Potatoes

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This morning, I spent a couple of hours in the garden cleaning, weeding and harvesting potatoes. This year’s yield was pretty meager and I noticed a good amount of soft and rotten potatoes in the ground. We had a lot of rain in the past couple of weeks and I probably should have harvested them earlier. I am not sure I got all of them, in particular the purples ones, who looked just like clumps of dirt and were hard to spot in the soil.Overall, I harvested 3 lb. 12 oz. of Banana fingerlings and 1 lb. 8 oz. purple Magic Molly. I had planted two rows of six plants of fingerlings and six plants of Magic Molly. Of the fingerlings, only seven plants total grew and only four of the purple ones. I laid the harvested potatoes to dry for a couple of days and will then gently rub of the dirt and store them for a few days until the time is right for a nice dinner of roasted potatoes.

I also harvested more cucumbers and more tomatoes and my first Kentucky Wonder pole beans. My eggplant is finally bearing fruit. I am very excited!

My plot this morning. A lot of bare space where I harvested the potatoes (left side) and took out the bush beans (right side in front of the pole beans). Time for fall planting!

Volunteering

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I signed up to be one of the harvest volunteers at City Natives in Mattapan and today was my first day. We harvested (and weighed and recorded) tomatoes (8 pounds), eggplants, bell peppers, hot peppers, turnips, cabbages (Savoy and Oxheart), kale (Rainbow Lacinato and Red Russian) and 26 (!) pounds of callaloo. All of the produce will be donated to a nearby food pantry. I will be helping out once a week during the months of August and September.

Ping Tung eggplant

Mixed peppers: Bell peppers, Anaheims, Banana peppers, Islanders, Little lemons, Serrano.

My share 🙂 (The tomatoes are from my garden).

EDIT: A few days later, I made this recipe. Yum!!! Served with rice, green beans with chili sauce and ginger chicken.

Four Days

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Four days out of town:Cucumbers, Swiss Chard and tomatoes.

I had harvested really thoroughly the night before I left and took four cucumbers up to Maine where they went into a salad.

The cucumber is producing fruit like crazy. Those six cucumbers weigh in at 4 pounds. When I came to harvest this morning, the cucumber cage was toppled over and I had to stake it to fortify. Same happened to my Brandywine cage. Looking forward to the next few weeks of fresh garden produce.

The potatoes are getting ready to be harvested, and the pole beans (that I planted late) are flowering. The bush beans are close to being done, the cucumber is still producing heavily and my three tomato plants are heavy with (for the most part still green) tomatoes. The leeks are looking great and the kale is coming up. The golden beets I sowed sadly did not germinate as did the last carrot crop.

The pinkish-white dahlias are the only ones flowering so far – I have two of those. The two red ones are taking their time.

I need to weed and clean the plot and will sow fall greens in the next couple of weeks.

 

Another Week of Summer Harvests

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Thursday: Swiss Chard, cucumber, tomato, green beans, basil, flowers. I will make another pesto potato salad for another party on Saturday. Also on the menu, Caprese salad and a Swiss Chard omelette for breakfast.Tuesday: cucumbers, green beans, tomato, Swiss Chard. Dinner tonight: Fettuccine with Swiss Chard (from today’s and Friday’s harvest), mushrooms, garlic, feta and pine nuts.

Sunday: onions, radish, green beans, cucumbers. The cucumbers will go in a Turkish cucumber salad, together with those harvested over the last few days.

Saturday (no picture): green beans and a lot of basil. Turned the green beans (and some more harvested in the last few days), basil and home-grown garlic into this delicious pesto potato salad, which we brought to a party this afternoon. I pretty much followed the recipe except I roasted the potatoes. Yum!

Friday: First heirloom tomato, cucumbers, Swiss Chard, a handful of green beans and basil

Cucumbers

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So many cucumbers this year! About two a day. From three plants bunched into one single seed pot. I am not even sure what the variety is, I think I might have panic-bought them at Whole Foods after my direct-sowing experiment failed. This picture shows about 3 pounds of cukes.I chopped those cucumbers up and turned them into this tasty Turkish-inspired cucumber salad, minus the dill. It was very refreshing. I served it with spiced lentils with yogurt and feta, roasted broccoli, sauteed chicken breast and rosemary focaccia.

Mid-July – a Week of Harvests

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Sunday: Kale and green beans. Dinner included green beans with feta.

 

Friday: carrot, beans, basil. Dinner tonight included a large Greek salad (I used up all home-grown lettuce and the cucumber harvested yesterday).

 

Thursday: first cucumber, the very last lettuce, beets, kale and green beans. Dinner tonight did not involve anything in this picture, but this (with carrots and herbs from the garden) and homemade rosemary focaccia, roasted broccoli (daughter is vegetarian) and sauteed chicken breast (son is not).

 

Wednesday: more green beans that together with the harvest from previous days were turned into this deliciousness.

 

Monday: Swiss Chard, lettuce, green beans, mint and the first cherry tomatoes. On the menu: Swiss Chard, mushroom and sun-dried tomato frittata, and a Greek salad with feta, parsley (from my back porch) and mint.