Harvest Monday | This Organic Process

Blue Spice Basil Memorial Day Harvest Monday – 05-28-2012

May 28, 2012 | 7 Comments | by Ben Czajkowski | Gardening

One of the best parts of gardening in a community is sharing harvests with everyone. Since we can’t really hand each other butternut squashes or cuttings of a giant bush of rosemary, we take pictures, measure weights, and post them over at Daphne’s Dandelions. Because she’s AWESOME.

This week, I only have one herb to report. My attempts to start some spring spinach didn’t quite go… well. Regardless, my Aerogarden produced some absolutely delicious Blue Spice Basil, seeds that I received for free from Wintersown.org.

Blue Spice Basil Harvest

Harvested: 1/4 oz of delicious

My basil plant was beginning to grow a bit too aggressively, outpacing the other plants in the Aeorgarden. So, I cut half of the stem off to harvest this quarter ounce, after doing some quick research to make sure I wasn’t going to end the plant’s life. I layered it on fresh Italian bread with thinly sliced baby Swiss cheese, pepperoni, salami, and turkey. I cracked some pepper on there, as well, onto a thin layer of Mayonnaise.

What a great sandwich. I meant to snap a picture, but the sandwich didn’t last long enough.

So far, the basil has been some of the weirdest seeds that I’ve seen sprout. The sequence is below:

The Blue Spice Basil seeds are tiny

Those black specs form translucent sacs

The blue spice basil's radicles begin to show

And the blue spice basil emerges

Growing quickly

Sticking above the growing medium

Taking over their world

The final, delicious blue spice basil product

Harvest Monday – September 19, 2011

September 19, 2011 | 5 Comments | by Ben Czajkowski | Gardening

I’m not proud to admit that it’s been a few weeks since I’ve written a blog post and a Harvest Monday post. I’m also not proud to admit that I’ve neglected most of my garden, since the end of August. I traveled over the course of two Mondays, and, here, in Baltimore, we received an obscene amount of rain, enough that my basement flooded. Granted, it didn’t flood as bad as some, but enough that I had to throw some things out.

Harvest Monday September 19 2011

In my absence, the garden suffered a bit, mostly from insect ravaging. Something killed the hops’ cones, and I think that ultimately killed my gardening motivation for the year. I was truly looking forward to brewing up an IPA with these cones. Sadness.

Insects obliterated the Cherokee Purples; I went to pull one of the tomatoes off the vine, and a black and yellow beetle with a black spot on its back crawled out. I image-searched, in hopes of finding what it was, but I haven’t been able to find a match to what I think I saw.

The damage was extremely upsetting, but most of the insects then left the Bush Early Girl Tomatoes alone. I harvested nine pounds from the two plants, this weekend, a personal best. I’ll have to try the Cherokee Purples again next year because Mother Nature just didn’t give this one a fair shot.

The eggplants aren’t thrilled that the temperatures have dropped into the fifties and sixties. Both are still flowering and fruiting like champs, though. The Ichiban has more fruits on it now than it has all season. Might try to overwinter this one.

Sweet Million Cherry Tomatoes

Harvest: 4 Cherry Tomatoes Weight: 7/8oz.

Cayenne Peppers

Cayenne

Harvest: 3 Peppers Weight: 3/4oz.

Bush Early Girl Tomatoes

Notes: These two plants turned out almost 9lbs of tomatoes over the last two weeks. Most of the fruits were small, unlike some of the tomatoes from earlier in the season. However, with all the rain and the quick decline in temperatures, it doesn’t surprise me that the fruits didn’t get very large. There are still probably more than two dozen tomatoes left to pick, once they ripen.

Almost all of the ones pictured above became gazpacho or salsa. The former was absolutely delicious, with a warm quesadilla; I couldn’t even let the gazpacho chill before wanting to eat it.

Harvest: A grocery bag full of tomatoes Weight: 139 1/2oz.

Red Beauty Pepper

Red Beauty Bell Peppers

Notes: There was originally a fourth pepper. However, when I brought all of the harvest in, and I left it sit out overnight, the pepper collapsed in on itself. It smelled awful, and its innards had, basically, putrefied. If I was more adventurous, and I had a mask, I would have dissected it.

Harvest: 3 Peppers Weight: 10oz.

Bush Green Beans

Bush Beans

Notes: The two plants that survived Mother Nature produced a ton of beans. Most of these probably should have been picked before I let them get so big; from what I’ve read, greenbeans are best when they haven’t fully matured. Oh well. They’ll make something delicious this week.

Harvest: Bagful of Bush Beans Weight: 10oz.

Purple Beauty Bell Peppers

Purple Bell Peppers

Notes: I let two of these peppers fully mature into their reddened state so that I could harvest seeds from them for share and to see what happened when they fully mature. Might sample some of the “reddened” peppers and compare with the “immature” purples.

Harvest: 5 peppers Weight: 12 5/8oz.

Early Sunsation Sweet Bell Peppers

Early Sunsation Bell Peppers

Notes: These started to develop random brown spots. I had to scrap one; it was just beyond safe-eating salvage. I didn’t see any insect penetration or damage. Maybe something else got to it (like Time).

Harvest: Two peppers Weight: 5 1/8oz.

Patio Pickler Cucumber

Notes: This is the final cucumber of the season. Wave goodbye!

Harvest: 1 Cucumber Weight: 11 1/4oz.

Ichiban Eggplants

Ichiban Eggplant

Harvest: 1 Eggplant Weight: 7 1/8oz.

Fairy Tale Eggplants

Notes: No idea why one was starting to turn neon yellow.

Harvest: 1 Eggplant Weight: 5 1/4oz.

Weekly Total (doesn’t include various herbs): 202 1/2oz.

2011 Year-To-Date Total (doesn’t include various herbs): 38.1328125lbs. (610 1/8oz.)

Daphne is the ringleader of Monday Harvests. You can see her here and wish her a speedy recovery.

Harvest Monday – August 29, 2011

August 29, 2011 | 7 Comments | by Ben Czajkowski | Gardening

I feel blessed that after a hurricane moved through the East Coast, this weekend, that my garden is still in relatively good condition. You can see pictures of the aftermath here.

Monday Harvest August 29, 2011

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes

Note: These were a garden first, for the year. This plant has suffered some major annoyances. Among them, blossom end rot and, most likely, squirrels. These two fruits were cracked and scarred from all of the rain that we’ve had here, in Baltimore. I was stubborn and wanted them to ripen on the vine. They were just fine, during consumption and seeding.

Harvest: 2 Cherokee Purple Tomatoes Weight: 6oz.