Harvest Monday

Northern Arizona Melon?

Welcome to Harvest Monday, a great blog hop sponsored by Daphne's Dandelions. It's great fun to visit with gardeners from around the world.

The biggest news this week is the giant muskmelon from the greenhouse bed. It weighed 11 pounds! Now I'm pretty sure I planted Hale's Best Jumbo and the other large melons are round like Hale's. The only thing I can think is either some seeds of Northern Arizona Melon, which I grew years ago and is the only football shaped melon I've grown, got mixed in or this is something out of the compost.

It's been a few years since I've grown Northern AZ so I don't really remember what they should look like inside or out. As you can see a slice of this melon almost fills my dinner plate, the flesh was sweet and delicious, and tend all the way to the skin. It has a flavor resembling cantaloupe but not quite the same. Of course I saved all the seeds ;=)

green chili

Other harvests included green chilis. I'm not positive, because my plastic labels with permanent marker all faded completely out, but I think these might be New Mexico Joe E Parker.

Baby Blue Hubbard

The sole Baby Blue Hubbard plant in the back garden only set one fruit and then looked like it was dying. Possibly disease, possibly from lack of water. The stem on this one looked like it was drying out so I went ahead and pulled and cooked it. It really needed to go longer, a bit watery and not as sweet as I think it will get later towards fall. But a good lesson, since I have four more plants out front. I will be patient and wait.

eggs

There were only about a dozen eggs all told from the hens this week, but one day we got three, so I think the molty one might be getting back to laying again.

Market Stand

My oldest grand daughter, Miracle, spent the weekend with me. She brought her violin to the farmer's market and played for folks. She even got a $2 tip.

Here on the table, from left to right is more of the weeks harvest;, Tromboncinno squash ( I had to climb on the roof to get one of them!), Snow White, Princepe Borghese and Red Currant tomatoes, Mountain Rose potatoes, eggplants, Rond de Nice squash. In the back are some yellow Scallopinni, white patty pan, yellow zuchinni, and some odd squash that I think must be either something out of the compost or something that came in with the yellow zuchinni seed. They look a bit like a cross between zuchinni and yellow crookneck. They taste fine tho.

In the red crate are herb plants, sorrel, basil, lavender, rosemary.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Neon Eggplant in my garden, 2009

Happy New Year, one and all! I've enjoyed a lovely sunny day here in Arizona, though I'm sure it won't last. I actually had to water some of the garden beds today because they were getting too dry.

I'm looking forward to a wonderful new year and our all too short spring growing season. I've got my grow lights and heat mat set up, though I probably won't start a huge number of plants until after March 1. I will be gone a few days then to teach at a painting convention. 

In the meantime I am doing what is really  more germination testing. I have a lot of really old seeds so have planted some in the hopes of getting at least one plant to save new seeds from. I also bought some fresh tomato seed because apparently I never saved any from a couple of years ago. Be sure that will not happen again!

A fun project I'm looking forward to is growing some seedlings from this Neon eggplant. Neon is a hybrid and really is a shocking pink color, the photo doesn't really do it justice. I saved some seeds from this so I expect to get all different kinds of eggplants from it in several colors. There probably won't be any this particular color, but that's ok. What I'm really after are prolific plants that have fruit with thin, tender skins and not much or any bitterness.

Be sure to check for Harvest Monday and Seedy Saturday will be back next week!