Harvest Monday 10/10/16

This week we finally met autumn.  The temperatures are cooler and the skies are bluer.  Well, except for a few days of rain from hurricane Matthew.  We're far enough inland to miss the major path of the storm, but we did end up with about three inches of rain.  It thoroughly soaked the garden to the point of the massive okra plant toppling over.  I feel as though my okra plant is not of normal size.  Most of the ones I see in other gardens are tall, but have one or two main stems.

The giant okra plant toppled over from the rain.

The good thing is that picking okra is much easier now!  I did attempt to right the plant and propped it up with bricks and stakes.  The trunk didn't break, so it may survive.  If not, I've had plenty of okra from this one plant, 12 lbs to be exact.

Basket of eggplant, okra, edible gourd, Seminole pumpkin and a few tomatoes and cucumbers

Besides okra this week, I harvested another Seminole pumpkin that was almost 3 lbs along with a rather large edible gourd.  The remaining cucumber plants are putting out a few fruits.  The tomatoes appear to have lots of green tomatoes on them now, with a few making it into my basket.  I hope they have time to ripen.  So far the ten day forecast does not show any lows anywhere near freezing.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll have a late frost like last year.

Peppers were plentiful this week at 4.5 lbs.  The ones I don't eat this week will get frozen.

Basket of Sweet Peppers

Green beans are in the running for most resilient crop this year.  They have steadily produced since early summer.  This week I harvest 2.3 lbs of green beans.  I roasted a pile of them and then blanched and froze the rest.

Garden of Eden and Blue Coco Beans

I picked another cantaloupe at almost three pounds.  Several of the remaining melons cracked from all the rain and were swarmed by ants.  A couple of melons remain, so I may have a few more before the season ends.  I'm still not tired of eating melons.

Hale's Best Melon

In a few weeks I will need to start digging up the sweet potatoes.  The vines are growing rampantly.  I trimmed several of the vines to prevent them from taking over the young carrots, so now I have a pile of sweet potato greens to cook.  I wonder if they can be frozen like other greens?  When I harvest the sweet potatoes, I'm going to have a ton of leaves.  In the past they have gone to the compost, but this year I may experiment with freezing them and see how they do.

Sweet Potato Greens

Saturday it rained and rained and rained some more.  I decided to bake and puree one of my medium sized Dickinson pumpkins.  From a 7 lb pumpkin I got about 10 cups of pureed pumpkin.  From that I made pumpkin soup, a triple batch of pumpkin muffins and some treats for Domino's 7th birthday.

Pumpkin soup with grilled cheese and homemade pickles

Pumpkin Muffins

Pumpkin and Peanut Butter Treats for Domino's 7th Birthday

If you recall from last week, I had the tragedy of a giant pumpkin falling off the vine.  It seems to slowly be turning a bit more orange.  I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that it'll ripen.  Domino is also keeping his paws crossed because he's imaging all the treats that I can make from a pumpkin that big!

Weekly Harvest (lbs):
Peppers  4.5
Okra  0.95
Cucumber  1.45
Green beans  2.33
Tomatoes   0.24
Eggplant 1.74
Melon  2.73
Winter squash 2.86
Sweet potato greens  0.71
Gourd  1.31

Yearly Harvests: 895 lbs

That's all the harvests coming from my garden this week.  To see what others are harvesting, check out Harvest Monday on Our Happy Acres.