Temperatures dropped yesterday by 10 degrees. We've had lots of rain in the last week, and it rained all day today. My sons are finally back in
school, and it's September. Summer is over. Vegetable production has shifted dramatically in my garden. The picture above is about 3 weeks old, and it is a typical summer harvest.
This was yesterday's harvest - mature carrots and massive winter squash...most definitely an "autumn" harvest. Here's some more of our harvests over the past few weeks:
Green beans, cukes, and squash. That big boy has been eaten and he was tasty.
Cukes and red Chinese noodle beans.
Lots of stuff here, but the only notable is on the left, some summer-planted greens...arugula, red mustard, and thinned radishes.
The last summer squash and one of the last non-cherry tomatoes. Radishes, arugula, carrots and a wealth of one-bite 'maters.
Onions planted in July started to fall over and needed to be harvested. Small but tasty.
Clockwise from top left...red and yellow volunteer cherry tomatoes, a stunted mortgage lifter, tomatillos, a pickling cucumber, Black Cherry tomatoes, and a variety called Matt's Wild Cherry.
This mini-sized melon grew out of my compost pile...I mentioned him 2 posts ago.
He was fragrant and the perfect size for breakfast.
I planted a new cucumber this year, Mexican Sour Gerkins. They were instantly swarmed by the larger and more aggressive types, but in the past week I've seen a lot of gerkin resugence as their larger cousins have died back. Here is the one and only harvested gerkin, looking like a microscopic watermelon.
Didn't taste sour to me, but had good cucumber flavor. I doubt I'll get a full handful of them. Next year I'll use a different planting strategy for the gerkins.
Most of these winter squash have grown out of my compost pile. We're unsure if these are butternut squash or crookneck pumpkins. They have a sweet butternut flavor, but they certainly look like crooknecks. We've grown both things in our garden in the past. Doesn't really matter, I guess. They'll keep well and feed us into the winter, despite their anatomically humorous shape. Many a bad joke is made due to these squash.
Anyway, that's what's happening in the garden in early September.
Maybe it is a cross between the two squash? I keep waiting for my squash to be ready. I can't wait to start eating it again. I say that, but I still have a bit in the freezer from last year. I just don't think of eating it over the summer.
ReplyDeleteIdaho has seen three nights of 31 degrees and we had 25 deg. two weeks ago, a one-time anomaly. Our more succulent plants are dead but the hardy stuff still survives. I have hesitated to pull anything up out of curiosity - will some of the plants continue to grow produce?
ReplyDeleteCase in point: Corn. Our corn was devastated by the one night deep freeze. It is now brown. But the ears still partially filled! I am sad that I never took the time to let crops continue to grow in Virginia, I could have been eating fresh until Turkey day! Your squash is looking delicious...