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.