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