We just returned from a birding trip to Mammoth Lakes California. My husband Vic Leipzig led a group of birders in search of white-tailed ptarmigan, black-backed woodpeckers, and other mountain specialties. And found them!
So my harvest this week was for only four days. The poundage wasn’t spectacular, but the variety was good. I’ve been lagging in photographing my harvest, so here are some catch-up photos of some of my late season harvests as well as this week’s.
My community garden plot provided some really nice onions this year. Here are Texas Sweets and Southern Belles. Both are incredibly sweet and mild, really nice onions.
I grew a nice variety of winter squash and pie pumpkins too. Here are some of them: New England pie pumpkin, Amish pie pumpkin, mini blue hubbard, and mini red kuri.
These Cherokee Trail of Tears pods will provide dried black beans for soup later in the fall.
My tomato harvest at both my home garden and the community garden is really falling off. Harvest of tomatoes should be extending well into October and even November, but my plants at the community garden are nearly dead already. I'm trying to revive them with additional fertilizer and compost and some pH adjustment of the soil, which is too alkaline. They're responding, so I have some hope of getting a few more tomatoes later on in the season.
I didn't get too many peaches from the neighbor's tree this year. The rats got most of them.
The peaches went into a pie along with a Granny Smith apple that an opossum knocked off the tree and the last little drab of blueberries. Here the fruit is in a bowl. I was going to photograph each stage, but forgot. And when the crumb-topped pie came out of the oven, it smelled so heavenly that we gobbled it up. Sorry, no photos of the pie. Trust me, it was beautiful.
The mesclun went into a salad with hot bacon grease-basalmic vinegar dressing with a boiled egg. Delicious! Can't believe I'm harvesting mesclun in August.
Carrots, onions and lacinato kale went into a chicken broth. Then I added egg noodles. If you haven't grown Lacinato kale before, give it a try. It has a much milder taste than Scotch blue curled and a finer texture. I'm hooked on it, but will continue to grow the Scotch blue curled as well.
This is essentially an Italian stir-fry. Onions, garlic, eggplant, bell peppers, summer squash, and chard, all stir-fried in olive oil. Then I added some marinara sauce and some cooked pasta. Didn't get a photo of the finished product. Ate it too fast. Delicious!
Here is my harvest for the week ending August 14, 2011.
FRUIT
6.5 oz Apple, Granny Smith (one fell off the tree a bit early so I put it into a peach pie)
0.5 oz Blueberries
1 lb 10 oz Oranges, Navel
Subtotal FRUIT 2 lbs 1 oz
VEGETABLES
8 oz Bell Pepper
6 oz Bok Choy
6 oz Carrots, Kyoto Red (so sweet)
1 oz Chard
11 oz Corn
11 oz Cucumber
3.5 oz Eggplant, Japanese
2 oz Kale, Lacinato
4 oz Mesclun
2 lbs 4 oz Tomatoes
Subtotal VEGETABLES 5 lbs 8.5 oz
TOTAL PRODUCE 7 lbs 9.5 oz plus 5 eggs
Everyone else has already posted their harvests on Monday at Daphne’s Dandelions. I’m late, as usual. Happy gardening.
Lou Murray's Green World 
Great, now I’m hungry! That all looks so tasty. I was speaking with a farmer just up the road from us whose specialty is also tomatoes, and we both agreed, at least right here on the coast, this is the worst tomato season we can remember. Our plants for the first time seem to have been hit with fusarium wilt, and what hasn’t wilted, or suffered from blight, has been struggling with vole damage. Even our previously reliable varieties are struggling terribly. I’ve never had a tomato season before where I’ve so strongly questioned the wisdom of growing them here. I can’t believe we’ve had days in August where the high was below 70F, and the nights were in the 40s! We’ve been having a slight warm up the past couple of days, but I’m not if it will be enough. Next season better be a whole lot better than this one, or we’ll have to resort to specializing in kale 😛
Your pumpkins are looking good! We’ve harvested a few ‘Baby Pam’ pie pumpkins, but not much else yet. I’m hopeful for our Red Kuri, and Anna Schwartz Hubbards. We’re waiting to see what the voles leave us though, they’ve been hard on the squash patch this year, despite trapping. It looks like ‘Boston Marrow’ may be our star winter squash this season, if only for their sheer size…but I don’t want to count my pumpkins before they’re harvested so to speak!
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Clare, I wondered if others on the California coast were having a cool summer, and it looks like you are. We had blazing heat in early June, then cool when it was supposed to be warm. Global weirding. With all your space at Curbstone, you should be getting a great winter squash harvest.
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