Mid August Harvest

Smaller than usual harvest haul

The relatively cool weather until just these past 2 weeks of ultra-hot, has slowed down the growth of the veggies in my garden. Then the sudden and intense heat seems to be telling them to ripen quickly. So I'm noticing that I'm getting ripe veggies that are smaller than usual.

I’ve only harvested one green zucchini so far, weighed about 1 lb, a good size for a zuke, and these 4 very small yellow crooknecks. Not sure how any of them taste yet. Only a few tomatoes have ripened so far. Romas and golden cherry tomatoes. The cucumbers are the small, pickling variety and very tasty.

Everything is moving in slow motion. Everything but time, that is.

© Copyright 2012 Mountain Harvest Basket

Fresh Figs!

That's all.

Just Fresh Figs.

Juicy and sweet.

A summertime treat!



© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Strawberry Pies

Luscious Strawberries, Sweet Glaze and Flaky Crust


So I bought a flat (12 pints) of fresh, locally grown, organic, ripe strawberries. Washed them and hulled them:

Fresh. Ripe. Juicy.



Made a couple of flaky pie crusts:

Ugly but flaky!


Cooked up some strawberry glaze and made two very tasty fresh strawberry pies!


Fresh Strawberry Pie


I also had some berries left over to use in my yogurt and smoothies. Next batch of strawberries will be used to make some homemade jam. Yum!


© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Montmorency Cherries for the 4th

Cherry Filled Bowl


Also known as "sour" cherries. These Montmorency cherries are best for cooking and baking rather than for eating fresh out of hand.

So far this season I have harvested about 1 quart of these sour cherries, which is about 4 times more than I harvested last year! And there are more still ripening on the tree. Yay!



And yes, of course, I will make my World Famous Cherry Pie with them and probably use the remainder of the Sweet Cherries to round out the taste too.



Summer is definitely here! Hot and sunny (and humid) here today.

Have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend, everyone!



© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Just Peachy

Adult Smoothie!


Hot, humid, sunny weather combined with some beautiful, ripe, juicy organic peaches and nectarines:



Mixed with some creativity and a little rum, amaretto and local honey:



Add a couple of handfuls of ice cubes. Then poured into my favorite crystal goblet:


Made a refreshing "adult smoothie", also known as a Peach Nectarine Daquiri.

Hit the spot yesterday evening after working in my garden for a few hours. The fresh fruit really made the drink special.

Happy Summer Solstice today! Longest day of the year. Enjoy the sunshine if you have it where you are.






© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Best. Cherry. Pie. Ever!

Leaky, but luscious, Cherry Pie

First off, this is a VERY belated blog post. I made this cherry pie way back in mid July at the peak of the summer fruit season. Hot days and balmy nights. The whole summer thing. I've just been so busy since then, that today, over 3 months later, is the first chance I got to compose this post.

I've made cherry pies before, but only from canned tart cherries. This is the first time I have ever made a cherry pie from fresh cherries. This time I had enough fresh fruit available and a very handy cherry pitter to make the best cherry pie I have ever tasted. Ever.

This is the first year that I could use fresh sour cherries from my young Montmorency Cherry tree. (I call her Mary Montmorency.) She gave me just over one cup of fresh tart cherries.


(Mary) Montmorency Tart Cherry Harvest 2010

Well, one cup of cherries is not enough to make a whole pie, so I also used a combination of Bing Cherries and Van Cherries from my sweet dual graft cherry tree. Usually I just eat these nice sweet cherries out of hand for snacking, but this year my dual graft tree produced enough for snacking and some baking projects. I had a bit over 3 cups of fresh cherries, tart and sweet ones combined, for my pie.

Combination of Montmorency, Bing & Van Cherries for pie

For some reason my pie crust turned out especially flaky (not sure what I did right to make it that way), and the combination of cherries made this pie taste wonderful. I can only hope to bake another one just as good as this one with next summer's cherry harvest. If not, well, I have my cherry pie memories to savor.

Tart/Sweet Fruit Filling, Flaky Crust

Looks good enough to eat!


Till next summer's cherry harvest these photo memories will have to do!

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Happy Birthday to Me ~ A Belated Report

Look at those cool wavy neon candles! Love 'em!

So this birthday post is belated. Maybe I am moving more slowly since I turned 50. Oh well, here are the highlights of the big "five-oh" last month. It was a good day.

We had my birthday party and "cake ceremony" at Jack's home. This is how it looked when I walked in:

Helium Balloons and Piles 'o Presents!

I was seated at the table and then Jack brought in the flaming cake. The guys were singing the Happy Birthday song to me, so maybe that accounted for the dorky look on Jack's face in this photo (or maybe he just looked dorky):

Jack and the birthday cake he made ~ chocolate, of course



So here's the flaming cake:(Bob was standing by with a fire extinguisher, just in case)

Beautiful cake! Dangerous flames.


Here's me just after I blew out all the candles (Jack wasn't quite quick enough with the camera):

Sort of looks like I am praying (or saying my mantra)

We saved the cake eating for after dinner and I went on to open that stack of gifts, but apparently I didn't take any pictures of that part of the celebration. I loved all of my gifts. The guys did a great job on wrapping and gifting.

We went out to dinner at our local Japanese restaurant a few miles away. We usually sit at the sushi bar or get a table in the dining room, but this time we decided to sit at the teppan yaki table where the chef cooks our food in front of us while entertaining us with a performance, "Benihana" style.

We started with drinks:

I had saki and hot green tea ~ in separate cups

Jack had Japanese beer

First course was miso soup:

Miso Soup

Then started the entertainment as well as the cooking of our meals:

Egg Balancing and Tossing!

The chef artfully sliced up a big onion and then stacked in the form of a volcano, to which he added some "fuel":

Fueling up the onion volcano

Then he lit it on fire, and boy did it flame up!

Flaming onion volcano!

The volcano quieted down and started to smoke while he turned his attention to the preparation of our main courses:

Chicken, shrimp, calamari, scallops and a smokin' volcano

Next he chopped and cooked the veggies and finished the meats and seafood:

Our dinner, artfully prepared


This was my birthday dinner plate:

Veggies, beef & shrimp

We ate until we were stuffed. I took home about half of mine. Had to leave room for some birthday cake and ice cream, don't ya know.

Chocolate birthday cake with my favorite natural peach ice cream.

All the food, the singing, the balloons, the gifts and the love made my 50th birthday a perfect celebration. My thanks to my partners, Jack and Bob, for making my special days even more special.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Midsummer Harvest

Small Harvest



French Breakfast Radishes, Radish Greens, Snow Peas & Baby Romaine Lettuce. That's all I could harvest today from my midsummer garden. Everything is growing so slowly this year. Except for the weeds! I seem to be able to grow huge, luxurious weeds very well indeed.

Arrgggh!

I just haven't had the time this year to get out there and pull out the weeds when they are small and easier to remove. I know better than to let them grow big, but have not had the time to address them. I will. I really will.

So except for the berries and cherries (I will write about those in another post) and the artichokes which I posted about toward the end of "Spring" last May, I really have not had a very productive garden yet this year. Got started late and things are growing slowly. I haven't even planted some of my summer crops yet! There is still time, but I do worry that summer will be over before I can gather my usual abundant veggie harvest.

I love my garden. I love growing and eating fresh vegetables and fruits. I just need to make more time for it in my life.

I need to be at one with my garden.
Zen gardening.
Yes.






© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Garden Tomatoes Summer 2009

Tomato Harvest Basket


As most of my blogging friends and faithful readers already know, my summer tomato harvest was very poor this year. None of my tomato plants thrived. Sure, they grew from little seeds in their recycled yogurt cups filled with good soil into healthy seedlings that I set out in my raised bed garden in late Spring. The summer weather got a late start, staying colder than usual through May. Then the really, really hot weather kicked in with a vengeance. It stayed unusually hot for an extended period of time. So hot and for so long that my tomato plants stopped producing flowers and fruit for several weeks.


The plants were stressed out from the heat. They also had tough competition for water and soil nutrients this year due to the more prolific than usual weeds that quickly covered every portion of my garden bed. The heat helped the weeds grow very tall and very quickly this year. I guess the weed seeds, grasses mostly, entered the garden with my homemade compost that I had worked into the soil at the beginning of the planting season. Usually the weeds are much fewer and a lot less fierce. I blame the heat and just generally weird weather we've had here this year.


I probably should have watered more often and more deeply. I probably should have amended the soil earlier and more often with more compost. But I didn't. The extended heat stressed me out too. I just did not have the energy this summer to devote enough time and muscle power to my gardens.


So the summer growing season is over. My garden is full of plant remnants. Most of them are brown or turning brown now. Some fruits still cling to the vines adding much needed color. The green stuff that is still alive out there is not being very productive.


So my thoughts are already turning to how I can do it better next year. For now, here are a few photos of some of my sad little tomato harvest.



The first little sweet gems I picked this year ~ Red Peacevine Cherry Tomatoes



The first Luther Burbank Red Slicing Tomato ~ about 1/2 the size it should be.





Yellow Slicing Tomato #1 ~ also smaller than it should be


Now for some "artsy" nighttime tomato shots taken on my front porch railing:


Peacevine Red Cherry Tomatoes

Roma Tomatoes ~ smaller than normal and not juicy enough

My first ever Thessaloniki tomato

First Thessaloniki ~ sliced open to taste it and to collect the seeds

I will write more about the Thessaloniki tomatoes in a future post.

I am sadly disappointed with this year's tomato production. I am used to getting pounds and pounds of tomatoes from my small garden. One year, that little garden produced 96 pounds of tomatoes for me, mostly Romas. I canned, froze, dried and sauced until I was exhausted, but I loved my tomato bounty. I guess every year can't be that abundant. Maybe my garden soil is just a bit tired, like me.

All of the above tomatoes are heirloom open pollinated varieties. None are hybrids. This means that planting seeds from these tomatoes will give me the same type of tomatoes next year. Hopefully in a more productive way.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Bell Pepper Celebration!

Green & Red Bell Peppers ~ Homegrown by me!

For 10 summers now, I have been trying to grow bell peppers in my garden. I want big beautiful bell peppers of many colors! I always plant them. Sometimes the plants do grow well, but the peppers have never really pleased me. I have tried several different seed varieties from many sources. I especially want to grow red and yellow/orange/gold bell peppers. They are sweeter than the typical green ones and they are so expensive in the supermarket. I never buy them in the market. Sometimes our local organic farmer has colorful bell peppers, and then I will buy one or two. This year I did buy a few purple bells from our farmer friends to make my favorite stuffed pepper dinner recipe.



Big Red Bell Pepper ~ a green Cal Wonder turned red in the sun

In years past, I have tried growing bell peppers from seeds and also resorted to buying pepper plants when my seeds wouldn't sprout correctly, or when I couldn't find the seeds I wanted. I have planted and grown green, light yellow, purple, gold and red bell pepper plants. I said, I grew the plants. However, usually the plants only produced a sparse few peppers, mostly green, mostly small and not very tasty.

The purple variety, as I recall, produced many peppers, but they were all the size of a ping pong ball at maturity, (maturity = turns color) which didn't work very well for my stuffed peppers recipe.


Gold & Green Bell Peppers!

This year, I started two varieties, a Green Cal Wonder, and a Golden Cal Wonder from seeds. The plants were healthy if a bit small at transplanting time. They flowered well and started to bear fruit. Little peppers formed on each plant. However, they kept getting shaded by the adjacent summer squash leaves that were taking over my entire raised bed garden. I kept moving and even pruning the big squash leaves away from my peppers, but the little pepper plants did not get enough direct sunlight to really produce well. That is until the end of summer when the squash plants started to die back and let the sunlight into the rest of the garden.

Then the recent cold nights hit and a few rainy and cold days. Peppers love heat, bells being no exception. So I went ahead and harvested all of the rest of the peppers, green, red and gold and brought them into the kitchen. Perhaps a bit prematurely, since it has been sunny outside now for a few days.

The peppers that were already starting to turn yellow or red have since turned color completely in the warmth of the house. They are beautiful, thick walled, crunchy, juicy and sweet. I have been enjoying them mostly raw in fresh green salads. Also some in stir fries. Only one or two were really large enough or the right shape (square & blocky) for my stuffed pepper recipe, so I doubt I will use them that way.

So I am celebrating my harvest of beautiful bell peppers. There are more peppers of more color variety that actually taste good, than I have ever grown before. So this really is a pepper celebration.

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Last Weekend's Harvest

Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Herbs & Green Beans

A few quick photos of my harvest baskets from last Saturday and Sunday.


6 3/4 lbs of Dark & Light Green Zucchini and Yellow Crookneck Squash

I picked almost 7lbs of summer squash in just one day's harvest. My little raised bed garden has produced over 30 lbs of zuke and crooknecks this season! We are eating zucchini cake, zucchini parmesan, steamed zucchini, fried zucchini, sauteed and stir fried zucchini, pureed zucchini soup, raw zucchini in salads and sliced very thinly on sandwiches. I may make some zucchini pickles or relish and can it. I have successfully given a few squashes away to my massage clients. ("if you take some of my homegrown zucchini I'll stop poking you with my sharp elbow...")

Peacevine Cherry Tomatoes, Romas & Small Burbank Red Slicing Tomatoes

The tomatoes have finally started to ripen to their beautiful red hue. Usually by late June the cherry tomatoes are ready to pick. Not this year. And the tomato "worms" have had their way with my tomato plants and even munched on a few of my Romas. When I find a tomato worm (really the catepillar of a big ugly moth) I pluck them off of the green plant and give them to my chickens to dispose of. This year however, my hens have decided that they are vegetarians. They peck at the worms and then lose interest before eating them. Go figure. Maybe the old girls have decided to watch their fat intake in their advanced age.

Peacevine Cherry Tomatoes all washed and ready to eat

Fresh in salads & as snacks, dried and vodka soaked appetizers have been ways I have enjoyed these sweet little red gems.

Bunches of Lavender, Oregano & Mint Drying on the "High Tech" Herb Line

I dry herbs for seasoning meals, making teas and for use in some homemade bath products I am thinking about concocting. Not sure exactly what I will make yet. I am waiting for the creativity muse to inspire me.

Enjoy the summer harvest!

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket