Harvest Time

The first of the Cherokee Purple tomatoes were ready this past week, some of the earliest I have ever had. These are the grafted tomatoes that were growing in gallon pots and were about 5 times bigger than the Amish Paste tomatoes I planted the same day.

Pickling cukes are also coming in. I started a crock of fermented half-sours from a recipe given to me by my friend Lynn. She makes the best pickles and I only hope mine turn out half as tasty as hers.

The last of the fall planted broccoli yielded a tasty broccoli salad. And I have been occasionally picking Chiogga beets and zucchini and yellow squash.

The berries are continuing to go crazy. So far I have picked 29 pounds of blueberries, most of that now residing in the freezer.  The blueberries are definitely on the downward side of picking.

The red raspberries are getting close to finishing, I hope; but the fall gold raspberries are starting to ripen for their first harvest.

Last year I preferred the flavor of the red raspberries over the gold but this year the taste of the golds is superior. Must be the weather since nothing else has changed.

Berries, Berries, and More Berries

We are in the height of berry season here. I was very late getting up my blueberry cage. We put it together two days ago and the blueberries are starting to ripen today. I am trying a different type of netting this year. Last fall I bought a 28x28ft piece of netting instead of piecing three foot rolls. It took three people to get the netting on but it seems to be working better. I am not sure how well it will survive the season as it is a lot flimsier than the old rolls. The netting feels like it will tear easily.
Every year when I put up the cage I can't remember which part goes where. Each joint is numbered but I forget where the numbering starts. NUMBER ONE POST GOES IN THE SOUTH WEST CORNER! Now I should be able to figure it out next year.

The raspberries are producing well this year. So far this season I have frozen 7 cups of red raspberries and eaten them on my cereal every morning. I have also frozen 6.75 cups of black raspberries. I'll make jelly when I have more time.

Today I picked 10 pounds of gooseberries and probably have nearly that much left on the two bushes. I made a gooseberry crisp and a gooseberry cake. Both were very tasty. The BBC has the best recipes for gooseberries. I still have too many gooseberries and will have to make up a compote to freeze. It will take forever to trim the "top and tail" from all those gooseberries.

Raspberries

The black raspberries have exploded with ripe fruit and the red raspberries are right behind.

This is the first picking and there are many more to come.

I carefully made a new bed for black raspberries the fall we moved here. This is the first year we have actually had a harvest from the bed, what with one calamity after another befalling the poor raspberries. But now I may need to rethink the entire bed. It's not very large, maybe twelve feet long. There were a few black raspberry bushes growing at the edge of one of the pastures and I hastily dug in what bushes I didn't have room for in the new bed. Now this group of black raspberries is flourishing and may make the small bed superfluous. That would give me room for more blackberry bushes!