So much produce harvested since our last Harvest Monday post. Let the parade of deliciousness begin!
We planted a lot of beans this year – broad, French and runner – and all but one variety are in full productive flood. We’ve been eating them, freezing them, and I made a batch of runner bean, tomato and courgette chutney as well.
The courgettes are still producing like crazy (no surprises there) and there’s a good selection of other veggies to accompany them:
The purple cauliflower we sowed turned out not to be cauliflower after all; it’s definitely calabrese broccoli. It loses its colour on cooking, even when gently steamed. Which is a bit of a shame, but par for the course for most purple veg. (The anthocyanin pigments are water soluble, y’see, and probably break down even faster under heat.)
We also picked the last of the mangetout-turned-podded peas yesterday, so we’ll be shelling those and finishing them off before too long.
Last week we lifted the last of the onions, before the white rot set in. I was pleasantly surprised to find that only a dozen or so had taken rot, leaving us with this many for drying and storing:
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about the potatoes, which took blight a bit too early this year. This is all the tubers we got from an entire three metre row of first earlies:
Not good. The second earlies are a bit more promising, but yields are definitely way down on last year. We might not have as many to store as we hoped, but so it goes.
So far this year – a load of grey mould infected strawberries aside – the soft fruit and berry harvests have been very good indeed:
Clockwise from the top, we have: blackcurrants, redcurrants, Japanese wineberries, blackberries and raspberries.
The Japanse wineberries are definitely winners in our book. The plant is a spiky old so-and-so, but the berries are incredibly easy to pick; they just slide right off their stems once they’re ripe and they taste delicious, sweeter than raspberries but still nicely sharp.
And we’re glad to see that our twin blueberry bushes in the back garden have produced a decent crop this year, despite being re-potted back in the Spring.
And this is one of the dishes I’ve been cooking up recently. Allotment bubble and squeak, with goat’s cheese and homemade courgette and tomato chutney. Simple, incredibly tasty and highly recommended!
Harvest Monday is a GYO meme hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.
8 replies on “Harvest Monday for August 8th 2016”
You have a lot of lovely berries! Those wineberries may be spiky, but they don’t look as bad as gooseberries which always seem to get me without warning. The purple cauliflower sure looks like broccoli from here. Sorry to hear about the blight issues on your potatoes. Thankfully I don’t have any problems here, at least yet.
Aye, our gooseberries are particularly vicious. And because yours truly didn’t plant them all that sensibly a couple of years back, they make harvesting our redcurrants and blackcurrants somewhat hazardous as well. A reorganisation of the soft fruit section is called for this winter, I think.
Hope the blight stays well away from your spuds!
Have you tried eating sprigs of broccoli raw in a salad. They are delicious. That way you keep the purple colouring too.
That’s a very good idea indeed. I’ll have to cut another head or two and give that a try 🙂
Those are some gorgeous harvests! I’m going to have to consider adding wineberries to my list of berry shrubs to purchase. First, though, I’ll have to check to see if they are hardy around here.
I’ve not seen pink broad beans before, although a variety I’m growing that are green when fresh do go purple as they dry out.
Thank you Margaret! Those broad beans are a variety called ‘red epicure’ and depending on the stage at which you pick them, they come in all sorts of shades from pale pink through to deep red. They tend to keep their colour when cooked, and the plants are good croppers as well. Definitely a variety I’d recommend and will be growing again myself.
Your bubble and squeak dish looks great with the goat cheese. That’s terrible about the potatoes, I wonder if the extremely wet year encouraged the blight. Your onions and loads of beans look good though.
I think you’re absolutely right there, Phuong. Blight thrives in warm, wet conditions and this “summer” has been one long combination of wet and warm. But those are the conditions that beans enjoy – as my Dad-in-law told me once, they’re originally swamp plants, so love a llt of water – so there’s an upside there.