Five heavy butternut squash, a nice red cabbage head, a couple green Hillbilly tomatoes (I think they'll ripen at home), a few Thai hot peppers (one with just a little bit of blight), some Purple Calabash and San Marzano tomatoes (just the edges show in the squash and pepper photos), big fat Oxheart carrots, and a bunch of white Portugal onions.
Good Morning Kathy, your harvest is wonderful, nothing can be compared with the joy of a harvesting of your stuff. Love the chubby form of your carrots.
ReplyDeleteAren't those carrots funny? I grew them, too. I think carrots did better than anything else this year. Celery also going strong, but my beets stayed small and pathetic. This may be some kind of virus? I planted early, around the first of June but they are just little, about the size of a quarter. Also, butternut has not produced fruit yet so it doesn't look good. Planning to stuff the blossoms with goat cheese and fry em up. Hey, how do I know when my red cabbage is ready to pick? Thanks, Betsy
ReplyDeleteGorgeous! I love that you take photos with a little bit of dirt still hanging on... :)
ReplyDeleteIna Garten has a delicious recipe for butternut squash and pumpkin soup. SO good...I can't remember which of her cookbooks it in...but you may be able to find it online. Delicious! And it freezes pretty well, too.
Betsy,
ReplyDeleteA cabbage head will feel (and look) solid when its ready to pick. It needs to be harvested then or it will split open.
Beets grow best in cool weather with lots of sun. Maybe all the cloudy days this summer affected yours? They are sensitive to low soil pH and will be stunted at pH less than 6.2.
Also, you can start them earlier. The beets I have been harvesting since early July were planted indoors at the end of April. I've been planting fall beets in July and August.
Most beet varieties require 55 - 70 days. If you sowed seeds on June 1, adding 65 days is August 5. But then I'm still pulling some of mine I planted in April.
Thanks for the soup recommendation Michelle! I'll look for it.
ReplyDeleteOhhh, good for you on the Butternuts, I have one that is thriving in my garden patch, but although the lottie ones are about 5 inches long the vines are dying back, I think they won't get any bigger now. Still for next year I now have a better idea of how the soil is and be able to work in more goodness pertinent to the rotation.
ReplyDeleteI grew some stubby carrots Parmex the flavour was really strong, funny enough the BBC Frontpage carries a quote of the day and this morning's was Mae West saying "The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond" ha! ha! what a character.
Shame you are all those miles away Kathy I would swap you a big old Savoy Cabbage for a Butternut!!
Enjoy your Saturday night.
Marian (LondonUK)
Oh and I LOVE savoy cabbage!
ReplyDeleteI have given away 3 butternuts so far. I'm trying to figure out how many the 3 of us can possibly eat before they go bad. The rest will go to the food pantry I think.
Back to the beets...turns out I did plant them earlier - first of May. Oddly, i think the problem may be lack of consistent watering in the raised bed. The ph is fine and there are no bugs, just kind of stunted plants with small beets. Even though it did rain a lot, maybe they needed more?
ReplyDeleteBetsy, I don't know about your beets. It seems if you've got good cabbage you should have big beets.
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