Harvest Monday August 8

I am joining Our Happy Acres in their harvest Monday posts :)

I took a few pictures this week of our garden stuff. I wish I had tallied last week's haul separately, I will start doing that.

Our garden consists of 7 4x4 beds, 1 2x2 bed, and 2 2x8 beds. I also have a bucket of tomato sprouts, and several small buckets of herbs. I also sprout alfalfa, broccoli, and radish seeds for salads in my windowsill.

One 4x4 is all pickling cucumbers. We have picked 60+ pounds of them with about 8 pounds being just this week (made 6 quarts of dill pickles). We didn't trellis them as we should have (first time gardeners here) so they are a mess. We have two kinds of pickling cucumbers in there. I bought a six pack of mystery vines when our plants from seed didn't look like they were going to grow. Well they did, and we have a lot going on in such a small space. This is normal for my every other day pick.

Just one day of treasure...

We had heirloom purple beans in a bed for awhile. They didn't do anything, I don't think they liked our soil. We also had ants invade them. So I yanked them up. Normally I would not have picked these tomatoes but can you see the holes from those thieving ants? They moved to the tomato bed. We have home made ant killer out there now so I hope it fixes the problem. I couldn't leave these out there to mush up and get worse.

So I made freezer salsa :) Tomatoes, onion, hot pepper, bell pepper. I put this in a ziploc raw then dump it on precooked ground beef. I can have a taco dinner ready in 15 minutes. 

I also sprouted 4 tablespoons of alfalfa this week. I used to do it all the time and stopped, I don't know why. Normally I mix my seeds up, but this week I did just plain alfalfa because I was using it as a salad base. I think it tastes just like crunchy lettuce, I love it. These are a little hull-ish because I didn't switch the strainer lids on the right day. Once they green up and curl up, your hulls are pretty much trapped. They don't taste like anything, it just isn't as pretty as it could be. 4 tablespoons made over 12 ounces of sprouts. Converting pounds to grams to tablespoons, I should get 20 pounds of sprouts from my 2.5 pound bag of seeds. It was $20, so $1 a pound for organic greens? I'll take it considering Aldi organic lettuce is 3.49 a pound and you have to recycle the large clamshell. 

My first zucchini :) This is going to be pizza for dinner tonight, delish. And there is another cucumber harvest back there. I have about 4-6 vines in one corner that give me weird shaped cucumbers. They taste ok so I just go with it. If I don't pick them as gourd shapes, they grow into large balls. Weird huh? Anyway, we also have 20+ zucchini plants. Some are very small, two are very large. If I can get 5 plants producing like our squash did, I will be happy. My goal is to freeze stuff for winter and I can eat zucchini all day, every day.

This is our corn!!  I did four corn in each square foot (saw it on youtube). So a total of 64 plants (and actually I did more than that because I didn't know they would all sprout). We have about 20 that are up and growing. We are racing the clock with our first frost, this is mostly just a learning thing for us. If we can actually get corn from a raised bed I will be very excited :) 

Our watermelon bed is a 2 X 8. It has now extended through the fence 6 feet into the yard (you can kiss all that goodbye, we have deer). It also extended underneath the zucchini in their bed (another 2 X 8), 10 feet past that bed around the corner (trying to keep it on our edge out of other beds), and 10 feet the other way (wrapping itself into an empty area so that is ok). I have no idea what kind these are. Our sugarbaby seeds did not sprout in our fancy cups. So I bought 8 plants for $1.50. We have ten watermelons, from the size of a roma tomato to the size of a cantaloupe. 

So that's the summary of our little garden this week. We have 50 small cucumbers growing. We have 100 cherry tomatoes trying to turn red. We have 50 large tomatoes trying to ripen. I have 7 yellow squash trying to make it to picking size, 3 zucchini, and 10 watermelon. Our basil has sprouted, along with the beefstake tomatoes in the bucket :)

Picked so far....

Cucumbers 989.86 ounces
yellow squash 229.15 ounces
tomato 147.00 ounces
Cherry tomato 2.90 ounces
Zuchinni 7.35 ounces
Sprouts 12.35 ounces

4 hot pepper

3 tiny green peppers
green beans 9.1 ounces