Monday Harvest – Apr 30th 2012

After being lulled into a false sense of security by about 3 weeks of beautiful weather it now seems that winter has come early.  Its cold, its been wet – not lots of rain but the sort that appears just at the point that your washing’s almost dry.  Mr 2 has about 20 pairs of trousers and I was down to the last pair last week – the rest hanging sodden on the line or hidden in a increasingly large dirty clothes pile.  Remarkably in all this greyness I seem to have managed a reasonable number of harvest photos.

The first of these are tamarillos – I have cut these so that anyone unfamiliar with the fruit can see the inside.  They taste a bit like one of the sweeter tomato varieties, but the texture is quite different so the experience of eating them is quite different.

This weeks harvest was very much a mix of summer and autumn.  The chillies are still producing – albeit in decreasing numbers (there is a second crop of long cayennes forming at the moment though).  The rainbow chard on the other hand will last until Spring when it will eventually go to seed.

The eggplants are still cropping – in fact both the Bonica and the Lebanese eggplants are both still setting fruit.  This is fortunate as Mr 2 seems to like to play with them.  These ones did eventually make it to the kitchen where they went into a Penne alla Norma.   For anyone unfamiliar with the dish Diary of a Tomato previously posted a good recipe for it.

I spent a bit of time this week clearing sweet potato vine away from an area I want to sow broad beans in.  I found these mini sweet potatoes at points where the vine had come into contact with the dirt and then rooted into it.  For all you sweet potato growers out there is it good practice to try and encourage this to happen?  Or will it deflect energy away from other tuber formation?  I also found a few left over potatoes in this area too.

I have been harvesting a lot of lemongrass lately – the stems are really fat and well flavoured at the moment.  I have grown lemongrass for a number of years but I had a question on my blog this week that I wasn’t sure how to answer.  The correspondent wanted to know if they could harvest all their lemongrass before winter and if they did that would it re-shoot in Spring?  I have to admit I’ve never tried harvesting the whole plant – I usually leave a good few stems on there over winter.  Although I think it would probably work I couldn’t say for sure.  If anyone has any experience of this please let me know.  I am going to experiment with one of my plants this winter to see what happens but if you’ve tried and it killed the plant then perhaps I will rethink.

This week my recipe posts were: Chard and Ricotta Gnocchi and a Vietnamese Coleslaw.  The silver beet and oregano above went into the gnocchi.  The Chinese Cabbage below became coleslaw.

Finally very few days go by at the moment without my harvesting either celery, parsley or both.  Here they are pictured with the last couple of borlotti beans:

For other harvests then pleased head right on over to Daphne’s – you’ll see things from all round the world.