Goodness from the Garden

Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Jeremiah 29:5 (NASB)

Ain't gonna argue with that.  While we're picking lots of bok choy right now and about to start picking plenty of kale, Sunday afternoon was an opportune time to go ahead and harvest some hold-overs from the late summer/early fall crop that will be playing out with the onset of cooler temperatures.  

Russ, Benjamin, and I straddled the two rows of Contender green beans and picked a nice mess of beans.  The early spring and late fall green beans are the absolute best.  We even picked a few early pods off of our Sugar Snap Peas.  Beautiful.  Healthy.  Colorful.

Green Beans and Sugar Snap Peas

We got out a shovel and began pulling at the sweet potato vines and then loosened the soil where the roots were to pull up the sweet potatoes.  For some reason (drought?) our sweet potato crop was the worst we've ever had this year.  We never plant sweet potatoes - they just come up on their own every year and overtake the garden.  We just let them run.  This year we had the same amount of vines to start off, but I think due to the lack of rain, they didn't spread out and produce.  I plant to remedy that this year by running piping along the garden with quick connect fittings to sprinklers so that I can keep the garden adequately watered during dry spells.  Here is our meager crop.  We will ration and savor them, nonetheless!:

Sweet Potatoes

In our first experiment with fall tomatoes, we met great success, and I plan to plant fall tomatoes again next year, but in greater quantities.  The tomatoes were beautiful, and we experienced zero bug pressure and only a few worms.  The chickens enjoyed eating the worms as I pulled them off and flicked them over the fence.  It was really nice to not have to fight stink bugs and not see the scarring and ugliness of tomatoes ravaged by bugs.  It was also much more enjoyable picking them off the vines with temperatures in the 70's versus the 90's!

Heirloom Tomatoes

We experienced an odd occurrence with our eggplants.  We planted our Black Beauty Eggplants from seed way back in January - a little over 11 months ago. They grew three feet tall, with lots of foliage and healthy-looking, and had blooms from time to time, but never fruited.  Then last month I noticed some baby eggplants. Finally!

I waited patiently and we are finally experiencing a harvest.  There are lots and lots of eggplants loading down the branches and many blooms announcing the arrival of even more - but with freezes coming, they'd better hurry up.  Here are a few pictures of the eggplants in different stages:

The flower

The Eggplant

I don't know what to blame the long delay on - the drought? heat? stress?  All three? Who knows.  Patience paid off, though, and we picked the first four eggplants on Sunday:

The first harvest

Tricia sauteed the smaller one on the right with some tomatoes and onions, and we ate it as a side dish last night.  Very good!  We'll make caponata and fry some as well.  It is hard to imagine that in only a few short months it will be time to plant the spring garden and will plant the tomato, pepper, and eggplant seeds in early January.  I'm just harvesting and I'm already looking forward to planting again!

"A Garden is never so good as it will be next year."  - Thomas Cooper