I've been gardening for most of my life and have been a devoted fan of organic gardening the whole time. It just makes so much more sense to work in harmony with Mother Nature than to fight her. Besides which it is better for the planet and better for our bodies. Here you can see what I'm planting and harvesting, with gardening hints and resources thrown in for good measure.
Welcome to Harvest Monday, a great blog hop hosted by Dave over at Happy Acres And why am I late to the party this week? LoL. Because I am a crazy, stubborn old lady with a one track mind sometimes.
A single yellow zuchinni, Japanese eggplant, Lemon Spice Jalapeno
Really I was getting my act together, had part of this post done, had my little video all uploaded and then forgot all about it while I dealt with all that milk.
the cucuzzi are still going strong
all the eggs are from the pullets now
All the older hens have quit laying for the winter but the new pullets are laying well.
goat milk
While milk production is slightly down due to heat cycles it is still a lot.
This weeks totals
cucuzzi 31# 6 oz
eggplant 1# 4.6 oz
eggs 43
milk
Bambi 4 gallons, 2 pints
Esmarelda 7 gallons, 4.5 pints
Thanks for stopping by, be sure to stop over at Happy Acres and see what everyone else is harvesting.
Welcome to Harvest Monday, a blog hop hosted by Dave over at Happy Acres Thanks Dave! Milk is still the most abundant harvest this week with a total of 13 gallons and 7.25 pints.
Japanese eggplant, Lemon Spice jalapeno
eggplant, Lemon Spice and other peppers
There were some eggplants along with Lemon Spice jalapeno and a couple of other peppers. Totals are down because it's been hot and dry and I just haven't been able to get out and water like they need it.
Cucuzzi
Still lots of cucuzzi and the vines are still going crazy. Some folks at market are adventerous and giving them a try. Leftovers go to a friend with pigs, she says they love them. Just over 6 pounds. I'm wondering if I missed some.
colored eggs
Still just getting about 7-8 eggs a day mostly from the new pullets. Giving serious thought to hatching the bigger blue ones from a couple of Legbar hens. Chicks that hatch now will begin laying in spring and will lay well most of the summer and fall when the older birds quit to molt. I just don't know if I have the time and energy....
Thanks for visiting and be sure to check out what other folks, in other parts of the world are harvesting too.
Welcome to Harvest Monday, a great blog hop hosted by Dave over at Happy Acres I hope you stop by there and see all the wonderful gardens and harvests. Even though I got half an inch of rain, the ground was still powder dry under the surface. Which is why I tend to water even if it's trying to rain, because it almost never rains enough.
Esmarelda is still pumping out milk like crazy
Esmarelda, one of my Nubian dairy goats, has weaned her triplets and is making milk like crazy. 10 gallons in the past 7 days. While the kids were nursing I was only milking once a day and now I have to milk twice a day. The old girl Bambi gave me 6 gallons this week, milking her once a day.
Japanese eggplant
The eggplants are still going strong. I did notice as I picked this week that I must have missed some last week because there were a couple very large ones with dull skin. I decided to leave them for seed.
a handful of tomatoes
There was only a handful of tomatoes, most of which I ate with tacos.
cucuzzi
Cucuzzi is an edible gourd from Italy and it's been producing like crazy and trying to take over the whole yard. Too bad the goats didn't seem to care much for it, it'd be a great thing to grow for them.
Honey Nut squash
Last year my daughter brought me some HoneyNut squash she had been given. They are like single serving butternuts but much better and sweeter flavored. I thought maybe they were hybrids but when I looked them up online found they were supposed to be heirlooms. So I saved seeds and grew some. These three were on the ground so I picked them because I was afraid they might be get too wet and rot. The vines have quite a few more but I love these so much I'm pretty sure I did not grow nearly enough of them.
Cucuzzin obliterating the rest of the harvest
This weeks totals;
Eggplant 1# 14 ounces
Tomatoes 4 ounces
Cucuzzi 11# 11 ounces
Honey Nut 1# 1.5 ounces
Milk;
Esmarelda 10 gallons
Bambi 6 gallons
Eggs 54
Thanks for coming along and thanks Dave for hosting us. See you next time.
Harvests this week were pretty thin. However the cucuzzi, an edible gourd from Italy is trying to make up for other things. This is the first year I have grown and eaten cucuzzi and it is a bit different from squashes. No one wanted to buy this giant at the farmers market so I cut into it when I got home. Most of the seeds in the top half were still pretty small and soft, getting bigger and harder towards the bottom. The flavor was stronger than the small one I tasted before (although I still can't describe the taste!). Since I was tired and not really in cooking mode I cut it up and took some to the goats. Only one wanted some, but it was my silly girl that eats anything. So I gave the rest to some chickens and they ate it up.
Green Knight eggplant
The eggplants are still coming in pretty good. I mostly ended up with Green Knight, but also have some other colors, having planted several different mixtures of Japanese eggplant.
eggplant harvest
harvest 8/30
Ready for the farmers market
the giant cucuzzi
It has been cooler and dryer this past week and I have had a hard time keeping up on watering, especially things in smaller pots.
One garden with a lot of tomato plants has some dead and dying plants in it. It's possibly from root knot nematodes or perhaps just not enough water. I really need to get out and do some maintenence but it's been really hard when it's hot and the UV is really high. I just can't work in the direct sun, even if it's under 100F.
This weeks harvest totals
cucuzzi 6# 11 oz
Eggplant 2# 4.5 oz
Tomatoes 2# 4 oz
Milk
Bambi 7.5 gallons
Esmarelda 4 gallons, 7 pints
AND she's still feeding triplets
eggs 5 dozen
Thanks for stopping by! I hope all your harvests are wonderful. Thanks to Dave at Happy Acres for hosting the blog hop. So much fun to see what other folks are doing and to 'visit' other gardens and gardeners, even if it isn't in person.
Welcome to Harvest Monday! This is a blog hop that I used to participate in regularly and I'm trying to get back in the swing of things here. You can see more participating blogs here; Harvest Monday
This past week I harvested about 24 pounds of prickly pear cactus fruit.
Cucuzzi gourd
Thanks to the Hollar Homestead over on YouTube for showing this new vegetable. So I knew what it was when I saw the seeds. It does however look like it might take over the world!
Eggs and bird pecked peaches
I don't think I counted the peaches, just tasted the better parts of them. They are firm ripe but not yet super sweet and juicy. However I am battling the squirrels and birds for them! The peaches are from a seedling tree I call Nida's Peach after the lady I bought it from. See more of that tree here.
Not sure what the round egg plant is, the others are Japanese in different colors
Ready to go to the Farmers Market
Not a huge haul this week, the tomatoes are petering out because it was so hot in June and July they couldn't set fruit. There are some more cherry tomatoes out there because they always come through.
So this weeks totals are;
Prickly Pear 22 pounds
Eggplant 2 pounds 8.5 ounces
Tomatoes 2 pounds 8 ounces
Zucchini 3 pounds
Cucuzzi 8 ounces
Eggs 51
Milk almost 9.5 gallons
Hopefully I'll manage to keep up this week. Enjoy the blog hop and I'll see you next time.
This week I realized that the prickly pear near my house were ripe so I picked about 10-12 pounds one day and about that much another day. The second batch is in the freezer waiting to be processed and there are more getting ripe.
processing prickly pear fruit
Since I'm not saving the skins or pulp (just don't have time to deal with extra projects!) I freeze them whole, then let them thaw and mash with a potatoe masher. I strain the juice through layers of cheese cloth at least three times, to get all the little glochids, the tiny hair like thorns, out of the juice.
New Goat Milk Products, lotion and sugar scrub with prickly pear
My research says that prickly pear has healing properties similar to aloe vera
different kinds of eggplant
This week's tomato harvest was negligible but the eggplants are coming on strong.
That is the 4th diamondback this summer
Watch this video and see what Freya Cat does to that snake!
Double rainbow Friday evening
Haven't gotten a lot of rain lately but the sunsets and rainbows have been beautiful
There's more from the week in this video.
Have a great weekend and stay tuned for a Harvest Monday post!!
Well I don't have any pictures of stuff harvested this past week! Both of my camera batteries were dead and I couldn't find my charger for several days. Talk about being blind, it was of course right where I last left it, under my nose!
Welcome to Harvest Monday though, I'll still be hooking up with our lovely host Daphne for the blog hop. In the meantime I will recycle pictures of past produce that are representative of this weeks harvest.
Here's a shot of the front yard path. Beginning to look a bit sad out there, the grape vine is suffering from the skelatonizers which I didn't see early enough to head off before there was a lot of damage. It's ok, no grapes this year anyway.
On the arch there is my first and perhaps only luffa for the year. The soil in this area is not the best so it hasn't grown nearly as much as the other squashes I have. And a bright cheery sunflower, soon to be chicken food.
This week I did harvest about another ounce of ground cherries.
A few more large fruited tomatoes
Some more beans
Eggs
A pile of green chilies bigger than this one
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Some squash and eggplant. I also picked a lot of the small tomatoes. I've been trying to get some fall crops started but it has been really hot and while over the hill got some good rain I have had almost none.
Welcome to Harvest Monday! I really enjoy this visiting with other garden bloggers over at Daphne's Dandelions each week.
The small tomatoes continue to come in, not as heavy as at the beginning of the summer, but still respectable harvests. The larger tomatoes, Black from Tula, Amish Paste, Italian Heirloom come one or two at a time, along with some round red and paste volunteers. The patch of yellow wax beans are going strong and a trickle of green chili is coming in.
eggplant twins
This time of year often brings odd and deformed squash, but this week it was a twin eggplant.
Squash and eggplants
This week the squash were not as prolific, but the eggplants gave a good harvest.
Butterfly on small sunflowers
The are tons of bees, yellow jackets and flies, with a few butterflies around
tromboncinno squash
Here are two of the Tromboncinno squash on the greenhouse frame. One is now about 40 inches long, the other one is longer and has touched the ground and is now growing in a curve. I'm leaving these for winter squash. I have several more; some are coiled up like snakes. With all the leaves it is hard to get pictures of some of them.
Time for my favorite time of the week, Harvest Monday! A great blog hop sponsored by Daphne's Dandelions, cruise on over and visit with gardeners from around the world.
My apologies to the other Harvest Monday participants last week. Usually I am able to go around, read and comment on every post, but last week I was having internet connection problems and didn't make it until Thurs. I did read all the wonderful posts and drooled over all of your beautiful produce, I just did not have time to comment. Hopefully this will be a better week!
Last week saw a huge amount of squash, a few sweet and chili peppers.
yellow wax beans
My first picking of yellow wax beans, about a pound.
Kentucky Wonder & Yellow Wax beans
Then a bit more than a pound of mixed beans, Kentucky Wonder pole and Yellow Wax bush. Yes I needed a ladder to get some of the KW!
all blue potatoes
Some of the All Blue potatoes died in the heat so I dug them up. A pathetic showing of tiny potatoes. It is just too hot for 100 day potatoes as a spring planted crop. Next year I will save them to plant in June, hopefully they will do better.
eggplant # 9
Eggplant #9 is a bigger, later plant than the others have been, with slightly larger fruit. For size reference, that's a salad plate, not a dinner plate.
tromboncinno
I have several large Tromboncinno squash I am letting mature for use as winter squash. This one is barely getting going and is already 32 inches long. The one next to it (not pictured) is 36".
mobile coop
And the new mobile coop is almost finished. The nest boxes are done and half the roof is on. I need to make a plywood shutter for the open section on this end, the other end and a strip above the nest boxes. But it will be pretty usable just as soon as I get the roof on!
