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.
Your basil looks so good. I wish I had some fresh basil right about now. The frozen stuff just isn’t quite the same.
So nice to see summer harvests!
Do the lemon cucumbers taste the same as the long green ones?
Very nice. My cucumbers have been slow but are just starting to take off, and the tomatoes are likewise slow but just starting to ripen. I agree its been a strange year.
Mmm, lovely cucumbers. It has been months since I last enjoyed a nice cool crisp cucumber. And I guess it will be a few months until I the next one, unless I break down and buy some.
Weird weather, that seems to be a common complaint this year. I sure hope things get back to “normal”.
Your cukes leave me longing for the smell and crunch of a garden cuke. Store bought is just not the same.
Yum~ drooling over your tomatoes and cucumbers, it will be a while before we get to see any fruits in the garden.
The bloke who mows my lawn (my one little indulgence) told me that an old market gardener he knows told him that tomatoes ripen over night and need warm nights to do so. I don’t know how true that is – but if there is a skerrick of truth in it, I suppose that is one advantage of the warm nights we’ve endured! At last, some of my tomatoes are ripening but I have to pick them when they have a faint blush otherwise the birds eat the insides out.
I’ll fix them, thought I, and trotted off to the big green shed and bought a plastic hawk perched on a stump. It worked really well, for a bit. Trouble is (and I didn’t think of that), it traumatised the chooks too and they’ve taken to their coop, never to come out, again. Sigh. The hawk is now in the shed and hopefully the chooks will venture out again one day and realise that all is safe. Geez. You just can’t win!!
I love your tomatoes and cucumbers, wish I had some. Summer Dance is a great cuke and will be in my garden again. I have not grown a lemon cucumber, although I know a lot of gardeners like them. Last year I grew Crystal Apple, a New Zealand heirloom that is white and looks a lot like the upper lemon cuke in your photo. I also have seeds for Richmond (River) Green Apple cucumber, an Australian heirloom I will grow as soon as the 2014 Ice Age glacier recedes.