It’s time once again for Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. We’ve had a bit of unseasonable weather here in August, with cool mornings and less humidity than usual. I’ve taken advantage of that to work in the garden as much as possible and that includes planting things for fall like bush beans and collard greens. Meanwhile, it’s still tomato season and while it’s not going to be the best year for tomatoes due to all the rain we’ve gotten I am still finding plenty for processing. I harvested about 15 pounds of them last week, mostly paste types. I made tomato sauce with most of them, cooking them down then putting in containers for freezing.
paste tomatoes
I got almost seven pounds alone of Juliet, and all of those went into the sauce. When cooked down they made over six pints of sauce.
Juliet tomatoes
The eggplants seem to be loving the weather, and Galine and Nadia wound up on eggplant sandwiches.
eggplant Galine and Nadia
The squash are on the decline, and I pulled a few of the bush types to make room for a fall planting of turnips. I got tromboncino, Tempest and Zephyr last week which kept us supplied, along with two of the Syrian heirloom Homs Kousa.
harvest of summer squashes
I used squash, eggplant and tomatoes to make a Quinoa Salad with Roasted Vegetables last week. It has a light olive oil and lemon juice dressing, with feta cheese and fresh basil from the herb garden. I’m always looking for ways to use quinoa and salads are one of my favorites.
quinoa and roasted veggies salad
I also pulled the first planting of blackeyed peas to make room for fall plantings. This is the Fast Lady Northern Southern pea, and I have another short row of it just starting to bloom. We got about a pound of shelled peas from this batch, plus enough dried ones for planting next year.
blackeyed peas
For those not familiar with blackeyed peas (aka cowpeas or field peas), they are legumes related to the yardlong bean and grow on shorter, bushy vines. The Fast Lady Northern Southern variety is compact compared to some. It made for a great ‘edible cover crop’ that I sowed back in early June. In just over two months time I got a decent harvest and now that spot is free for a fall planting of something else. For this variety the pods start out green, then turn yellow and finally brown as they mature. I pick them when the pods start to turn yellow, while the peas are still plump and green inside.
black eyed pea plants
black eyed pea blooms and young pods
The first of the pole beans are coming on, and I picked enough for a side dish. These are Robe Mountain, from the Sustainable Mountain Agricultural Center, and the earliest to bear of the varieties I have planted. Musica is now blooming and I should get some of them next week.
Robe Mountain beans
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!
We are having our best ever tomato season, I am picking about 4lb a day right now for passata and ketchup making along with a few hadfulls for eating fresh. Hopefully we will have enough to try drying them this year too.
I’ve been drying a lot of the small fruited ones. They are useful to have on hand when the fresh ones are gone.
I have quinoa biryani on the menu for this week. It will also use some of our broccoli and cauliflower.
That’s another use for quinoa I never thought of before!
That’s an awesome harvest of tomatoes! I planted primarily paste tomatoes this year but am not expecting a large haul. We’ve had the opposite in terms of tomato weather – dry and pretty great – and even though disease wise, our tomatoes are doing the best they’ve ever done, growth wise, they are the worst & nowhere near as large as usual. Still trying to figure out what is going on.
I think it’s a myth that tomatoes are easily grown! The small ones might be easy, but for me the slicers are always finicky about the weather.
Your tomatoes look so wonderful! I’m still waiting for mine to really start ripening, just a trickle so far. The sight of that quinoa salad is making me hungry, it looks delicious.
The quinoa salad tasted better than it looked, and it works for whatever veggies there are available.
Nice haul of Juliets! The quinoa salad looks great, and is healthy too! It’s strange, here we look to be having a great tomato year but a terrible eggplant one, just the opposite of you.
The slicing tomatoes are really struggling, though the Roma types have done reasonably well.
A lovely tomato harvest. That’s a great idea to put roasted vegetables over quinoa (which I have an oversupply right now).
Such an abundance of tomatoes, we are patiently still waiting for our to ripen. Never seen blackeyed peas growing before either, splendid indeed.