Monday 14 August 2017

Harvest Monday - they're still a comin'

Phew it's that time when, if all has gone well so far, us veggie growers are trying to keep on top of all the harvests. In the lean-to at home my tomatoes are continuing to crop nicely. The plants which may have had some kind of virus have put on new healthy growth, so that was good news. But I've just realised one of my pepper plants probably has red spider mite, so I need to have a close look tomorrow and try and sort it out (which probably means ditching the plant?), and hope none of the others have it either.
The courgettes and cukes are also to continuing to produce lots of goodies, though the older plants at the allotment are suffering quite badly from powdery mildew. The younger ones aren't so bad. And I have three cuke plants in the partially shaded back garden which are alright (but crop very slowly compared with the ones in full sun on the allotment).
And the beans are properly getting going now - green dwarf French beans, climbing purple beans (both on the allotment) and runner beans in the back garden. I've started freezing some of the dwarf beans and will do some purple ones too. There are so many purple bean flowers, I might do some fermented beans if they crop really heavily (and give some away or do a swap for something I don't grow).
They're quite versatile though, always tasty as a side dish (here drizzled with balsamic vinegar) and we had some cold leftover with lunch today. A few years ago when we had a really good harvest I'd cook loads up and we'd have them as our afternoon snack. The potato here is mashed spuds which I froze (late winter?), but I needed the freezer space now, and also needed the glass container they were in - plus the main potatoes will be ready to harvest soon, so might as well use these up first.
I've picked more corn this week too. We had a cob each on Friday....
...and shared one tonight, with freshly picked kale, courgette, tomatoes and beans (and there's an egg under there somewhere). The corn goes really golden when it's cooked - when raw it looked the same as the ones above). The variety is Sativa Early.
The other day I roasted a big batch of beetroot (all the b's), which were actually 'seconds' from the market garden I volunteer at. Mice or some other rodent had gnawed the roots but the roots were so big it was easy to just chop off the affected parts and still be left with a good amount of beet. I made these into another tasty beetroot hummus.
Another thing I haven't grown myself - a huge marrow (actually overgrown courgette) from my friend's plot. He hasn't been able to get down for a couple of weeks (he's the chap that uses a wheelchair and needs it to be reasonably dry on the plot to get around). I went and picked his greengages and courgettes for him and found this massive marrow too. He didn't want it, so today I made a batch of spiced marrow and tomato chutney, which is handy as we're just on the last jar of last year's lot. I actually chopped up the marrow yesterday and prepared some of the other ingredients too, but was too tired to make the whole thing. I'm glad I left the rest until today as the simmering / reducing takes ages and I'd have been up until goodness knows when last night.
Mid-way through. It's quite a sweet recipe, with chopped dates in too.
Just need to label these up now. And I didn't make too much of a mess, which is unusual for me. As we often have the chutney in sandwiches, I gave it a whizz with a stick blender to get out the bigger chunks.
On the fruit front, I've been picking more blackberries of course.
Not as many today though, a lot were too soft / starting to go mouldy from the rain, as I hadn't picked any since Friday. I ate quite a few of the squishy-but-not-mouldy ones though, whist picking - they were really good.
And there were just enough to make a couple of blackberry cakes, fancy that. I use an easy recipe from Mumsnet here, though actually use a little less sugar, add some cinnamon, and find it takes longer than 20 mins to bake. I made double the recipe today.
Freshly out of the oven, (which reminds me, to make the most of the oven being on, I slow roasted some sliced tomatoes afterwards too). Anyway, one cake is to take round a friend's tomorrow evening, and the other is to take to the market garden on Wednesday, mmm. They don't look very berry-y but should hopefully look good when cut open.

Also, hopefully the weather will be better this Wednesday - it was really rainy last week so I didn't get any photos again. We had a productive day though, despite the sogginess.

 

Okay, thanks for reading this week, I'm linking in as usual with Harvest Monday kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.

 

4 comments:

  1. Our beans are in full flow too. It tends to be all or nothing doesn't it?

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  2. It's good you were able to use those beetroots - I hate seeing food like that go to waste! Beautiful berries, I enjoyed looking at yours since ours are done for the year.

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  3. Love the look of the blackberry cakes.. I might bake a couple as there is a large bowlful sitting on the counter top right now, so thank you for that idea!

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  4. Oh yum berries! So jealous of everyone with berries, can't wait to get some garden areas finished so I can plant some. Lovely veggies.

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