Monday Harvest – 3rd & 10th February 2014

Last Monday I sat down to prepare my Harvest Monday post only to find my camera was refusing to talk to the computer and I couldn’t upload my photos.  Fortunately the camera has decided to be social in the intervening period.  My harvests this week were much the same as last week anyway.  Mostly I harvested cucumbers.

Lots of different sized and shaped cucumbers.  On the left are a misshapen Summer Dance, a very over sized Catalina Pickling, a normal sized Catalina Pickling, one I can’t identify (from a mixed seed packet) and two lemon cucumbers.

The lemon are my kids favourites, particularly when cut into segments and sprinkled with salt.  The Summer Dance is my favourite for its crisp cool texture.

Thanks to Bek for the Summer Dance and Lemon Cucumber seeds.

We are still at the stage of enjoying eating our cucumbers fresh but I don’t think it will be too long before I start preserving some.

Sadly cucumbers (and hopefully chillies) are one of the few crops I’ll have enough of to preserve.  Melbourne’s temperature spikes and runs of warm nights have played havoc with many of this years crops.  (My tendency to let the chooks dig wherever they want hasn’t helped either….).

Although my tomatoes have really only just started to produce a decent number they also seem to be almost finished as they haven’t set much in the way of new fruit since mid Jan.  Most of the tomatoes in the picture below are either Tigerella or Tommy Toe.

As are most of these, but I have also been harvesting the odd Yugoslav as well:

Other than cucumbers and tomatoes most of my harvests have been flavourings rather than substantial amounts of veg.  Basil, parsley, tarragon, kaffir lime, curry leaves and some Thai Basil (thanks to Yvonne for the seeds) and chillies.

After some great suggestions when I showed pics of these last year and a lot of googling etc I think I have identified the chillies as Joe’s Long Cayenne.  They are longer and fatter than the normal Long Cayenne but these aren’t fabulous examples.  These came from an overwintered plant which is producing lots of shorter, wrinklier and curvier chillies than it did last year.

And now time to head over to Daphne’s to see what other’s have plucked from their gardens this week.