November Harvests

I love gardening this time of year. The pace is slower for one thing. And most of the vegetables don’t demand daily harvesting. I did cut quite a bit of broccoli the other day before our first hard freeze – over three pounds of it actually. We’ve been enjoying it a lot, especially since we got very little of it this spring.

But most of the greens are harvested on an as needed basis. I cut some of the Beira Tronchuda for a lentil kale soup I fixed. I cut the stalks away from the leaves, and my wife and I ate them raw for a snack. We were amazed at how tender and tasty they were! And the large lower leaves were mild and tender in the soup too.

I harvested the first fall spinach this week and used it for a wilted spinach salad. That made for a nice lunch one day. The spinach is coming from a sowing I made back in August in one of the cold frame beds, and is a mix of Viroflay, Giant Winter and Space varieties.

I’ve been harvesting lettuce as needed for salads too. The Anuenue and Red Sails made a nice and colorful combination.

The hard freeze last week finally got the tomato vines, but we still have a few fresh ones ripening. They don’t have a lot of flavor but we’ll use them anyway for cooking and on salads. It will be along time before we have fresh ones again!

I also got the first figs of the season, mostly the Hardy Chicago variety. The figs were not great producers this year, though the plants themselves grew well. And they were loaded with figs, but most just didn’t ripen in time. There’s always next year I guess.

And my wife and I harvested the luffa gourds that were mature enough to use. I didn’t weigh these, since we’re not eating them, but there were quite a few. There were about a dozen of the large luffas, and a shoe box full of the little hedgehog luffas. We put them out in the garage for drying.

That’s a peek at what we’re harvesting here in November. For more gardeners’ harvests, visit Daphne’s Dandelions.