Today's harvest

[blissful]

I'm really enjoying all the harvest talk and pictures.

Our tomatoes are loaded, but not fully loaded yet, lots of flowers still. It will be more than a week until we see a ripe tomato on the vine.



This hot hot hot weather is not good for setting tomatoes.

 

[bethzaring]

You guys are killing me. My peas are about exhausted, of course asparagus season is way over, raspberries started to ripen last week, lettuce is trying to set seed, swiss chard is ready to harvest, celery and parsley have been trimmed for a few weeks, carrots are too small to harvest.....and tomato and green chile harvesting is in the far future. The onions are doing great! I plant hundreds so I can start harvesting when they are way tiny. The tomatoes pictured are Early Girl, will harvest zucchini soon and the calabacitas are almost big enough to harvest.

 

[bbqcoder]

Great pictures! I see white onions in the picture. Are any of them red or yellow?

I harvested most of my shallots today (grey, yellow
&red)

 

[pepperhead212]

Nice pics bethzaring! I wish I had room to plant onions, given how many that I use!

I harvested most of my shallots today (grey, yellow
&red)

Have you ever had a problem with gray shallots (probably not, if you are planting them again!)? One season I planted those, and almost all of them got some sort of grub in them. Now, I don't think that these may have been traditional gray shallots, as the shape was unlike other shallots I had grown, or ever bought - sort of skinny, and rounded on the root end, like a breakfast sausage! They were ready for picking before any others - early June. And no other alliums ever got this grub - garlic, shallots, scallions, or leeks.

My favorite shallots have been the Holland reds, which produced large clusters, from just one shallot, and stored for over a year, one time. I'll have to start growing them again; I used to grow them in the part leftover in the row for garlic, but that is just totally filled with garlic in the last several years! I'll have to maybe reduce my greens for the spring (I always have excess!), and plant shallots.

 

[larry_stewart]

I didn't have luck with shallots the first ( and only) time I grew them. To the shallots defense, they kinda were and afterthought, planted last minute and probably not in the most ideal location.

For some reason, my onions are hit or miss without any predictability. Even this year, I have 2 onion beds right next to each other, same soil, same fertilizer, same watering, onions from the same sets, and one bed is doing average, the other poor. I cant imagine that one bed being 4 feet west of the other bed could make such a difference. Some years I get normal sized onions, the other years, the size of golf balls, regardless of variety. For these reasons, Im likely going to ditch one bed and just grow twice as much garlic , since at least for me, its a much more predictable crop. ( Beth, those onion beds look great!! They make me both envious and jealous )

 

[bbqcoder]

Have you ever had a problem with gray shallots (probably not, if you are planting them again!)?

This is my first season with gray shallots. I planted them last fall with the ones I bought from Maine Potato Lady.

One season I planted those, and almost all of them got some sort of grub in them. Now, I don't think that these may have been traditional gray shallots, as the shape was unlike other shallots I had grown, or ever bought - sort of skinny, and rounded on the root end, like a breakfast sausage! They were ready for picking before any others - early June. And no other alliums ever got this grub - garlic, shallots, scallions, or leeks.

Interesting. Are you rotating your crops? I do a three year crop rotation. So a bed with alliums won't be planted with them for the next two years. I wonder if that would help? If you want to try again, I'll be glad to send you some gray shallots. Just send me your address via PM.

Here's a picture of some of my gray shallots.

The ones on the left of the black/brass hose connector are from the community garden where I get full sun, no shade. The ones on the right are from my house where I get full sun for ~8 hours. The community garden gray shallots are so much bigger!

My favorite shallots have been the Holland reds, which produced large clusters, from just one shallot, and stored for over a year, one time. I'll have to start growing them again; I used to grow them in the part leftover in the row for garlic, but that is just totally filled with garlic in the last several years! I'll have to maybe reduce my greens for the spring (I always have excess!), and plant shallots.

Shallots are fun to grow. Very easy. Same for potato onions. Most of my shallots are yellow. I do need to get some more red but from a different supplier. I planted them two years ago and a lot did not come up. I got them from Burpee.

For some reason, my onions are hit or miss without any predictability. Even this year, I have 2 onion beds right next to each other, same soil, same fertilizer, same watering, onions from the same sets, and one bed is doing average, the other poor. I cant imagine that one bed being 4 feet west of the other bed could make such a difference. Some years I get normal sized onions, the other years, the size of golf balls, regardless of variety. For these reasons, Im likely going to ditch one bed and just grow twice as much garlic , since at least for me, its a much more predictable crop. ( Beth, those onion beds look great!! They make me both envious and jealous )

I've had good luck with onions. My tips are: plant them as early as possible if you want bigger onions. In my area, that's the first week of April. I do give them some bone meal and fertilizer. Here's a good guide for fertilization

The other tip is to make sure that you give them enough water throughout the season and especially around bulbing time.

I prefer to plant onion seedlings over sets because sets can have a tendency to send up a seed pod. But if you do plant sets, choose the smallest bulbs, not the larger ones.

 

[larry_stewart]

I've had good luck with onions. My tips are: plant them as early as possible if you want bigger onions. In my area, that's the first week of April. I do give them some bone meal and fertilizer. Here's a good guide for fertilization

The other tip is to make sure that you give them enough water throughout the season and especially around bulbing time.

I prefer to plant onion seedlings over sets because sets can have a tendency to send up a seed pod. But if you do plant sets, choose the smallest bulbs, not the larger ones.

Dixondale is actually where3 I get my Onions from.
First year was great, second was ok, last two were poor.
Not blaming them or their advice, Im sure Im the issue.
Just wish I had consistency.
Maybe My problem is that I usually do choose larger ones.
There's always next year !!

 

[GreenEnvy22]

Peppers are starting to take off now.
We harvested some Banana peppers already.
Lots of Thai, apolalypse Scorpion, jalapeno, shephard, and yellow devils on the plants now. No fruit yet on the carolina reapers, don't think any on the ghosts either.

Yesterday we had people over for dinner so my wife harvested a little lettuce, beets, carrots, and radishes.

She also made bowls out of parmesean and asiago cheese, used those to serve caesar salad in (with the above lettuce).

 

[pepperhead212]

This is my first season with gray shallots. I planted them last fall with the ones I bought from Maine Potato Lady.



Interesting. Are you rotating your crops? I do a three year crop rotation. So a bed with alliums won't be planted with them for the next two years. I wonder if that would help? If you want to try again, I'll be glad to send you some gray shallots. Just send me your address via PM.

Here's a picture of some of my gray shallots.

The ones on the left of the black/brass hose connector are from the community garden where I get full sun, no shade. The ones on the right are from my house where I get full sun for ~8 hours. The community garden gray shallots are so much bigger!

I rotate my crops 3 years, too - each year I plant some fall greens, followed by the spring greens, in the row my garlic was harvested from., then the garlic in the squash rows, Then next year the squash go in the spring greens row.

I'm thinking that maybe the gray shallots I got were infested from the time that I got them. I had a disease on last season's Music, but the variety in the double row 8" from it, had no signs of the fungus, or whatever it was . After this, I learned some things from a guy on a gardening forum, that used to work on a garden farm. First, peel all of the garlic something that I figured was not a good thing, but, as he pointed out, the skin that you plant it with rots, and leaves the clove to start growing. Second, to kill those fungal diseases, they used to wash the cloves in vodka to sterilize them! I found many other suggestions for this online - H2O2 and isopropyl alcohol are two cheap things to sterilize them with. Of course, if it is inside the cloves, like the grubs probably were in the gray shallots, this won't help - this only works on the surface things, like fungal infections.

And speaking of infections in alliums, a few years ago something was imported from Europe -
the allium leaf miner . A lady in Lancaster had it attack her garlic, so she can't plant it there anymore; the area it's in is small, but it is spreading. It hasn't hit my area yet, but some day, I may find it on one of my alliums, and I'm not sure what I'll decide on then.

 

[bethzaring]

Great pictures! I see white onions in the picture. Are any of them red or yellow?

I harvested most of my shallots today (grey, yellow
&red)

Yes, pictured is a sweet white, and behind them are a red onion, and a storage yellow. My secret is I buy plants, not sets. They are pricey but the results are unbelievable. Here are the varities I plant.

https://www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetables/onions/onion-plants/sierra-blanca-f1-onion-plants-67.html

I use a lot of these large white sweet onions to caramelize in a crock pot and then can in 1/2 pint jars.

https://www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetab...lants-3638.html#q=red+wing&lang=en_US&start=1

and for storage...https://www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetab...s-3049.html#q=onion+plants&lang=en_US&start=1

 

[bethzaring]

I've had good luck with onions. My tips are: plant them as early as possible if you want bigger onions. In my area, that's the first week of April. I do give them some bone meal and fertilizer. Here's a good guide for fertilization

The other tip is to make sure that you give them enough water throughout the season and especially around bulbing time.

I prefer to plant onion seedlings over sets because sets can have a tendency to send up a seed pod. But if you do plant sets, choose the smallest bulbs, not the larger ones.

+1

and keep the onions weeded very well

 

[bbqcoder]

Yes, pictured is a sweet white, and behind them are a red onion, and a storage yellow. My secret is I buy plants, not sets. They are pricey but the results are unbelievable. Here are the varities I plant.

https://www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetables/onions/onion-plants/sierra-blanca-f1-onion-plants-67.html

I usually start mine from seed but had a late start this year so I also used sets.
Next year, I might get mine from Dixondale Farm. If I get a few people to go in with me, I can get a bunch of plants (50-75) for under $5 each.

I like Johnny's but yes, they're expensive.

 

[pepperhead212]

I got my first ripe Red Savinas today, along with some Big Jims, and a few more of the Superchilis. I also saw some of the Thai peppers starting to turn. It's that time!

We never see peppers referred to as determinate or indeterminate, as tomatoes are, but they definitely are. FI, that Red Savina is a determinate - it has so many peppers, of almost the same size, that the weight pulled over the plant! The Chocolate Habanero, OTOH, has peppers of all different sizes, and flowers all over, as well (no more flowers on the RS).

 

[dragnlaw]

oh oh... am I not supposed to let my onions flower?

 

[blissful]

oh oh... am I not supposed to let my onions flower?

On the positive side, if you let them flower (which we do for a few selected onions), you can then collect the seeds by cutting off the flower head after the seeds have developed. Then, next spring in Feb or Jan, plant those seeds so they are ready to plant in may.



It's the circle of life. Onions make seed stalks and bloom on their second year to produce seeds.

 

[dragnlaw]

I'm not very good at starting from seed. I did do the eggplants this year and they are barely 4/5 inches tall. Everyone else here seems to be harvesting them! Thought I had started them soon enuf but obviously not.

I bought a flat of Brussel Sprouts and they are doing well.

The onions are doing OK, (shallots, yellow & red) but between my back, my feet, my hands and not to mention the weather, I'm having a hard time with the weeding.

I never got to the garlic at all - still sitting in a mesh bag in the barn. Guess it's headed for the compost heap.

I planted a whole row of peas - only 4 plants appeared. Yellow 'n green beans -only see 1 plant. Something had to have stolen the seeds.

Beets are drowning in weeds but at least there's a lot of them! Now if I can just not pull them out with the weeds...

Not my most stellar year in the garden but at least there is one which is more than I got last year. 1/2 hour here, a 1/2 hour there, it is what it is.

 

[GotGarlic]

I got my first ripe Red Savinas today, along with some Big Jims, and a few more of the Superchilis. I also saw some of the Thai peppers starting to turn. It's that time!

We never see peppers referred to as determinate or indeterminate, as tomatoes are, but they definitely are. FI, that Red Savina is a determinate - it has so many peppers, of almost the same size, that the weight pulled over the plant! The Chocolate Habanero, OTOH, has peppers of all different sizes, and flowers all over, as well (no more flowers on the RS).

I've never seen indeterminate peppers that grow taller and taller as the season goes on. Do yours do that?

 

[pepperhead212]

Some do keep growing, GG. That chocolate hab is one, and the Hanoi Market is another favorite of mine that keep growing and producing, as the summer wears on. Mostof the Thai peppers are the determinate type, getting a huge flush of flowers, then the peppers, mostly at the same time, and the same size, and now they are ripening, pretty much at once. As soon as I pick a generous number of the ripe ones, they produce another flush of peppers, and with some, even a third flush. I always dry the first reds, then freeze some of the later ones, along with greens, and freeze all the rest.

 

[pepperhead212]

Here's that Red Savina plant, showing many of the green peppers on it, plus the ripening ones, I picked today. This is only a portion of them, that I could get in the photo - almost all of the peppers are this size, and they just pulled the plant down to one side, which I had to stake up. I'll find out tomorrow if it survived the wind of that first storm.
Red Savinas ripening 7-22 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

The Big Jims are one of the varieties I have to cover, and I noticed a couple under there ready to pick:
Big Jims and Red Savinas 7-22 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

One of the Thai peppers had a branch torn off by the wind earlier, and it had a few full sized green peppers on it:
Full sized green Thais - 7-22 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

 

[pepperhead212]

I picked a bunch of tomatoes today! A lot of cherries and grapes, and they are still loaded with flowers and smaller fruits.
3 qts Sunsugars, 2 qts Sprite grapes, and 1 1/2 qts Jaspers 7-26 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

And a few larger tomatoes, though there are a number of bad spots on some, so I have to use them fast. Some have gotten blossoms back quickly, since it has been in the low 80s, and even in the 60s at night, but we're in for another heat wave!
A bunch of tomatoes, plus a few Longhorns 7-27 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

And besides all these, I cut many of those I had before in half, and I have 4 shelves of them in the dehydrator!

And another thing that I harvested, that I really wasn't attempting to grow, were onions! I only planted the sets to get scallions, but I think the heat did them in, as I wasn't using them fast enough in that form, and the tops just disappeared! Still the last two sections there as scallions, so I didn't dig them - I'll have to make some Chinese soon! These onions were mostly white, about 2-2 1/2", about the same size with the yellows, but the reds didn't get large at all. I used one today, about 1" in diameter, in the gazpacho - usually, I use a small shallot, since I don't want a larger onion in that. The rest of those small ones I'll use as sets, and I'll plant for scallions again!