Harvest Monday

This is the first (hopefully of many) Harvest Monday posts! Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne's Dandelions, and other harvests can be found here at Daphne's Dandelions

What a great garden week it was! Things are really starting to look edible. I am trying to decide when to start thinking about fall plants here, but we haven't even hit the hottest part of the summer yet. Last year when we were house hunting, the mercury hit 101.... and I am dreading the heat! (But the plants will probably love it).

On to the good stuff...this week from the garden we had fresh Swiss Chard, zucchini, squash, eggplant, tomatoes, strawberries, green beans, and jalapeno. That sounds like a big haul, but in actuality it was pretty small!

Eggplant: 6 7/8 oz
jalapeno: 1 1/4 oz
zucchini: 4 oz
scalloped squash: 3 1/4 oz
Celebrity tomatoes: 10 oz
Super sweet 100's tomatoes: 1 7/8 oz
Green Zebra tomato: 4 1/4 oz
Strawberries: 7/8 oz
Swiss Chard: 13 1/4 oz
Green beans: I don't know, the kid grabbed them from me and ate them...

I managed to get the strawberries inside to wash and weigh them before they were consumed. We've had a pretty good strawberry harvest so far this summer considering that we only have 3 plants that have been in the ground for 3 months and 3 more that we just planted 1 month ago. The hubby and I have not eaten a single berry... my goofy boy gobbles them up as soon as I let him find them.

The goofy boy has been asking me the last few days if we can eat the purple eggplant. So I finally caved this weekend and we harvested the largest of the 3 that are edible sized. Since we were finally going to eat one of the eggplants, I decided we might as well eat the scallop squash I picked earlier this week and the zucchini that was sizing up. We can't eat just 1 squash/zucchini, so might as well combine them all for a side dish. We washed them up, sliced and tossed them on the grill with the rest of dinner, and they were so good! Hubby's response to the eggplant was "I didn't hate it." True praise indeed.

The jalapeno below (1 of about 4 good sized ones on the plant) was used in a last minute batch of black beans.

Hmmm..... Dinner was grilled chicken legs, rice, grilled eggplant/zucchini/squash, braised collard greens and some black beans. Yum! Summer is here and the garden will hopefully produce us lots of treats.
This huge bolting plant is bok choy. I've been letting it grow with hopes of saving seed. It was such a great producer this spring, we probably cut and ate over 4 pounds of bok choy. I know at a single harvest we had 2 pounds, 9 oz! It's taking forever though, I really want the space as planted the watermelon next to it and it really needs the room to grow now. I also have some Blue Lake bush beans behind it that have been lacking for sunshine and space and are already producing some beans. I hope that once we get the bok choy out the beans will shoot up and produce like mad. I have some beans there I need to pick soon, and hopefully I will be able to get a taste this time.
The squash and zucchini have been really odd lately, lots of female flowers and I have to hunt for male flowers. And there has been some cross-pollinating so the females will develop. I figure that is ok since I am not saving them for seed and really just want them to eat.