Harvest Monday Mid-September Edition

Although the garden is really winding down, there have been some good harvests this year and at the midpoint of September we have already harvested more than last September's total. My fall plantings are maturing at a very slow pace, so whatever we get out of them is questionable. There are rumblings of frost predictions for tomorrow night, but it is very unlikely to get that low here. Our first frost is usually in mid-October, so it would be quite a blow to get one a whole month early.

 I didn't take many photos this week. Not pictured are the 2 and 1/2 pounds of parsnips I pulled to thin the beds, because I posted that already last week. Some critter is grazing on the parsnip tops now, so I wonder how that will affect the growth of the other roots. I'd like to leave them in the ground until after the frost next month. Most of my harvest has been tomatoes as you can see from the two pictures here. I'm getting a great amount of kale both from the spring planted kale and now from my fall plantings. They've been the only really robust plants of the fall garden so far.

 It has been a terrible year for eggplant and peppers in my garden. The three eggplants pictured are very small and the few left out in the garden are even smaller. No ratatouille this year! Also not pictured, I picked two Anaheim peppers which will go into a batch of salsa I hope to can later in the week. Beans are still coming in both from my bush bean beds and from the Kentucky Wonder beans that are just now ripening. The Chinese red noodle beans are peaking this week. I still get broccoli side shoots even though the plants are looking decidedly ragged and the two Lemon cucumbers pictured above are just about the last of the crop, as the vines have pretty well succumbed to powdery mildew.

And finally, here are my first ever dried beans. They are called "Aunt Jean's", ordered from Fedco. They seem to be a sort of yin-yang bean. I don't think I even got quite a pound of them, but I'm looking forward to making a pot of baked beans with them later in the winter. I'm trying to dry my runner beans too since we've been swimming in all the other beans around here.
That's it for this week's Harvest Monday report which is hosted over at Daphne's Dandelions!