Harvest Monday

October 6, 2014

We’re still able to harvest raspberries and a little bit of lettuce. We are officially finishing up our last watermelon. Two months of watermelon eating from one plant — not too shabby! I need to remember to just plant one or two plants next year. After sharing, that’s about as much watermelon as my kids can take 🙂

We had a new harvest this week: Peas! They are plumping up quite nicely. The kids volunteered to pick some. This is what they got before they grew tired of that task. I’ll go pick the rest later. It is so nice to eat peas twice a year!Some other good news (hopefully) is that my late-planted carrots (9/15) have sprouted! I hope they continue to grow! The first round planted here did not sprout (planted 7/30). They will DEFINITELY need to be covered over the winter so they will continue to grow in early spring.

My daughter turned 7 this past week and she wanted twice-baked potatoes for her bday. I used up the last of our potatoes to make them. They were SOOOO goood 🙂 Since

1. we were out of potatoes
2. some sweet potatoes were popping out of the ground
3. the sweet potato leaves seem to have more damage

I decided to go ahead and harvest one sweet potato patch. I decided on patch #2, the raised bed.

For the past 5yrs or so, an elderly friend has been getting permission to glean sweet potatoes from a local farmer and he always gives us some. It has been such a blessing. We always get the little ones so we have grown fond of that size 😉 This past year, I took about 5 of the leftover little sweet potatoes to use as slip-makers so this whole harvest is possible because of him. I am excited that I will be able to bless him with some sweet potatoes this year (as it is getting harder for him to do any gardening).

First, I ripped up the vines and gave them to the chickens. Then I went section by section and dug up sweet potatoes. I am not sure if this is good or bad but these were the only ones that had damage. Is that wire-worm damage? We set those aside to eat first.

We got a variety of sizes. The itty-bitty ones will be cut up and used in soups. The small ones are great because they bake quickly and are individual-sized for the kids. Though the large ones are impressive, they will take FOREVER to bake…I prefer the little ones 🙂(This is the entire haul of the undamaged sweet potatoes.) I had two sweet potatoes that had popped out of the ground that seemed to have green on them. I thought light didn’t have that effect on sweet potatoes like it does on regular potatoes but maybe I’m wrong?We set them out on our brick path (weedy as it is) to dry outand then crated them and set them in our pantry.  We will be eating those in the blue bucket first as those are the damaged ones. We got a couple more harvests towards the end of the week. More peppers and some celery from our grocery store cuttings! 🙂 Our temps are fluctuating quite a bit these days. Nighttime temps were in the 40s last night but in a couple of days, we’ll be back in the 80s. We are supposed to have a colder winter this year but hopefully, it will hold off for awhile. Our first frost date is October 20th.

Are you still harvesting? Head over to Daphne’s Dandelions to see what other gardeners are harvesting this week.

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