Monday 30 September 2013

Harvest Monday - 30th September 2013

Well, September is just about finished, but my tomato harvest isn't!


The cucumbers are finally giving up. The plants look very tired. The leaves flop during the daytime, though they revive again overnight.


I hardly dare to think how many fruits they produced between them. It was a huge number. The ones being produced now are not prime specimens - mostly rather yellow and "weedy".


We have had so many cucumbers that Jane even made a batch of curried cucumber pickle this week, which I expect she will write about on her blog Onions and Paper.


This week I picked my pears. Actually, half of them picked themselves, in a manner of speaking. They fell off the tree, which I took to be a sign that they had reached maturity. It wasn't a very clever thing to do really, because two of them got bruised in their fall. Anyway, I picked all the others to save them from a similar fate:

"Conference" pears

It's not a lot of pears, is it? Still, it's better than no pears. The big one in the middle of the group is enormous. It weighs 280 grams. Pears like this are traditionally ripened indoors, so they have joined the multitude of tomatoes on the Dining-Room table.

A rather different crop that I picked this week was a couple of Brussels Tops (the ones I wrote about on Saturday). They are very much like Spring Greens, and they went very nicely with the venison we bought at the Farmers' Market on Saturday.


I have harvested my very last potatoes of the year - two pots of "Pink Fir Apple". At 1.6kgs, the yield was not bad, but several of the tubers were covered with scab. This makes them unsightly, but is not a major problem, since it is only skin-deep and can be removed by scrubbing the tubers before cooking. (Peeling PFA potatoes is not really possible, due to their very knobbly shape).


This week I'm not going to post a picture of Runner Beans, because I'm sure you are all bored of looking at Runner Beans. I have picked a few, though not many. I have also picked more chillis, and the basket of them drying in the airing-cupboard is gradually filling up.


My final harvest of the week is not one from my garden, but a wild one instead, from the local hedgerows: Sloes and Rosehips.


These have now gone into a batch of jelly, which I will write about soon.

That's it from me for this week. Why not visit Daphne's Dandelions to see what other people have been harvesting?

20 comments:

  1. Wonderful harvests. I love the last photo, so colorful. I remember as a kid picking wild rosehips for tea. I haven't done that in years - well decades.

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  2. An excellent harvest. Love the image of all the produce on the dining table. Something many of us can relate to I'm sure!

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  3. Did each of the pots of potatoes contain just one seed potato? That isn't a bad harvest at all if so, certainly better than my Anyas. I think I'm going to grow some of each next year and then I can do a proper comparison. It's been a great tomato year, hasn't it? Mine are still producing and still ripening on the vine. Long may the milder weather continue.

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    1. Jo, yes, each pot of PFA had one single seed tuber in it. I think they did very well in terms of yield. I probably left them in the pots too long though. The first ones are harvested some weeks ago were clean, but these ones were a bit scabby.

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  4. Beautiful harvest!
    My tomatoes are finished, but we are still getting peppers.
    Have a beautiful week!
    Lea

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  5. What a wonderful wild harvest! Those berries look perfect :-)

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  6. Picking tomatoes in October - well we wlll be - is seriously weird!

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  7. What a wonderful harvest you have there! Love the late berries, cucumbers and potatoes, and wonderful tomato picture!

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  8. Just look at those harvest! I'm jealous - what a variety, YUM!

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  9. Your veg always looks so pretty and pest free. Its great that you had such success with cucumbers as I always thought they were more suited to warm climates.

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    1. Kelli, my garden has its share of ugly and diseased veg, just like everyone else. I do try to present things in a positive way though - as witness my comments on the scabby Pink Fir Apple potatoes in this post.

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  10. That's a load of tomatoes for this time of year!! We are down to just 8 to 10 ripening a week, and they have to sit on the counter for a few days to finish them off! The Brussel tops sound very interesting!!

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  11. wowzers you really are reaping the rewards.. those toms are amazing. We've had a lot of cucumbers but they are now over too... what's next?

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  12. I'm impressed with all those beautiful tomatoes! Your harvests still look wonderful even this late in the year. Nice pears too! Our pear tree is old and is too tall to harvest so I wait for dropped pears, but unfortunately the deer usually get them as fast as they hit the ground!

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  13. That's a very fine harvest of tomatoes at any time of year, and in almost October especially impressive. Looks like your cucumbers have bacterial wilt, no saving them now. Mine came out weeks ago when the fungi got the better of them.

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  14. I am excited to see the curried cucumber pickle. It sounds delicious.

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  15. Wonderful, you are still getting such a good harvest. I am very envious of all of those beautiful tomatoes. Planning to pick my pears fairly soon.

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  16. Jeez, I've been composting the Brussels leaves. I did not think they were edible.

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  17. Love the rosehips and sloes. I have to admit, I didn't know what sloes were and had to look them up. Your pears look absolutely perfect! It has been a strange growing season and my tomatoes are still ripening too.

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  18. Wild rose hips! What a find. We used to make rose hip syrup and drink it in water whenever we knew we'd be working the in poison-oak infested woods. Never had a case of poison oak when taking a mega dose of vitamin C prior to exposure.

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