More harvesting

We've had a wonderful week of collecting what we've grown. The tomatoes are starting to ripen. We've had little ones like these for more than a month but larger varieties (early girl, beefsteak) are now ready to harvest. Friday night the salad was a single tomato with a bit of salt on it and it was enough to feed three of us.

The cucumbers continue to put out fruit. I'll do these up a trellis next year, I think. I've also had a request to grow less prickly cucumbers so I'll see what I can find at Apache Seeds in the spring.

We dug up the rest of the potatoes in the large front bed. I'd say was got about one-third of the maximum potential yield from the plants. This was pretty good given I did not make much of an effort to hill them and the soil was not very good. Amending that soil for some surface crops next year is one of my weekend tasks.

Both the russet and the shepody potatoes are nice in their own ways. Baked potatoes have been enjoying a renaissance here (after a 20-year hiatus due to overeating them as a child). We still have about a dozen plants to dig up (some have not yet died off) so I expect we'll have potatoes into November. I've storing a few in the basement in paper sacks to see how that goes.

We have one solitary head of cauliflower out back and it looks a bit dodgy. I'll cut it this weekend and see how it is but I think these are off my list for next year. Broccoli, however, did reasonably well for not much effort so I would try them again in a sunnier spot.

Finally, the asparagus plants I put in this year have put up a first shoot. I think we plants six sets of roots and there are four shoots up. This is quite encouraging. We also saw a massive wild asparagus plant in the valley while we were out hiking.

This weekend I'll be making some more soup stock to freeze and I'd like to snap a few pictures of some of the flowers that are putting on a burst of blooms with the colder nights.