Harvest Monday August 29, 2022

It’s time once again for Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. August is nearly over, and the summer garden is still keeping us well supplied with heat loving crops like tomatoes and eggplant. And slowly but surely, the sweet peppers have begun ripening as well. Last week a few pole beans joined the party too! I have lots of hot peppers both green and ripe coming on, and I typically use these as needed until later in the season when I begin making hot sauce and drying peppers for chile powder.

It’s been a few years since I last grew Emerite pole beans. It makes long, slender filet beans we great flavor. We especially like them roasted, or steamed and used in salads..

Even though it’s not been a great year for tomatoes, I am still hauling in plenty of them. Last week I got a mix of cherry tomatoes, plus slicers like Damsel, Benevento and Better Boy.

I’m growing Verona for the second year now, with somewhat mixed results. According to Johnny’s Selected Seeds, the breeder, it is “Similar to Juliet, but with even tastier, somewhat more plump, deep-red “cocktail plum” fruits averaging 2 1/2 oz”. In our garden the fruits are indeed bigger than Juliet. Last year it was quite productive, but this year much less so. This batch weighed right at two pounds. I will likely give it another go next year, since I have seeds and 2022 is not a good year to judge tomatoes. I dehydrated some of the Veronas, and I plan to use the rest in sauce.

Slicing tomatoes are somewhat hard to find these days, and many of the early setting ones rotting. Damsel has given us quite a few edible ones though, and it remains one of my favorite slicing tomatoes.

It’s my second year growing the striped beefsteak tomato Benevento, and this Artisan Seeds introduction has great flavor with an extended shelf life both on and off the vine. I lost some of the first ones to set on, but the second flush has given us several nice fruits.

I’m growing mostly the hybrid bull’s horn sweet peppers these days. I got peppers from Carmen and Cornito Rosso last week, along with several of the heirloom Jimmy Nardellos which are usually listed as a frying pepper. I’ve been growing Jimmy Nardellos for many years now, and I did a Variety Spotlight on them back in 2013.

We tried a little different treatment on eggplant last week, dipping it in egg white and rolling in seasoned bread crumbs before baking on a sheet pan. It was tasty, and a great addition to our usual lineup of eggplant dishes. We also baked up one of the Goldilocks acorn squashes that night to go with our fish piccata.

We still have quite a few sweet potatoes in storage, and even though many have sprouted they are still quite edible. We cubed up one of the white-fleshed Korean Purple potatoes along with one of the all purple Purple variety to make hash one night last week. We tossed the cut up sweet potatoes with a bit of olive oil and baked in a cast iron skillet until brown and a bit crispy. I was amazed at how sweet the potatoes still were after 10 months in storage!

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 please take a minute and check out what everyone is harvesting!