Gardeners' Holidays 2019: Harvest Home

The fall equinox, or Harvest Home, might just be my favorite gardeners' holiday of the year. The hard work of planting and weeding and watering is mostly done, and the fun part—the harvesting—is in full swing. Of course, the harvest has been going on for months already, and other gardeners' holidays also celebrate it, but most of them tend to focus on one particular crop that's producing abundantly at a given time: rhubarb or asparagus in May, berries or plums in July, butternut squash in late October. But in mid-September, there's a wide variety of crops producing in abundance, including summer crops that are just winding down and fall ones that are just gearing up.

Here's a sampling of what our garden has produced in the past few days. Those tomatoes in the colander are a mix of several varieties. The smaller cherry tomatoes are mostly Sun Golds, with a few Honeydrops. These have been much less prolific than the Sun Golds this year, and we'll most likely drop them from next year's planting. However, the larger tomatoes in the basket are Premios, a new early variety we tried this year, and it's a definite keeper. They started producing even before the Sun Golds did, and since then they've kept up a steady stream of medium-sized fruits (42 to date). We've also harvested seven nice big fruits off the Pineapple vines this year, much to our relief after last year's disappointing performance. (You can't see any of them in this picture because they all got used in a roasted tomato fettucine, one of our favorite recipes from The Clueless Vegetarian, earlier in the week.)

The green beans you see nestling alongside the tomatoes in the colander are not our trusty Provider beans, which finished producing a week or so ago; these are the results of our successful attempt at growing Climbing French beans. Last year, we discovered that in amongst our Provider bush beans, a mystery bean plant of the pole variety had sprouted and twined its way up the trellis, where it proceeded to produce particularly tender and delicious beans long after the Providers had petered out. We obviously didn't know what variety it was, but a few image searches suggested that it was a Climbing French bean, so we decided to take a chance and buy some seeds from that variety to plan this year. Only we ran into a snag; our regular seed provider, Fedco, doesn't carry this variety, and ordering a packet of them from another company would have cost us about three times as much for the shipping as we'd pay for the seeds.

However, Brian had saved some of the seeds from last year's harvest, and based on my research, the Climbing French bean appeared to be an open-pollinated variety that would breed true, so we decided to just plant them (in the spot formerly occupied by lima beans, since we weren't getting very many of those) and hope. And by golly, it worked! We now have one trellis covered with lush green vines, and our first harvest, about seven ounces, came in this week. And if last year's experience is anything to go by, we should be continuing to harvest these for the remainder of the fall.

The two peppers shown here are another new variety we tried this year, a chili called Caballero. These are the first peppers we've harvested off the plant, and we haven't tasted them yet, so we don't know just how hot they are (not terribly so, according to Fedco). But regardless, they should work fine in a salsa or any other dish that calls for a hot pepper; all we have to do is adjust the amount we use. And if we can't use them up this week, we can just freeze them. (We've also been getting plenty of frying peppers off our two Carmen plants, but the Jimmy Nardellos have so far given us nothing. We'll most likely drop this variety next year and add yet another Carmen.)

The butternut squash at the back of the display is a Waltham, the first we've picked this year. However, judging by what's out there right now, it certainly won't be the last. The butternut squash vines, not satisfied with covering their entire trellis, have jumped it at both ends and extended their tendrils along the garden fence and into the neighboring beds. We have one large squash dangling off the outside fence near the gate and two small ones shoving their heads in unceremoniously amongst our marigolds. So we're certainly looking at a fall and winter packed with butternut squash soufflé, lasagna, pizza, rigatoni, and whatever else we can come up with.

The last item in the display, the raspberries, doesn't look like a particularly impressive harvest, but that's just what I gathered today, after having also harvested berries yesterday and the day before. The raspberry canes are now well into their second crop of the year; they produced bountifully all through July and into August, took a short break, and then returned quickly to full production, yielding us half a cup to a cup of berries every day or so. We've harvested a total of eight quarts of berries so far this year—which, when you consider that Trader Joe's charges six bucks for a half-pint container of organic raspberries, means that in this year alone, we've collected a $364 return on our initial investment of around $60 for the canes. Even counting the additional money we've spent on such things as mulch and the components for our raspberry trellis, that's one hell of a return.

Tonight's dinner, a Skillet Kugel, will also include one more item not shown in the picture: four small leeks, the first we've picked this year. Try as we might, we can never seem to grow big, fat leeks like the ones you can buy in the store, but even our spindly ones work just fine if you use enough of them. And we'll probably cook up the rest of those green beans to enjoy on the side.

Happy Harvest Home to all, and to all a good meal.