Harvest Monday - July 25, 2016

The Fling has flung and it was fabulous!  I reconnected with old friends from last year and made a lot of new friends as well – some were bloggers that I had only briefly met last time while others were brand new faces.  And the gardens and inspiration….wow!  The Minnesota climate & growing season is very much like our own, so everything we saw could easily be applied to an Ontario garden.  More on the Minnesota sights in another post - today is Harvest Monday!

Since I missed last Monday, I’ll be covering 2 weeks of harvests.  First up is my favourite photo from the past couple of weeks:

Arcadia Broccoli - Pretty in Pink
 

This is the first head of Arcadia broccoli and, as you can see, a right nice size it is too!  Not exactly the most uniform shape, but considering the heat it’s had to endure, I’m actually surprised it got to this size without flowering.

Now on to 1st harvests.  One of these just sneaked in under the wire as I spotted them yesterday evening as I was mulching the pathways:

Sungold wins the 1st tomato harvest race this year
 

Pick, photo, scale, munch…1 minute and they were all gone.

The other exciting 1st harvest were the snap beans.

Provider Snap Beans
 

We were really looking forward to the beans as last year we had some germination issues so our snap bean harvest was mediocre.

Another very exciting and rather unexpected harvest - Yukon Gold potatoes:

Yukon Gold
 

A few of the Yukon gold plants had died off and I moved the straw on top of them to take a look at the base of the plants and saw a potato peaking out.  I brushed the soil aside, only going down an inch or two, and unearthed a few more.  YUM!  I'll be leaving the rest to harvest with the other varieties although now I know where to go should I need a few to add to a meal :)

The pepper harvest has also begun starting with, not surprisingly, those that are picked while still at the green stage.  The very first harvest consisted of a few Padron peppers and a handful of Pepperoncinos:

Padron (left); Pepperoncino (right)
 

A few days later I harvested an Anaheim and some Melrose peppers:

One Anaheim together with a few Melrose
 

I harvested my first ever Kossak kohlrabi.  This particular variety is new to the garden, but not new to the table as I received several of them last fall from the farm.

Kossak Kohlrabi
 

Kossak gets HUGE – this one weighed in at a hefty 1.2 kg/2.69 lbs – and it was still tender and sweet.

There were a few Kolibri left in the bed and all but one of those were also harvested:

Kolibri Kohlrabi
 

In the face of all the heat we’ve been getting, I probably should have pulled them earlier.  But they’ve actually held up remarkably well and are only now starting to get a bit fibrous.  They do just fine, however, when peeled and grated into salads.

I harvested quite a few favas once I returned from my trip.  The Extra Precoce Violetto variety are almost done and many of the beans were either starting to dry out or fully dried.  These are used much like dried beans and I also set some aside to use for seed.  The other variety I'm growing, Ianto, matures slightly later.

Ianto Fava Beans
 

As you can see, Ianto has decidedly small pods with only 2 beans per pod on average, but the pods have little padding, so the beans inside are a good size:

Ianto fava bean reveal
 

Also, each plant contains numerous pods and most were properly pollinated, so that makes up for their small size.

The cucumbers are starting to trickle in:

Garden Sweet (left); Green Finger (right)
 

And one rather pathetic zucchini was harvested as well:

Romanesco zucchini (left); Chelsea Prize & Garden Sweet cucumbers (middle & right)
 

This is from a plant in one of last year’s straw bales that didn’t get properly conditioned.  As a side note, the squash plants in the properly conditioned bales are MILES ahead of those in the old bales and now that everything is on a drip system, I’m hoping to see even better growth in the weeks to come.

The snow peas were pulled out and I was able to get a nice final harvest from the vines:

Oregon Sugar Pod Snow Peas
 

I'm so glad that I sowed snow peas this year especially as they made up for the lackluster performance of the sugar snaps.

And lastly, before I left for Minneapolis, I decided to harvest all of the lettuce.

Sierra MI
 

A good chunk of the bed was ripped out and composted as it was bolting, but the Sierra MI lettuce and a few the Sweetie Baby heads were still perfect, so those were harvested, cleaned and are packed away in the refrigerator.  Lettuce lasts a good 2-3 weeks when freshly harvested and properly packed.  I haven't started a succession yet, but with tomatoes and cucumbers rolling in now, that becomes less of a priority.

My harvest totals over the past 2 weeks were:

Fava Beans (shelled) – 764 grams (1.69 lbs)
Snap Beans – 592 grams (1.31 lbs)
Broccoli – 608 grams (1.34 lbs)
Cucumber – 796 grams (1.75 lbs)
Kohlrabi – 2,144 grams (4.73 lbs)
Lettuce – 2,780 grams (6.13 lbs)
Snap Peas – 154 grams (0.34 lbs)
Snow Peas – 276 grams (0.61 lbs)
Potatoes – 602 grams (1.33 lbs)
Summer Squash – 74 grams (0.16 lbs)
Tomatoes – 26 grams (0.06 lbs)

Total for last 2 weeks – 9,258 grams (20.41 lbs)

Total to Date – 45.10 kg (99.42 lbs)

To see what everyone else has been harvesting, head on over to Our Happy Acres where Dave is our host for Harvest Mondays.