Sunday, September 7, 2008

The time vegetable gardeners dream about, Harvest time baby!

Three posts in one week, must be a new record for me. Kudos to all the bloggers that post every day or there a bouts, it consumes allot of time.

I have been very busy harvesting the last little while. It seems this cool wet season has made it so everything is ready to pick in late August.

Click to enlarge if you can not read the names

Above is a tomato line up, I finally picked my first hillbilly potato loaf tomato so I thought I would take a photo of every variety I am growing. The hillbilly tomato is my favorite tomato, it tastes very nice and looks spectacular. The only problem is it does not produce many tomatoes and this year it produced hardly any at all but it is worth all the waiting. The tomato plants are almost done for the year, most of the tomatoes have ripened and been picked. A few are still on the plants but a couple are down to pretty slim pickings.


A few of the many tomatoes I have picked

I have picked close to 7 liters of blue lake pole beans, beans beans and more beans. They are in my opinion the best bean you can grow. I pick them at the young stage all the way up to the stage that they are showing large bean bumps and they are always tender and tasty. I have yet to blanch any but if they keep coming I may have to start.

Some of the green beans

It has also surprised me at how many pickling cucumbers I have harvested. The plants have lost almost 75% of there leaves and yet every few days I am still picking a couple. I pick a few and then think, well that must be the last of them due to the look of the plants but they seems to keep truckin along. Maybe this double yield variety is worth keeping next year after all.

3/4 dead cucumbers and the fingerling potatoes.
Things sure get ugly this time of year.

This cucumber has hiding behind the a/c unit.
He was feed to the composter

The pumpkins are just starting to turn colour. I will have to look up weather to harvest these when they fully turn or wait until after a frost. I was not planning on growing pumpkins so I really have no idea how to grow them asides from that kids story about feeding them sugar water. Maybe I should try that :-)

The largest pumpkin, about 2x the size of a pie pumpkin

One of the two pie pumpkins

The red potatoes have finally died back so I dug them up and ended up with 17lbs 4oz lbs of reds. I think this was a pretty good result from 7 plants, there was 8 but one died. The fingerling potatoes are still very much green but I have read that fingerling potatoes take much longer to develop. I will weigh the fingerlings once they are harvested, add it to the reds and see how much I produced in total this year. I have been going back and forth about even growing potatoes next year but I have now hatched a good plan for next year. I think I have figured out the perfect spot & layout that they will not take over a 1/4 of my space well still being able to grow about 16 plants. I am going to do a preliminary drawing so once I get that done I will post about it.

The dead reds, finally.


Weighing the reds. I put the bucket on,
zeroed the scale and the filled it up with potatoes

Well that is about all I have been harvesting asides from a pepper here and a radish there. My next post will be about the fall seedlings and transplants in the veggie patch as well as some of the clean up I have done.


And I will end with some steamed garden goodness on the grill.

11 comments:

  1. Wow...that's quite a harvest. Nice photos - the tomatoes looks wonderfully tasty!

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  2. Your tomatoes look beautiful and that is quite a lot of potatoes. I hope to try potatoes some day but just don't have the space right now.

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  3. I feel so healthy this time of the year when I can eat so many fresh veggies all the time. I also feel quite smug that while prices are going sky-high everywhere - mine are free!

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  4. Your harvest looks great! I vote go for the potatoes again next year. It looks as though you had luck with them in my book...

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  5. Wow, what a wonderful harvest. All those great tomato varieties. I might try potatoes next year!

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  6. That must give you a well deserved feeling of satisfaction. A great line up - from the tomatoes to the red potatoes!

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  7. OMG...I can't even imagine growing that much produce...Your whole yard must be a veggie garden! Each year I try to grow beans, and the bean beetles keep eating my plants!!! Oh well. I too have a pumpkin that I just harvested, it is my first year growing pumpkins, and I am in awe with them! Right now I have one outside curing, and 3 more on the vine. Thanks for telling me how to get the tom seeds. I had tried soaking them once, but they seemed to turn all sour on me; so I threw them out, not knowing that this is suppose to happen. Now I know, and as JI Joe says..."And knowing is half the battle!"

    ~Zach

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  8. parsec - thanks, if it only didn't come all at once.

    emily - fresh potatoes are so good, they have a distinct crunch when cut kind of like an asian pear. I have seen potatoes grown in pots and even right in a bag of compost when space is limited, maybe you could give them a try one of those routes.

    matron - it does make you feel much healthier and I am sure it is a rather beneficial time of year. You couldn't have made a better statement about the free produce either. When I made the raw sauce I picked up a couple actually red tomatoes at the market and they were $5 for two tomatoes. I figure I am sitting on a gold mine now!

    Skeeter - when you taste those fresh potatoes there is not one more thought of not growing them again.

    dp - good luck with your potatoes next year. They are really easy to grow they just seem to take forever to be ready for harvest.

    topveg - I don't think I have seen you comment before, welcome to my blog! It is the best time of year, when all the work pays off. The only thing is I am getting a little sick of eating green beans :-)

    the organic gardener - I grow veggies just in my side yard which is pretty small. I compensate for the size by cramming things as close as possible and growing one of this and one of that. Kind of like a hybrid square foot garden. It is the first time I have grown pumpkins as well and it was by mistake. I planted zucchini in some of my compost that had pumpkin seeds in it, which I did not realize. I thinned the seedlings and ended up with just pumpkins. But I am just as happy with pumpkins as zucchini.

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  9. It's really amazing how much food can come out of so little garden!

    This really looks fantastic!

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  10. Wow, your garden is so ful that you have to pull things out of it before you put something new back in! Yikes! I hope I never reach that point!

    ~Zach

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  11. hydroponica - it really is amazing how much can be produced. Not enough to feed us for the year but still a decent amount.

    the organic gardener - My mistake when planting the ornamental gardens is planting way to much and to closely. Now I have a huge mass of plants which I guess is not really a bad thing. It just the stronger plants over take the weaker ones and some times its the weaker ones you want to thrive. I should post some photos of the yard asides from the vegetable area.

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