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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Harvest Monday

September 29, 2014

If you recall, I had quite the TO DO list for this week. Wipes, bread, & marinara sauce making, bean cooking & freezing, and potty training…I got all of it done, except for potty training the 2yo. I’ve potty trained four children now and it never gets any easier. 😛

We are in a harvesting lull these days. My carrots did not sprout (I am going to pick up diatomaceous earth for spring plantings, thanks to homegrown adventures), our tomatoes and peppers are few and far between, and the chickens got out this week to scratch up my WHOLE garden, including some newly planted carrots and ALL of our wonderfully ripe raspberries 😦 We only got a handful this week.(Last week, this was one picking. This week, this is all we got.)

I was able to harvest our first bit of lettuce this week! It is the first time we have been able to eat lettuce since July. I’ve missed it, for sure! I am excited to be getting back into greens-eating weather. Spinach and lettuce, here we come!

I’ll post soon about our wonderful marinara sauce.

Head over to Daphne’s Dandelions to see what other gardeners are harvesting this week 🙂

Harvest Monday

September 22, 2014

This week, I planted more carrots, onions, and lettuce and spent a large chunk of the week weeding where some bermuda grass is creeping through. I am noticing a big ant problem in our garden and it seems they are stealing quite a bit of my seeds. What to do about that…

Harvests this week included…raspberries, carrots, tomatoes, and peppers. Oh, we’re also getting about 1-2 eggs/day.Most of the white spots/sunscald spots are gone.

We harvested about this much 3x this week but only managed to take one picture. Between these raspberries and the watermelon harvested earlier this month, our fruit bill is looking good 🙂

The only tiny patch of carrots that has managed to come up for me this summer was harvested this week. I was having camera issues mid-week. I apologize. Seeing how this was my only patch that grew (out of the 20 or so I planted), I am posting the picture anyway. What is up with my seeds not sprouting!?!

The tomatoes are slowing way down on production but the peppers are picking up! I thought we had bad pepper plants but it turns out, I think, it’s just that peppers give their flush of fruit later than tomatoes.

On my list of TO DOs this week:

• Make marinara (ran out of the batch made a month ago)
• Make bread
• Make wipes
• Cook & freeze pinto beans, black beans, and chickpeas (why do we have to run out of everything all at once?)
• Potty train the 2yo 😛

Who wants to help…with any of those…? 😉

Check out what others are harvesting this week at Daphne’s Dandelions!

Harvest Monday

September 15, 2014

We were on vacation this past week. Coming back, we harvested raspberries, (we really had 5x this much but this is what was left after eating them for supper)

tomatoes,(Mr. Stripey and Brandywine)

Peppers,(and more tomatoes throughout the bowl)

and…Yup. Eggs. Go figure.

At the beginning of August, I read in a blog about how it is not necessary to feed free-ranging chickens chicken feed in the summer. At the time, our chickens were eating a lot of feed & producing fewer and fewer eggs. I now realize they were doing that because daylight hours were decreasing; however, at the time, all I knew was that they were costing me money and someone offered a way to spending little to no money so I went for it.

So, we expanded the run so it was the size of a typical suburban backyard to ensure they had PLENTY of room but were still kept safe, as was my garden. Because of the expansion, some of the young chickens got into something and we had three die 😦

They also started moulting like crazy and stopped laying. Two weeks after expanding the run, we stopped getting eggs from them. I thought it was a little early in the year for them to moult but it was clear (with all the feathers everywhere) that is what they were doing.

When we came back from vacation this week, I didn’t see feathers all over the run, as I had before. I thought it was odd because it had only been a month. I asked my daughter to check in the coop to see if there were a ton of feathers in there, as there were before I cleaned it out.

She came back with three eggs. We got another one yesterday. Sigh. All I can figure is that cutting off their feed supply, though they had plenty of greens and bugs and seeds (we were harvesting our sunflowers), put them in a ‘forced moult’. Now that their bodies have adjusted to little to no feed & pure free-ranging, they are laying again a little bit.

I assume they will go into another full moult soon. This is all speculation, of course, as I have only had chickens for 18mo. I think I ruined my birds 😛 I feel badly (especially for the ones who died) but there’s nothing I can do about it except to learn from my mistakes and take notes for next year.

As far as the rest of the harvests: the raspberries were eaten, the green peppers were chopped up and frozen, and the tomatoes are on the counter, finishing up ripening.

How were your harvests this week? Check out what’s going on in other gardens around the world at Daphne’s Dandelions.

Harvest Monday

September 8, 2014

I have not been very good about taking pictures of harvests this week.

We harvested about 15 unpictured cucumbers, a couple of unpictured peppers, and a number of unpictured tomatoes 😉

Here is what we DID take a picture of:Our second, and last, butternut squash, one cucumber, and a number of tomatoes.

I went ahead and harvested all of our watermelons from the watermelon patch and cleaned it up. (This area was COVERED in watermelon vines previously)

In all, we harvested 10 watermelons. I’m not sure the few little ones are completely ripe but everything was dying so…

All of these watermelons were from ONE volunteer plant! Quite a pleasant surprise 🙂The raspberries are still trickling in…I have a question for raspberry growers. Most of the raspberries look like this on one side… It’s like they didn’t pollinate everywhere? Any suggestions?

What are you harvesting? Check out what other gardeners are doing at Daphne’s Dandelions 🙂