Harvest Monday 8/11/14

I've been a bit overwhelmed this week, which is why my Harvest Monday is on Tuesday.  I was out of town last week and then came back to a pile of veggies and a garden overrun with weeds, fungus and bugs.  Luckily this should be the last time I have to go out of town for awhile.  I think next year I need to have a travel moratorium for July and August!  Adding to the overwhelmed feeling is the fact that the semester starts next Monday and I'm teaching a new course plus I have an extra course.  I planned out the fall garden and of the nine rows I have, I'm only going to plant two and a half of them.  This should be more manageable for a busy semester plus I need to work on improving the soil in the rest of the garden this fall.

I may have reached the garden harvest peak last week at 80 lbs.  This week was a close second at 75.4 lbs.  I didn't do I very good job of taking pictures this week, but this represents most of what I harvested this week:

The biggest harvest continues to be melons at almost 25 lbs this week.  I've still been eating a melon per day, which I don't think I would ever get tired of!  I picked the first watermelon.  It was a small one and was alright, but definitely could have been riper.  Several of the melons started cracking from our never ending rain, but I can't complain because I've had a lot of melon this year.

The other big harvest this week has been tomatoes at 16 lbs.  I'm amazed at how much the tomatoes have produced because the plants look sad and pathetic with blight.  I have been picking the tomatoes early and letting them ripen inside because if I leave them to vine ripen they crack because of that never ending rain again.  I roasted a big batch of the tomatoes and made I big pot of curry that I then divided up into freezer bags for quick and tasty lunches.

I didn't take a picture, but I did harvest another Cushaw squash.  This one was a little over 12 lbs.  I cut it into cubes and roasted it in oil and salt.. delicious!  The bell peppers have been doing pretty well.  They are one of my favorite summer veggies.  I have been sauteing them in all kinds of dishes.

I learned this week that if you leave carrots in the ground too long, they start rotting!  I don't know if this is normal or if the excessive rain caused the problem.  I have been pulling carrots as I use them, but then I noticed black leaves and started pulling and many of them were rotting.  I harvested the ones that were not rotting, which was 5.7 lbs.

In a previous post I wrote about harvesting potatoes and about how my potatoes were not very big, so I was going to let them completely die back and harvest the rest.  Well, I harvested the rest of the potatoes and got 0.23 lbs.  Once again, I don't know if it's because of all the rain, but most of the potatoes rotted.

I continue to get a few cucumbers and summer squash and beans, but bugs and fungus have definitely hampered their growth.  I let the Mexican bean beetles get out of control and the larva have practically decimated the beans.  This is what the larvae look like and this is how many there are on a somewhat whole leaf:

And this is what the leaves look like after they've munched (you can also see an adult on the left):

I spent awhile this morning picking the adults and larvae off the beans, but it is looking hopeless.  I have new bean seedlings for fall that haven't been attacked yet, so I think I'm going to have to just patrol the new beans and give up on the old beans.

Weekly harvests (lbs):
Onion 0.76
Herbs 0.04
Potatoes 0.23
Summer squash   3.43
Peppers 5.43
Cucumber   3.22
Beans 0.45
Carrots 5.71
Tomatoes 16.12
Corn         0.79
Melons 24.76
Cabbage 2.41
Winter squash 12.09

Weekly total: 75.4 lbs
Yearly total: 376.55 lbs

That's all the harvests coming from my garden this week.  To see what others are harvesting check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions.