Labor Day Harvests

It is officially the ninth month of the year and autumn is just around the corner.  This weeks harvests have included a summer squash or two, lots of tomatoes, peppers, broccoli shoots, a handful of cucumbers and a couple of quarts of pole beans.  This week was also the week we harvested our main storage onion crop.

 

Another batch of tomatoes waiting to become sauce.

 

A colorful array of sweet peppers and jalepenos.  The red peppers have finally started to turn and the fruits are large and heavy.  I'm sure the flavor will be well worth the wait.

 

More cucumbers destined to become pickles.

 

Another quart of green beans which promptly became dinner.

 

The red onion portion of the harvest.  These won't keep as well as the yellow onions so many of them will be used up as quickly as possible.

 

The yellow onion harvest had many good sized bulbs.  The larger bulbs will be braided and hung up for storage and the smaller ones will probably find their way into the dehydrator and ultimately become onion powder.

 

This was also the first harvest of the purple potatoes.  I only pulled up one plant and as you can see there were a good number of small potatoes from it.  This plate became breakfast potatoes shortly after.

The purple potatoes add a lot of color to the dish and contrast nicely with the red pepper and yellow onions.  The flavor was outstanding.

 

This was a dinner side dish that included yellow squash, red onions and green beans.  I love the mix of colors and flavor you can get from a fresh garden harvest.

 

This week I a plan on setting up the hoophouse framework for the fall and winter garden.  I will have a small house covering the carrot bed and the onion bed will get planted with some lettuce seed in the next few days so we can have fresh salad in the winter.  I also have to start thinking about where I want the garlic to live next year once some of these summer crops start coming out of the ground.  Harvest season sure is busy and I love it.