have more surprises ahead. I labeled one of my four Padron peppers a mystery pepper because I wasn’t sure about its original location in the tray of soil blocks. I am now looking at one of my Lipstick peppers which seems to have foliage different from the other three. The problem goes back to my use of 3/4 inch soil blocks, made in rows of five blocks. Using that size block, I could pack a lot of blocks into a 1020 tray which was great because I only have a single heat mat. Labeling those tiny blocks is difficult, so I applied masking tape to the sides of the tray and wrote descriptions on the tape with a Sharpie. The trouble is the blocks, particularly the end blocks, tend to wander when the tray is handled, so I wound up with a few out of position. Next year I will have to try to be more careful. Hope the guy who got my Black Cherry tomato at the garden seed swap is enjoying my Black Cherry tomatoes.

 

One final item. My grafted tomatoes are healthy and doing fine, but they are dwarfed by their ungrafted control plants. Below is a photo of the grafted Juliet, which is about two feet tall and has set one truss of about five fruit. The next photo is the ungrafted Juliet, a monster plant that is suckering like crazy and has set multiple trusses of 8-9 fruit each. There is no comparison. Both are healthy right now so disease resistance is not a factor but may be later in the season. Right now I would have to say they were a waste of money.

 

 

 

There is a lot of gardening season still to come but so far my peppers and tomatoes are doing very well and making me happy, even dare I say, optimistic.