Harvest Monday November 2, 2015

Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. It’s hard to believe it is November already, with Thanksgiving only a bit over three weeks away. It must be true though, because I just put in an order for a fresh turkey from our favorite local producer, Uebelhack Turkey Farm. Here at HA we are enjoying fresh seasonal veggies like the Coalition Mix kale I harvested last week. I like the big flat leaves on this kale which are easy to clean and easy to cut. It’s also tasty, and we braised this batch to go with some baked pork chops we had for dinner one night.

I also picked out some of the larger Hakurei and Tsugaru Scarlet turnips to grate up for turnip kraut. The kraut has been fermenting for five days now, and it has stopped bubbling. I made one pint jar each from the Hakurei and Tsugaru Scalet and I will taste them later today and see if they are ready. I harvested another batch of the Hakurei for a meal earlier in the week. It was my wife’s turn to cook last week, and I always give her a list of what’s available from the garden. There’s lots of kale and turnips ready right about now, and she has worked them both onto the menu several times now.

The leaf stems on the Tsugaru Scarlet turnips are a lovely shade of reddish green, and they almost look like rhubarb. I gave one a taste, and they had a nice juicy crunch to them. I decided to try fermenting them. I’ll let you know how they turn out, but I will say the stems were pretty tasty even before fermenting.

It was a good year for spinach here, and I froze quite a bit for later use. It finds its way into all sorts of dishes, but one of my favorites is my wife’s Spinach Pie. It’s not exactly a quiche and not exactly a tarte, so we just call it a pie! She served it up for dinner one night with some cooked Hakurei turnips as a side dish.

I planted lots of kale this fall. It’s something we enjoy eating, and with any luck we will have it available until really cold weather arrives. I made another cutting of the Wild Garden Mix last week. It’s a little bit more curly than the Coalition Mix, with the occasional plant that is downright frilly, but the leaves are big and still fairly flat and smooth. The leaves in the basket in the below photo came from several different plants, and you can see the color differences plus a leaf on the far right from one of the ‘frilly’ plants. I need to do a spotlight on these two kale mixes because they have been great performers for me here.

I think the flat leaves makes it great for kale chips, among other things. My wife whipped up a batch of those last week. We pretty much ate the whole bowl of them in one sitting too! The slightly different colors and textures of the Wild Garden Mix made for a colorful display.

My smallest harvest of the week came from the greenhouse. I wanted to save seeds from the Aji Golden peppers, and I had a few that ripened after I put the container plant in the greenhouse. I’m not sure where the peppers will wind up after I take the seeds out, perhaps in a dish later this week. I still have Aji Panca and Malawi Piquante peppers ripening on other container plants in the greenhouse. I’m planning on a report on the pickled Malawi peppers later this week.

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to share, add your name and blog link to Mr Linky below. And be sure and check out what everyone is harvesting!