late august harvests

 these days i'm mostly getting lots of tomatoes, squash, some peppers, eggplants, and ground cherries.

 the long red peppers are choriceros, a basque heirloom pepper brought here and grown for the last 50 years by a gentleman i met at a seed swap a couple years ago. the purple/green peppers are black hungarian, the eggplants are fairy tale and shoya long, and the squash are ronde de nice and yellow straightneck.

 the yellow-ish green tomatoes on the far right are lime green salad--when you cut them open they're brilliant emerald green inside. also pictured are ground cherries (in the dish), and an assortment of tomatoes: white currants, cream sausage, lemon drop, chocolate cherry, brown berry, gartenperle, tiny tim, and a mystery tomato i grew from OSU blue seed i saved last year. the mystery appears to be an accidental cross with a larger, striped tomato (in this picture they just look like generic medium-size red tomatoes, but the ones ripening now have some blue in them, and more pronounced stripes.) thankfully i planted one pure OSU blue plant from the original seed.

 casper eggplant, tomatoes and squash, including a couple "peter pan" squashes. i planted these extremely late so they're just now starting to pump out the fruit. when you let them age off the plant for a few days the coloring turns really cool, kinda green/yellow tie-dye.

 my first two japanese black trifele tomatoes (top right) and zapotec pleated tomatoes (bottom). i tried to grow both of these last year but they died as seedlings before transplant. the zapotec pleated at front/right weighs 3/4lb.

 snow white cherry tomato, with an outie belly button!

 mixed basil pot, with (clockwise from bottom right) opal, sweet, thai and dwarf greek basil. i discovered last year (or maybe the year before? i can't remember) that basil does really well planted in a container, planted late in the season, and grown in partial shade. some of that goes against traditional growing practices for basil, but that's what has worked by far the best for me here in boise.

 this is red and green holy basil, a.k.a. krishna tulsi, grown in a separate container. the stems turned a beautiful deep purple.

 the dozen-or-so volunteer tomatillo plants took over a huge portion of the garden bed. they're all loaded with fruit, but nothing ripe yet.

 nikki and i went blackberry picking yesterday. the berries were super sour, nothing like the ones i picked a couple weeks ago. luckily i picked just the right amount for a pie. it still turned out nice and tart, but not as unbearably mouth-puckering as the raw berries.

 the calendula in my front bed is in full bloom, and the bees are loving it.

last harvest monday of summer

it’s starting to feel like autumn already. we just came out the other end of a cold snap that brought the first rain of summer, although the official total precip for that day is a bit of a letdown: .09 inches. before that, since the first day of summer, we’d had a total of .03 measly inches of rain.

back in early august i started seeds for fall: broccoli (waltham 29 and purple sprouting,) purple kohlrabi, kale (red russian and dinosaur,) fennel and purple orach. i also started holy basil, two containers of sweet basil and two hahms gelbe tomato plants--a teensy-tiny yellow cherry container variety that’s even smaller than tiny tim. those are now potted up and growing indoors on a windowsill.

i harvested an entire head of red russian kale to make room for fall seedlings. i used half of it to make dehydrated kale chips, that was all that would fit in my dehydrator, so the rest is waiting in the fridge. here’s what the area looked like before:

you can see the huge kale and lots of carrots underneath. i also harvested most of the carrots (red core chantenay and cosmic purple):

my soil won’t let me grow long carrots. no matter what they’re short and fat.

they shine like jewels when they’re all washed up.

i saved the kale stem. it’s about 2.5 feet long and a beautiful purple color. not sure what i’m going to do with it.

i’m getting lots of rattlesnake pole peas now--i planted these really late, using the space where sugar snap peas grew once they were done.

my bush beans are producing the majority of their crop pretty late this year for no good reason.

check out daphne’s dandelions for more harvests!