The garden seemed to go into overdrive this week. The kitchen island has been loaded up every day with goodies from the garden, and the freezer is filling up fast.
The blueberries and blackberries are hitting their peak, even as the tomato harvest is just beginning. We picked about 3.5 gallons of blackberries, and a gallon of blueberries. We got several quarts of the small-fruited varieties of tomatoes this week, plus a few of the slicers. The dehydrator has been busy drying some of the tomatoes.
We got our first sweet pepper this week, Carmen, from a plant growing in a large pot. I’m continuing to experiment with peppers and eggplants in containers. It does seem to be a worthwhile way to give us an early taste of both of these summer vegetables. This Carmen pepper looked more like a bell pepper, but the others coming on show the more tapered shape you would expect from an Italian bull’s horn pepper. It was juicy and sweet on a salad.
Sharon cucumbers and Carmen pepper
From the greenhouse I continue to get cucumbers, plus the occasional lettuce plant. Anything growing in the greenhouse here in summer has got to love the heat! The Sharon cucumber variety is supposed to be cold-tolerant, but it seems to love the heat as well. I made some cucumber salsa with it one day, a simple mix of diced cucumbers, some salad burnet flavored vinegar, mint and onions. It made for a cool side dish on a hot day.
cucumber salsa
And the lettuce has amazed me. I planted heat tolerant varieties in the greenhouse back in early June (New Red Fire, Loma, and Magenta). While the outside temps have reached the upper 90s, it has gotten over 120F in the greenhouse. None of these lettuces have bolted. New Red Fire and Magenta don’t color up as well in the greenhouse, but that’s ok.
New Red Fire lettuce
We are happy to have any lettuce at all in this heat! We used some of the Magenta leaves for BLT sandwiches one day.
Magenta lettuce
It was our first BLTs of the season, but I’m guessing it won’t be our last. I even baked a loaf of whole wheat Honey Flax bread for the occasion.
BLT sandwich on Honey Flax bread
I couldn’t wait any longer and decided to dig one of the Caribe potato plants. It rewarded us with almost a pound of new potatoes. I cooked them up with some green beans. This was one of the plants growing under straw in the new lasagna bed. I hope the rest of the plants do this well!
That’s a sample of what we’ve been harvesting in the last week. The total harvest for this week was 69 pounds, the largest yet of 2010. To see more gardener’s harvests, visit Daphne’s Dandelions.