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

Walnuts & Catepillers

Catepillers eating my walnut tree leaves

So can anyone out there tell me what kind of catepillers these are in the photo above? What kind of moth/butterfly do they turn into when mature?

They appear this time of year and eat as many of my walnut tree leaves that they can before I find them. They literally devour the leaves off the tree. I am left with just the skeletal veins of the leaves.

I'd like to know what they are and how to prevent them from eating my walnut tree leaves, if possible. I don't spray my plants and trees with pesticides (or anything), so maybe I'll just have to pick them off each time I see them.



2011 Walnut Harvest ~ with protective husks

The photo of the 3 walnuts above shows my entire walnut harvest for 2011! There were 3 or 4 more nuts on the tree, but the squirrels got to them before I did.


Washed Walnut Harvest

So I cleaned them up and am waiting for them to dry a bit before I eat them. What should I feed my tree to get a bigger crop? I want lots. Not just a handful.

Bah!






© 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

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

Bountiful Basil

Big Basket o' Basil

Since we were due for our first big winter rainstorm this morning, I decided yesterday that I'd better harvest as much of my remaining sweet basil as I could before the heavy rains hit. I didn't want the heavy rains and wind to damage the leaves or slam the overly tall plants into the mud. One plant has already sort of uprooted itself due to being top heavy.

I have three basil plant clumps still growing nicely in my lower garden. One is much bigger than the others. Eventually I will pull them all out of the ground as the really cold weather comes in, but for now I will leave them to produce more leaves, even if at a slower pace than they did during summer.

The photo above shows the huge amount of basil that I harvested from just my one larger plant yesterday. The basket was crammed full of leaves and stems and was quite heavy. As I came in from my garden last evening just as it was getting dark outside, I wondered where I planned to place all of this basil that I just harvested while it dries. I couldn't hang it outside on the porch as I usually do during fair weather, because it would just get drenched with rain and blown away with the wind.

So I spread it all out on a clean sheet on top of my massage table. That table is 72 inches long by 30 inches wide and I completely covered it in basil sprigs:


Basil on my Massage Table


All that basil was pretty bushy and thick, creating some depth:


Basil~ relaxed & ready for a massage


I let the basil cuttings rest and relax overnight. Then today I created several bunches tied with twine to hang up to dry. Usually I hang them from my herb drying line on my porch, but in wet weather I must improvise:


Basil Drying Hanger ~ one of two

This window is near my woodstove that I use for heating the house in cold weather. A good location for drying herbs.

Well, it has rained all day here and is still storming as I type this. I can hear the wind blowing things around out there. More of the same is predicted for tomorrow. We can use the water, but I'd rather get it a little at a time instead of all at once like this. The ground is slippery with mud and there are many puddles out there that I must watch out for while working outside. Life in the mountains. Never boring.

How's the weather where you are today?



© Copyright 2009 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

Plum Harvest

Late Santa Rosa Plums


This is just a quick post to show you my small, but delicious plum harvest. Just one small basket full. My Late Santa Rosa Plum tree usually has a bigger harvest than this, and usually they are ready earlier in the summer. This year probably due to our weird extended hot weather, the plum harvest was pretty small and their ripening was delayed until August.

I picked this basket of plums, which is the entire tree harvest, one afternoon in early August. They are very juicy, tangy and tasty. Just how I like them!

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Garden Garlic

Garlic Braid


I grow garlic every year. I plant it in the Fall and harvest it the next Summer. I tried growing garlic bought from a seed company the first year, but found that not only was it very expensive, it did not grow well in my garden. So the next year I bought a handful of ordinary garlic from the supermarket for about 50 cents, took it home, separated it into "toes" (leaving the paper skin on each toe), and planted it in my garden pointy side up about 1 inch deep in the soil. I watered it as I would any garden veggie until the Winter rains came. Then I pretty much ignored it and left it to grow on its own until the warmer weather came back the next Spring and Summer.

When the garlic tops (leaves) started to turn brown in late May or early June, I test-dug one bulb to check for size, and then harvested all of the bulbs over the next day or two. I washed each bulb with cold water and veggie scrub brush, leaving the long stem and leaves intact. I then braided the garlic as best I could to hang over my kitchen sink in front of the window to dry and to be handy when I needed it for cooking. I made sure that I reserved 3 or 4 nice looking heads for planting next season's crop.

I have been growing and harvesting my homegrown garlic in this way for the past 10 years. Each year I use some of the garlic that I harvested in the Summer to start my new crop in the Fall. It works very well, and I have been very happy with the results. Some years have been better than others. Other years have had odd weather and small bulbs resulting. Some years have had huge bulbs produced. One year I had an invading gopher (yes, in my raised bed!) and had to dig up my half grown garlic bulbs and transplant them into another raised bed to finish out the growing season while we repaired the hole in the original raised bed. That was fun. Not.

Anyway, until this past year I usually planted the same type of garlic each year. Descendents from that original handful that I purchased at the local market. The common California White, a softneck variety of garlic. I live fairly close to the Garlic Capitol of the World, Gilroy, CA where there are fields upon fields of CA White garlic growing prolifically. I am sure there are other types grown too, but the most common one we see in the markets is CA White softneck.

I have always enjoyed my homegrown CA White. It has a medium-strong garlicky flavor that I used in a variety of dishes. It keeps very well hanging in braids in my kitchen for months after I harvest it in Summer. It is easy to peel once it has dried a bit.

This photo below and the photo of the garlic braid at the top of this post is from my current crop of CA White softneck garlic. I think it is beautiful. I love looking at it, and enjoy having it decorate my kitchen.

California White Garlic

Last Fall, inspired by my local organic farm store's variety of garlic that they had for sale and also by two of my favorite blogging friends, Farmgirl_dk from Critter Farm and frugalmom from Fancyin' the Farm Life and both of their garlic gardening adventures, I decided to try growing a few different types of garlic along with my favorite CA White. I chose about 4 varieties from the farm store. I don't even remember their names. One was purple. One was reddish brown. Another was tan. At least two of them were hardneck varieties. One was the standard CA White like the one I had already grown. I thought I'd compare store-bought to my own homegrown garlic descendents as far as growing and bulb production.

So I planted my usual 5 or 6 rows of garlic, some of the new varieties along with my CA White, each row having about 7 or 8 plants. They all sprouted and grew through the Winter months. This photo shows how my garlic bed looked in late Spring:


Garlic Growing

That's broccoli, lettuces, chard and bok choy you see growing in between the garlic rows. I find that the close proximity of the garlic helps repel the bugs and slugs from my tender greens.

I found that my homegrown CA White garlic descendents grew much bigger and stronger than the store bought CA White, by the way. I have a theory that has proven true with many crops in my garden. My theory is that plants adapt to their local environment, the weather, the soil, the air, the gardener's vibes, and whatever else affects plant growth. I have noticed that each succeeding generation of plants grown from seeds (or in this case, bulbs) from a homegrown plant, is bigger, stronger and produces better than new seeds just being introduced to my garden environment (like from purchased seed packets). This works best with open pollinated varieties as opposed to hybrid plants.

Continuing on my garlic growing adventure, I read all about the phenomenon of garlic scapes on Fancyin' the Farmlife, and then I ran out to my garden with my camera and found these odd looking spiral flower stalks on every hardneck variety garlic plant.


Garlic Scapes in the Garden

I had never grown hardnecks before, only the softneck CA White. This was a new, exciting and weird happening for me and my garden. Apparently, only the hardnecks send up scapes as the weather warms in late Spring/early Summer. The scape is a flower stalk (you can see the flower bud in the photo). It is recommended that the gardener prune off the scapes to allow more nutrition to be available for the garlic bulb's growth. So I did that:

Severed Garlic Scapes

The scapes tasted like "green garlic" and were quite good. I understand that they make a lovely pesto sauce. I used them in my normal cooking as I would any garlic. I chopped them up small and put them in soups, stir fries, stews, eggplant parmesan etc.

And they added delicious flavor to my homemade pizza!


Mushroom Pizza



Homemade Pizza! Yum!


Garlic is good! Plant your own this Fall.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Snow Peas

3lbs of freshly picked Snow Peas!

My snow peas did well this year. Long cool lead in to summer's hot weather made for great growing conditions for snow peas in my garden. The photo above shows 3 pounds of snow peas, the last harvest for the season which happened a couple of weeks ago. Overall this season, I have harvested over 5 pounds of fresh from the garden snow peas. That's a lot for my small raised bed garden.

Delightfully sweet and crunchy raw as snacks or in salads or sandwiches. I've added them to stir fries and steamed veggies. I've given away several 1/2 pound bags to friends. And I still have a bunch in my fridge. I may blanch and freeze them to use a little at a time in stir fries or soups. I don't want them to spoil and I just can't eat them fast enough!

One of my favorite ways to eat snow peas is in a simple Asian inspired stir fry that I call simply Shrimp & Snow Peas.


Shrimp & Snow Peas

Frozen Shrimp (from Trader Joes) + Fresh Snow Peas + Canned Water Chestnuts

Stir fried in a little olive oil , soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, black pepper, garlic, lemon, and a pinch of corn starch to thicken the sauce. Eaten over a nice warm bed of steamed white rice makes a very tasty and satisfying dinner. It's good even without the water chestnuts. Just shrimp and snow peas.


© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Berry Sweet

Sweet Homegrown Boysenberries


My boysenberries are doing well this year. There are many berries and they are all of good size. They seem sweeter than they have in years past. I think it may be due to our extended cooler weather this year. We have had cooler days and nights during this late Spring than I have ever experienced up here. It is starting to warm up now, and it will do so very quickly. Reminds me that I have a bit of garden irrigation repair to complete before it gets really hot around here.

Well, my berries have been enjoying the weather. My harvest is bountiful. I picked two of those plastic green pint baskets full yesterday afternoon:


Berry Harvest ~ 2 pints!


Of course, I actually picked more berries than the 2 pints worth you see in the photo. Many berries never made it into the harvest basket. (oh my!) Many of them volunteered to go directly into my mouth and skip the basket experience altogether.

And they are sweeter and larger than last year's harvest. I've even been enjoying the redder ones which are tarter than the dark purple ones.

I grow both Boysenberries and Blackberries, but I like the boysenberries the best. Their vines are easier to train and grow. They offer their ripe harvest earlier in the season than the blackberries do. And their seeds are fewer, smaller and easier to chew and digest than the blackberry seeds. Oh, and their vines are thornless! That's a plus too.

Those two pints of berries filled my special berry bowl to the top:


Boysenberries in Berry Bowl


This was my Mom's special berry bowl that she loved. It was a gift from me to her. Now it is mine to cherish. I think of her every time I use it.

Read more about this special berry bowl and last year's berry harvest by clicking HERE.

Have a berry good day!



© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Flowers in the Rain

Rainy Day Flower Harvest Basket

Today is a blissfully peaceful, rainy, cloudy, sort of cool but humid day here at Mountain Harvest Basket.

My phone has not rung even once today. I can hardly believe that. I pick up the receiver occasionally to make sure the dial tone is still working.

Even my incoming emails have been less than usual. Certainly my outgoing ones are less on the weekends lately.

I love that today is a slow, stay-around-home-and-do-what-I feel-like-doing day. That is such a rarity in my life. Usually I am going in several directions at once with many partially finished tasks all at the same time and juggling phone calls, emails, people, activities, outings and events. I can do that. I am even pretty good at all that coordination stuff, but it sure wears me out to a frazzle sometimes.

Why do I feel like I always have to give 110% of my energy to each project, event or person? Why can't just part of me, my energy or my attention be "good enough"?

Because it isn't. That's why.

I am sure you all can relate to this. Then since it is impossible to give so much of myself to every single thing that I pile up on my massive To-Do lists, I get frustrated with myself and then I feel like I have failed. I freeze and proscrastinate starting projects because I know I won't be able to do them perfectly as well as I would like to. I also sometimes feel like I have let myself or others down in the process.

Sometimes I am just so stressed out that I want to run away, far away, and hide for awhile. I fantasize about jumping into my car and just driving away somewhere. Somewhere peaceful and beautiful. Somewhere where nobody knows me and nobody expects anything from me. It would be peaceful.......for awhile. Crazy thing to fantasize about, huh? Yeah, probably.

I am really not the hermit type in general though. And I can't really jump in my car and just drive away from here in search for peace, beauty and anonymity. I have responsibilities here.

So instead of running away today, I stayed here at my home and listened to it softly rain. Felt the breezes on my skin and the let the big raindrops wet my hair as I weeded my vegetable garden and picked myself a bouquet of lovely Spring flowers to brighten my day and my heart.



I picked a bunch of sweet smelling multi-colored Sweet Williams that grow down in my lower garden near the herbs and berries. While down there I discovered that I had a slightly over-ripe artichoke (also a flower) so I brought it in to eat later as a snack. On my way back to the house I snipped a few bundles of French Lavender that grows in my herb garden right below my bedroom window. Lovely, all of them.

Flowers, especially the softly scented ones, make me happy. Flowers also remind me of my Mom, and sometimes this little girl needs to feel her Mom close to her, especially on a peaceful, rainy, cloudy day sandwiched in between weeks of frenetic chaotic activity. Sometimes I need to remember that I can't do it all or be everything to everybody all the time. Sometimes it helps to imagine my Mom telling me that everything will be OK, and then to see her smile and hear her wonderful laugh...even if it is only in my memory.




Thanks Mom. These flowers are for you too. I know how much you love them.

I can feel you with me in the garden telling the flowers to grow.






© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Salad Days

Big Beautiful Ice Queen Lettuce

Remember those big "volunteer" heads of lettuce I pointed out in my last post? This big head shown in the photo above weighed in at 1 pound and provided me with enough crispy cool lettuce for many salads and sandwiches. These big heads started from seeds that last year's plants sowed all by themselves. I also have some Ice Queen babies starting to show themselves in the newly planted section of my garden along with the other Spring greens.

Even with gifting a big head of lettuce each to Jack and Bob, I still have several left out in my garden. I must go out there and harvest them soon though. With this warmer weather we are having, those cool weather greens are starting to bolt. They have already sent tall spikes of leaves upward toward the sun. Next will come flowers and seeds, both making the lettuce leaves taste bitter. I will pluck the remaining heads and store them in the spare fridge. They will keep for a week or two.

I predict lots of salads on my menu for the next few weeks.

Another early season harvest item is show in the photo below and fits right in with the Spring salad theme.


French Breakfast Radishes

These are the first few radishes of many. I have already enjoyed them in a few salads. I noticed that there are many many more waiting to be plucked from my garden soil. Their round red shoulders are showing above the soil line asking for attention.

I really need to make the time to get out there and tend my garden this week. My tomato seedlings are big enough to be planted out there now. I will do it as soon as I remove the new layer of weeds that have established themselves after our rainy and now hot & humid weather.

Maybe if I get up tomorrow morning and just don't answer the phone or turn on my computer, I can sneak outside and play in the dirt for awhile. You think?

Happy Spring weather everyone.


© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Winter Carrots

Spring Planted, Winter Picked, Carrots

Well, not actually Winter carrots, but Spring planted carrots that I left in the ground until now. I had been meaning to dig up the carrots for awhile now and finally got out there to do it yesterday when I was out there "heeling in" my new blueberry and raspberry starts. (A story for another day.)

They keep well in the ground through the winter months and continue to grow and mature. Unfortunately though, starting in late Fall they start to flower and go to seed, so those carrots that go to seed start using up all of their taste and nutrition to supply the seeds with nutrients for the next generation. Those carrots may become very fibrous and not good to eat. The carrots you see in the photo above were the ones that did not produce seeds, so these should be fine for use in soups and stews. They won't be as tender and delicious as new baby carrots are, but they will still be good eating.

Just look at the huge specimen on the far right of the photo! Wowee! That one is short and very fat. These are Nantes carrots and I did leave them in the ground a little too long. They are not at their best when they grow that big. I give the chopped up carrot greens to my chickens. They are delighted with a nice green salad treat in the middle of winter.

I think I may turn these carrots into carrot soup. Seasoned with ginger. Good hot soup full of beta carotene to ward off winter colds. Now I must find my recipe for that...


© 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

Happy Autumnal Equinox (a few days late)

Pie Pumpkin Harvest

The calendar says that Fall arrived this past Monday, and I really meant to celebrate it with you by posting these photos a few days ago, but this week has been very busy for me. Right on schedule the nights are getting cooler now, but our days are still quite warm. We have had a lot of smoke blow in from some fires that are burning in the national forests. Some fires they just let burn, while monitoring them, to restore the natural ecosystem of the forest. No fire danger for us, but still a lot of smoke to breathe around here.

I grow small tender Pie Pumpkins each year. They differ from the standard field pumpkins that are used for Halloween decorations in that they are smaller, sweeter and not as fibrous.



I roast them by first slicing them in half around their equator, scooping out the seeds and stringy stuff, and then placing them cut side down on an oiled cookie sheet. Roast them until "fork tender". Probably about 375 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour. Placing them cut side down on the cookie sheet allows them to steam themselves while in the oven. When cool enough to handle, carefully scoop and scrape the cooked pumpkin flesh away from the skin and into a storage container to puree and then freeze for baking or to eat as you would any winter squash. Of course, you can use it and eat it right away without freezing it first.



These home grown pie pumpkins make wonderful pumpkin pies and pumpkin bread. They taste much fresher and brighter than the canned pumpkin.

Before I discovered the tender and sweet pie pumpkins, I tried to make pumpkin pie from a standard field pumpkin that I grew my first year gardening. The pie was not very sweet and definitely not tender. I find that the field pumpkins are much better for decoration than cooking. Sometimes I still grow those too, but usually only the small pie pumpkins. This year's harvest was smaller than normal. Fewer pumpkins total and each one smaller than I have grown in the past. I think I need to replenish the nutrients in my soil for next year. Organically, of course.

In the photo above you can see a couple of very small ears of sweet corn nestled in with the pie pumpkins. I grew those this year too. My corn stalks were very stunted. They only reached about half the height that they should have, but they did actually produce many tiny ears of corn for me. Most of the ears were not completely populated (filled with kernals), but some were as you can see in the above photo. I've eaten a couple of them so far, one raw standing right in my garden, and one I steamed and dressed with butter. Both were very sweet. Both were very small.

This photo shows what an ear of corn looks like when you neglect to harvest it on time. All of the kernals are dried right on the cob!


Dried Corn on the Cob

I allowed the corn to dry a little more before feeding it to my chickens. Not sure they liked the whole kernals, my old girls are picky and spoiled. I think they like their corn fresh and not dried and chunky.

It's also apple picking time around here. Most of my apples are still on the trees, but I did manage to harvest a couple of baskets of Gala apples so far. Usually they are ripe and ready to pick in late August, but this year they got ready much later. These were harvested in the middle of September.


Gala Apples

They taste great. I need to get outside and harvest all the rest of my apples before the weather turns cold and before the birds and other beasties find them.

Happy (belated) Autumnal Equinox everyone!

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Sage Wisdom

Fresh Sage Harvest


Well, freshly picked culinary sage anyway, if not wisdom. My hands and my kitchen smell like fresh sage right now. I have just come inside (it's getting dark out there already!) from harvesting a whole basket full of fresh culinary sage, salvia officinalis, also known as common sage.



It is a perennial herb that I planted several years ago in one of my herb gardens. I do cover it with a cold frame in winter, as we get snow and cold temperatures here in the foothills, but it survives just fine and comes back to its bushy self each spring and summer. It has purple flowers on tall spikes when I allow it to flower. I've read that it's not a good idea to let your leafy herbs flower as the flowering process takes the energy and nutrition away from the leaves.



I don't use sage as an herb in my cooking very often, as its strong taste is a bit overpowering for me in the foods I eat. Some people like it paired with chicken or in poultry stuffing. I do like it mixed with other herbs in soft goat cheese. I also use it as an ingredient in an herb tea mixture that I create this time of year to have on hand for cold and flu season. Mixed with catnip and some other sweeter tasting herbs and spices like cinnamon sticks, licorice root and citrus peel, it makes a wonderful decongestant and astringent tea. Steep it with boiling water and drink it as hot as you can stand it.

Sage, although not usually culinary sage, is also burned as incense. Some people use the burning sage "smudge" to clear the air, a room or a building of negative energy or evil spirits. I think that another type of sage is generally used for this purpose, but I have been known to burn my common sage from time to time. It does freshen the air, once the smoke clears!

I grow all of my herbs organically without chemicals or pesticides. These perennial herbs are very easy to grow and resist pests naturally.

This bunch of fresh sage will get tied into small bundles and hung to dry on my high tech herb drying line that I showed you this past August as part of my Garden Art post. I will likely use the dried sage in tea as well as in some new herbal bath products that I am thinking of creating for sale around the holidays.

Any of you have more suggestions for how to use a bunch of sage, dried or fresh?

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Tomatoes, More Tomatoes, Eggplant, Dinner & A Visitor

Freshly Picked Romas in my Garden Scale

So my Roma tomatoes have finally been ripening.


5 pounds of Romas ~ harvested August 31st


Once they start they just keep coming...


5 1/2 pounds of Romas ~ harvested September 7th


I grow Roma paste tomatoes mainly to make tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, fresh salsa and for canning whole. Sometimes I can it or freeze it if I make a lot. Below is some fresh spaghetti sauce simmering in the pot.


Fresh Romas plus garden herbs, garlic, olive oil and some ground turkey meat made this sauce extra tasty!

I had several dinners from this one batch of spaghetti sauce.


Whole wheat noodles + fresh tomato sauce = Delicious & Healthy


Enter the eggplant.

The one lonely little eggplant that I have harvested thus far in this odd weathered gardening season. It's a cute little thing. So sweet, smooth and purple. Hardly bigger than the palm of my hand.


Cute little eggplant

So cute that I figured it would be very tasty sliced up as the main flavor ingredient to another night's dinner of Ratatouille! So when I add the cute little eggplant, to the ripened red Roma tomatoes and the prolific zucchini and crookneck squash, then throw in a lot of garlic and olive oil, I get Ratatouille! Not sure I have spelled that correctly, but you know what I mean. Any way you spell it, it is very good eating. And healthy too.


Ratatouille saute


It seems like the vegetarian meal inspired a vegetarian visitor. See gratuitous picture below:


My Deer, or really My Doe

This doe sat outside my kitchen window for a couple of hours one recent morning. I talked with her through the window and took pictures of her at very close range. I believe she is one of my regular does that hang out around here. I have no dogs to scare them off, so I have many deer friends.


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