Harvest Monday - September 11, 2017

This has been an exceptionally busy summer.  I've been away 3 times since the end of June which definitely hasn't helped when it comes to making progress on my garden "to-do" list.

The one thing that I haven't been doing a lot of is harvesting.  More accurately, I have been harvesting but not as much as I usually do at this time.  This is partly because I simply haven't been here to harvest but there has also been less to harvest due to all of the pest pressure this year - there were a lot of casualties early on.  Some I replaced, such as the lettuce, but others (winter squash, peppers) I did not.

So on to the harvests and first up, we have the tomatoes.  These started as a trickle but then sped up throughout August.

I tried a few new varieties this year, but only one stood out - Mennonite Orange:

Mennonite Orange - This one weighed in at 536 grams (1.18 lbs)

The size was huge but what truly impressed was it's super meaty, seedless interior and great flavour (nice balance of acid/sweet).  The only downside is that it isn't a big producer - I believe I've only harvested 5 or 6 fruits from the one plant that I grew.  This is to be expected, however, when it comes to large fruited varieties in our climate.  I enjoyed this one enough that it is the only one of the new varieties that will be back next year.

This has not been a good year, on the whole, for the tomatoes - our wet weather meant that blight reared its ugly head early on, starting with the yellow salad tomato Taxi.  When it hit, it hit hard - my one plant was toast within 3 weeks of contracting the disease and it quickly started to spread throughout the bed.   Speckled Roman, which was right beside Taxi, was infected next (unsurprisingly) but it also seemed to have another disease as the spots on the fruits do not resemble blight:

This does not look like blight...perhaps bacterial spot?

One of the three tomato beds is still relatively green so I'm hoping that we will continue to harvest tomatoes until frost.

The garlic was harvested on August 2nd while the onions were harvested in two stages, the last harvest being in late August, once we returned from our trip.  All are now drying on a rack in the garage:

I normally hang garlic to dry but as I grew fewer onions this year,
I had room on the rack for them

Most of the onions were mediumish in size.
The large yellow ones are Ailsa Craigs which are typically huge;
those in the photo are in the small-medium range for that variety.

First impressions were that the garlic was a good size - similar to or larger than last year.  The onions were a better size than last years harvest but still smaller than I would have liked and definitely nowhere near as good as our best onion year back in 2014.

The cucumbers finally came in and we are really enjoying them:

Summer Dance (2 on left) and Garden Sweet (3 on right)

I've also been pulling carrots as needed:

Bolero and Cosmic Purple carrots with Garden Sweet cucumbers

I sowed about 1/3 of the carrot bed early, these being the carrots that we are eating now, while the rest of the bed was not sown until July.  The carrots from this later sowing will be stored for use in the winter.

The few pepper plants that didn't become rabbit food finally started to produce, although none of them fully recovered:

Clockwise from the top:  Ostra Cyklon, Anaheim,

Pepperoncino, Feher Ozon and Lu Mei

More peppers and some broccoli:

Clockwise from the top:

Jimmy Nardello, Odessa Market (not fully ripe), Shishito and Arcadia broccoli

And speaking of broccoli, after a slow start (or so it seems - must check my records on that), the broccoli is finally hitting its stride:

Arcadia

The tromboncino have been producing, although not as well as last year (dang cucumber beetles!)

Tromboncino

And I've been harvesting lots of mature beans that are now drying indoors:

Cherokee Trail of Tears

Some plums were harvested, although it was a very small crop due to late frosts and plum curculio damage:

Shiro

French Prune

The above bowl of French Prune plums is actually the largest quantity of that variety that we've harvested to date; they must take longer to bear than the others.

We have been harvesting greens, such as kale and collards, although not as regularly as I would have liked, and we finally have a good crop of lettuce.  Now that the bed is covered with netting, the rabbits aren't getting to it anymore:

Bronze Mignonette

This year, more than any other in the past, I need a break from the garden.  I've finally managed to plug all the gaps in the fence that allowed the rabbits in (or they are now just too chubby to get through whatever gaps are left) but the pest pressure continues.  Now, it's the slugs - their numbers are up and while we normally have some slug damage on greens, they have made their presence felt on other veg as well such as the squash, peppers and even tomatoes.

When it comes to peppers, they seem to favour certain varieties such as Odessa Market and Feher Ozon, attacking many of them while they are still immature.

Odessa Market - A sluggy favourite

In fact, I haven't been able to harvest ANY Odessa Market peppers from the two plants that are in the grow bag, even after I applied a coating of eggshells to the top of the soil.  Let me correct that - I've harvested at least 20+ peppers but all were immature and ruined by slugs *sigh*.  There is one Odessa Market plant in a bed and I was able to pick a few medium sized green peppers from that one.  There were many others, however, lost to slugs which tells me that the grow bag environment may have made things worse, but it was not totally to blame.

Still left to pick in the garden are potatoes (I've harvested a few but the main batch is still in the ground), peppers, kale, collards, lettuce, carrots, dried beans, broccoli, eggplant (a bunny favourite, apparently), cucumbers, tromboncino squash, tomatoes and lots of herbs.  There are also a couple of very small winter squash - cucumber beetles and rabbits made sure the winter squash harvest was meagre this year.

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