Harvest Monday - 12 Oct 2015

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

We’re well into October now, and by this time of year we have often had our first frosts, which will have killed of all the remaining Summer veg. Frost or no frost I will soon be taking down my Runner Bean plants because their crop is nearly at an end. Funnily enough, some of the best beans of the season are often amongst the last to be harvested. The plants seem to enjoy the cooler, moister conditions.

The beans are nice specimens – long straight and smooth. Some of them are over 30cm / 1 foot long.

This week I harvest the very last of my tomatoes, the last few of “Harbinger”. I decided that they were never going to ripen outdoors, so I have brought them in. They will probably ripen eventually.

I also harvested the last of my four pots of “Pink Fir Apple” potatoes:

This pot produced 712g, and this time there were no “tiddlers” at all. And I finally got a knobbly one!

I pulled another batch of carrots. They are a mix of “Autumn King” and “Kelly”.

When I washed them I saw that several of the carrots had a bit of slug damage, but there was no Carrot Root Fly infestation at all.

Even the carrots with slug damage will be useable if prepared carefully. I always use the damaged ones first because they tend to deteriorate faster. I have so many carrots this year that I have done something I have never been able to do before – I have frozen some. Jane and I are not great fans of frozen food, but we reckon that it is better to freeze surplus food than to throw it away. I have done a little batch of frozen Carrots, which we plan to try out in a week or so. If we like them I’ll do some more, before the slugs demolish the rest of the crop.

Many of my chilli plants are coming to the end of their lives now, and I am picking all the ripe fruit from them.

As the fruit ripens the plants tend to drop most of their leaves. I suppose this is a natural way of ensuring that the fruit gets the maximum amount of light.

During the week I also harvested lettuce twice, but I’ve given up photographing it, because it’s too samey. However, I am proud to report that I have finally managed to get some good Endives. You may remember we writing a couple of weeks ago about tying up some of them to blanch. Well, here’s the result:

I’ll be posting more about Endives soon.

I’m linking my post to Harvest Monday, hosted these days by Dave at Our Happy Acres.

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