Harvest Monday

So, more time has passed, and I continue to not be able to do as much as I want to, but I have not been without harvests! Must take my wins where they show up, these days.

Greens O’ The Mead

“Meady” veg on a sammy with homemade zuke pickles.

I have been pretty sick for a lot of the summer, and so two things happened: I didn’t get much planted, and I had to use store-boughten lettuce mixes. Now, those are totally nice, don’t get me wrong, but I try to top my sandwiches with something from the garden. This is about the time of year that I find myself switching to whatever is palatable across any spot on my property, so when that last giant bucket of organic spring greens reached its end, I started harvesting Greens O’ The Mead.

Essentially, it’s a combination of herbs, “wild foods,” and whatever leafy plant is available in the garden. It’s all my garden. Why have a lawn when you can have a flowery mead?

One of the things I like best about it is that I only need to harvest what I need on a daily basis, and a part of my work routine is grabbing a leaf of this, a sprig of that to shove into my lunch pail as I leave for the day. Sometimes I use it as a salad, but this year, I’ve just been putting the salad on my sandwich.

These 2 weeks, I’ve harvested this daily, comprised of the following plants, in any given combination on any given day: dandelion, chicory, wild grape leaves, lambs quarters, red curly kale, dragon kale, collards, basil, fennel, lovage, chard, carrot greens, good king Henry, daylily.

Tomatoes

Heavens! So shiny and ripe it hurts to look! Better eat ’em before someone comes to harm!

More new-to-me heirloom varieties have ripened and been tasted this couple of weeks, as well as my beloved Brad’s Atomic Grape and Bloody Butcher. I’m mostly eating them as is, but a few have gone into barbecue stew, which a pork-potato-onion-carrot stew that I canned for lunches over the next few weeks. I used Two Fat Guys as the barbecue sauce, but it’s a flavoring ingredient, rather than a full-on sauce swim for the meat and veg.

Costoluto Fiorentino

The Costoluto Fiorentino, which I tried as part of my everlasting interest in finding the perfect tomato for the 16th C garden, is much smaller than the Costoluto Genovese. I think about 16th C. drawings of tomatoes, and I can’t quite make up my mind if the size of the Fiorentino is more accurate than the size of the Genovese. Fiorentino tastes good, but it does not taste better than Genovese, so I’ll probably stick with Genovese for next summer.

Dark Galaxy Cosmic isn’t terribly dark mottled.

Dark Galaxy Cosmic is ripening up. I think it is okay, but I have to eat a few more of them before I can decide if I want to grow them again.

Chocolate Pear appears to not actually be a chocolate pear plant, since the ‘maters coming off of it are round red cherries. So that’s a fail. Alas.

Gooseberries & Raspberries

It’s a meager bit picked out this time, too true!

I’m sorry to note that my raspberry bed has gone to hell in a hand-basket. I had planned to move the survivors to a new bed this year, in hopes of the plants being able to re-establish. I have picked a few berries here and there, but there is not much, and there won’t be much for a few years. Since I am going to have to re-establish berry beds, I may try to do a black raspberry bed, as well. Red raspberries are easy enough to get in the store, but one never sees goldens or blacks. I used to be able to reliably forage black raspberries, because the city had a huge plot of unused land that had enough plants to feed the city, but in the interest of urban renewal, that field is now host to some sort of shipping center, and there have not been black raspberries for a couple of years.

Treefiddy, peaches, blue goose jam, and Chutney mit Stachelbeeren.

The gooseberries have been made many things: Blue Goose jam, treefiddy* (a new-to-me treat, and I basically used the recipe at Grown to Cook, here), a gooseberry chutney, a Blue Goose pie. The last of the gooseberries are to be canned as pie filling. Probably. There are so many, many gooseberry preserving recipes I want to try, but the fact that I work kind of  cuts into my canning & cooking (& gardening & painting & TV watching) time. Even refrigerated, they have a limited lifespan, and topping and tailing all those gooseberries is no joke.

Also present in the picture are the peaches I canned–I like to get a half bushel of peaches each year from the peach truck. I’m not sure the peaches are extremely better than many of the peaches obtainable at the supermercado or if it is just a marketing ploy, but, eh, so it goes. I certainly enjoy them more, and the peach pies, whiskey peach jam, peach cobbler that it all turns into is not to be denied.
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*Treefiddy is a reference to a South Park bit involving the Loch Ness monster, Chef’s parents, and significant absurdity. It is because of the significant absurdity that I find this bit hysterically funny, and after struggling for days to properly pronounce “clafoutis,” (the best I could manage was “clow-fiddy”) I gave up and started calling it treefiddy, which was funny. Still is funny. Because clafoutis is an absurdly easy recipe, and I wish I had heard of it sooner.

See other Harvest Monday posts via Happy Acres!