Our Second Harvest of Willow Leaf Lima Beans, and More!

The harvests are in full swing right now and we are enjoying picking every pound of it! The Willow Leaf pole beans we harvested a few days ago were ready to be picked again this quickly, so that's what I did.

After picking three pounds just the other day, we got three pounds nine ounces more! They shelled out to be thirteen and one-half ounces of beautiful butter beans.

This is the bag of shelled beans from the second picking.

Here are the first two shelled bags of butter beans we have from our new type of vining butter bean.

Here is how they look after they have been cooked with some butter and salt.  Delicious!

The first harvest period for the red raspberries appears to be over. This 1/2 ounce of berries is all we got after letting them grow for a few days. They provided us with a good supply of raspberries while they lasted!

The blueberries on the other hand, surprised me with another very nice harvest of fifteen and one-quarter ounces. The bird netting is functioning better than I ever expected.

I don't have pictures of the tomato harvest I got today, but it was a great one and it took quite a while to accomplish! Here is the tomato status from just today's picking:

     Park's Whopper Tomatoes  -  18 Pounds

     Celebrity Tomatoes  -  10 Pounds

     Roma Tomatoes  -  36 1/2 Pounds

This weekend I'm using a recipe for making 7 quarts of seasoned tomato sauce using 45 pounds of tomatoes. I found the recipe in the Ball Blue Book. 

That concludes this late-week post. Thanks for visiting and sharing your comments.

Have a great vegetable gardening day.
Veggie PAK

Our First Harvest of Willow Leaf Butter Beans, and More Tomatoes!

Garden harvests from your own garden are wonderful!      We are benefitting a great deal from having a back yard vegetable garden! I wish everyone would start one for their own benefit. It really isn't hard to do in order to get some harvests from it!

I pressure canned the last ten quarts of snap beans for this year. These jars will be going to our storage area. I won't be canning any more snap beans this year because I'm letting the vines produce the pods of seeds of future plantings.

I went out Monday and picked all these veggies from our garden. These Park's Whoppers weighed in at seven pounds three ounces.

These twenty-two Celebrity tomatoes weighed nine pounds fourteen ounces.

These sixty-one Roma tomatoes weighed ten pounds thirteen ounces.

This represents the yield from the last picking of snap beans for this year. These beans weighed four pounds nine ounces and will be cooked up with a nice piece of country ham seasoning meat.

The tomato berry plant is not producing anywhere near what a plant did in a previous year for us, but we'll take these seven tasty little ones that weighed one and three quarter ounces.

Finally, the yellow pear tomatoes are beginning to come in like they should. These six weighed one and three quarter ounces.

Butter Beans!

This three pound harvest of butter beans represents our first picking ever of Willow Leaf Pole Lima Beans. They are a smaller variety of Limas, similar to a baby butter bean.

Those three pounds came out to be twelve ounces of shelled butter beans! A very nice yield! The type of beans we are growing are reported to be able to produce through to the first frost. That would be spectacular!

After including the weights of some harvests that I had not added from my previous post, the total garden weight produced this calendar year comes to two hundred fofty-five pounds.

That concludes this impromptu mid-week report for our back yard organic vegetable garden. Thanks for visiting and please feel free to share a comment if you would like to.

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

Our Garden Harvest Report for June 25th.

Our harvests from our back yard organic garden are doing great this week! We couldn't ask for more without being greedy.

Our first picking of red raspberries this week brought in three and one quarter ounces that are shown in this pic. Five days later, I picked one and one-half ounces for a total of four and three quarter ounces of red raspberries this week. I'm freezing the raspberries so I can accumulate enough to make jelly or jam.

On Wednesday I picked thirteen and a half pounds of green beans and canned them the next day. I needed a little more to fill a couple of canning jars to have another full canner load, so I picked an additional one pound thirteen ounces of green beans.

On Saturday I went and picked twelve and one quarter pounds of green beans. Today I'll be canning them.

I picked twelve Park's Whopper tomatoes that weighed five pounds twelve ounces.

I picked twenty-two romas that weighed four pounds six ounces.

I picked fifteen Celebrity tomatoes that weighed in at seven pounds fourteen ounces.

Here is my first blueberry harvest since installing the bird netting. It weighed in at fifteen and three-quarter ounces! On Sunday I picked an additional four and one half ounces, for a weekly total of over one and one-quarter pounds of blueberries! Realistically though, I'm not expecting near that weight for next week's report.

Here is a side view of the over fifteen ounce bag of blueberries. 

This is the end result of all those green beans from last week being pressure canned: 33 Quarts! Now I have to pressure can the twelve pounds of beans that were just picked.

Granddaughter Celie helper her Poppa pick these fine organic vegetables. Four and one-half ounces of sweet banana peppers; three black beauty eggplant @ thirteen ounces; seven Park's Whopper tomatoes @ three pounds twelve ounces; and four Yellow Pear tomatoes @ one ounce. Celie told me they weren't pears. She turned one upside down and said it was a balloon! She was right. It looks just like one!

The harvest from this week brings the total harvest weight for this calendar year to 201 pounds so far.

I'll close now so I can get the pressure canner heating up for all those beans.

Thanks for visiting and sharing your comments with me.

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

Our Harvest Monday and Other Garden Info for June 18th, 2012.

This week has been a very good one for harvests. We are getting into full swing and we're enjoying it!

This is our first yellow pear tomato from our six plants that I have growing in a half-barrel on our driveway in the back yard. It weighed in at a whopping 1/4 ounce, but it had a half-pound of delicious in it!

You can see that there are many more little pears just waiting to turn yellow and get picked.

Here is a mixture of tomatoes I picked earlier in the week. There were eighteen Roma's weighing four pounds. The five larger ones are Park's Whoppers that weighed two pounds five ounces.

Mid-week  there were twelve Roma's weighing two pounds eleven ounces and four Park's Whoppers weighing one and three quarter pounds.

Later in the week we got four Park's Whoppers @ one pound six ounces, and seven Roma's @ one pound nine ounces.

I picked one and one half  pounds of sorrel that I have growing in a half barrel. I'll be making soup with that this week.

Snap Beans!

On Tuesday I picked four pounds of snap beans.

On Thursday I picked three pounds of snap beans.

But on Sunday, I picked ELEVEN AND ONE QUARTER POUNDS!

From three of my protected blueberry bushes I picked eleven ounces of them for the first picking of this year.

After having put the bird netting over my raspberry patch, I picked them on Thursday and got three quarters of a pound!

I came back on Sunday and picked five more ounces of them! The total raspberry harvest for this week was one pound one ounce!




Now for non-harvest garden info:

On the far left in the pic you can see the bases of my Swiss chard that is going to seed. I have found that seed saving involves a lot of time and space,but I believe it's worth it. Just to the left of center are  my seven Beauregard sweet potato plants. This is my first time growing them but it's worth a try. The little green row between the sweet 'taters and the marigolds is cherry belle radishes. They germinated in three days!

There are three sweet banana peppers hiding in this bush. Can you see them?

Here are some Celebrity tomatoes just waiting to turn red. They are a very nice size for sandwiches.

 Here are a couple more shots of them so you can see how plentiful they are.

There's one almost ready for picking!

The black beauty eggplants are doing great! There are several purple nubs that are actually the eggplant already!



Willow Leaf pole Lima's, or butter beans as we call them, are really producing hundreds of pods.

I have three 20 foot rows of them and they are filling out like crazy!

Fortex Snap Beans

These are heavy producers again this year.  We have picked over 37 pounds this year.

You can see that the beans are everywhere you look.

I prefer to pick them before the seeds swell up inside the pods. I think they're much more flavorful at that time.

These plants were grown from the seeds I saved from last year's crop. I'll be doing the same thing this year. It's a really big investment of time and space in the garden footprint, but it will be worth it.

Park's Whopper Tomatoes

Here are a few shots of the plants that are full of big round tomatoes. The shape of these tomatoes is perfect for tomato sandwiches!

La Roma Tomatoes for Sauces

The plants are loaded this year! I expect a really high total harvest weight at the end of this season.

Sweet Golden Bell Peppers

These plants are also growing in a half-barrel, but seem to be very happy there. Here are a couple of peppers already forming.

There are about thirteen plants in this 3.14 square foot surface area.

I soaked a packet of Detroit Dark Red beets in warm water overnight and planted them the next day. In about five days they had begun to sprout... along with weeds. I have had dismal luck with root crops in the past, so this year before I planted, I broadcast four pounds of greensand over a 1,400 square foot area and tilled it in. According to what I have read on the subject of poor root crop yields, greensand is supposed to provide some special nutrient for root crops. So I'm giving it a chance to work for our garden. We'll see what happens.

Finally, here is our asparagus patch. These were two year old Jersey Giant crowns when they were planted. Possibly next year I can get a few spears. The composted material is about six inches deep. The instructions that came with the crowns warned of seriously impaired growth if you let weeds crowd the plants. Hopefully, they will do just fine.

I'm trying to grow Chayote again this year. It tastes like a cross between a cucumber and a cantaloupe. It is refreshing when sliced very thin and chilled. Last year I started too late and the cold weather killed the vines. I'm growing them in containers so we'll see how long they take to crack the surface of the ground. They went right from the grocery store shelf to the flower pot. Now we wait...

That concludes this week's harvest report and our stroll through the back yard organic vegetable garden. I hope folks found it interesting and inspirational and want to try new gardening methods and or plant varieties.

Have a great vegetable gardening day and thanks for visiting!
Veggie PAK