Harvest Monday October 5, 2020

It’s time once again for Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. As the summer veggies wind down, I’m still harvesting ripe peppers for drying  and for fresh eating. I got quite a few of the small but mighty hot Thai peppers last week, including the one I’ve been growing for many years now and a new one from the Seed Savers Exchange that is similar but slightly larger. It’s on the right in the below photo. I dried all of these for later use.

The Amazing 2 peppers are a Korean pepper I dry and use to make gochugaru powder for kimchi. They have a mild heat level and bright red color both fresh and dried.

The Italian type frying peppers are a dependable performer for me even in challenging years, and last week I found ripe Jimmy Nardello, Lemme’s Italian and Dolce D’Minervino peppers for fresh use.

The fall planting of bush beans is producing small harvests of quality beans. Cosmos is on the left in the below photo, and the smaller Tavera filet bean is on the right. We use these mostly for roasting.

The pole beans are still producing too, and I got a bit over three pounds of them last week. They wound up in the freezer.

I made another cutting of collard greens last week, and this batch (the Flash hybrid) wound up in soup. There are lots of them ready for cutting whenever we need them, and the cooler weather will just make them sweeter when cooked.

Since we have plenty of collards, I cooked up a batch of Vivian Howard’s Healthy Soup from her book Deep Run Roots  in the Instant Pot, and we ate on it for two meals. I used homemade chicken stock for a base, including a bit of chicken meat we froze with the stock. To that I added celery, carrots and a few waxy fingerling potatoes and all the collard greens. I think collards make a good choice for soup because they hold their shape and don’t fall apart during a long, slow cooking that brings out the flavor of the ingredients. The soup was even better the next day, as soups often are.

It has been a great year for eggplants here. I harvested quite a few of the bright purple Dancer and one of the dark purple Nadia, with more still setting on the plants. We have been roasting them as a side dish, and they have wound up frequently on eggplant sandwiches. Our latest dish was eggplant panini, and some of these are destined for that tomorrow.

One of the bigger Turkeyneck neck pumpkins fell off the vine, and I brought it in to finish curing. I put it next to the Centercut squash that got caught in the fence for a size comparison. This Turkeyneck was a whopper, and weighed in at 9 pounds 11 ounces. That will make a lot of pumpkin puree! We freeze the puree in ice cube trays and use the cubes in our breakfast smoothies. They also can be added to soups.

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!