Archive for the 'Fruit' Category
We have been harvesting beans from our pole bean plants since late June. During the summer, they were producing more beans than we wanted to eat, so I didn’t harvest them all. They are starting to wind down their production of beans now, but there are many bean pods left on the vines that have dried up.
Today, I spent about an hour harvesting the dried bean pods and removing the seeds from them. Each fall, I save bean seeds from the dried up beans pods to plant as next year’s crop of pole beans. I place the bean seeds in a zip-locked bag marked with the date I harvested them. Then, I put the bag in a drawer in our kitchen for storage until next spring.
Beans are the only seeds I harvest from our vegetable garden to re-plant for next year. Bean seeds are very easy to harvest, because they are large seeds, and they dry within the pods while they are still on the vine. Other types of vegetable seeds are much smaller and are more of a challenge to pick and dry.
I always make sure to harvest the seeds from bean pods that are completely dried up. The dried up pods crumble in my hands when I break them open. I have noticed that if the bean seeds inside are not completely dry and hard, mildew may start to grow on them while they are in storage.
This year I planted mainly Romano (Italian) beans and some Blue Lake pole beans. The black beans shown in the third picture above are the Romano beans. These types of beans are usually grown for harvest as green beans. But I think the dried black bean seeds from the Romano bean plants can also be cooked and eaten. We have too many dried bean seeds to plant next year in our relatively small vegetable garden, so I am going to try cooking some of them and using them in Mexican dishes.
October 04 2009 | Beans | No Comments »
Yesterday, my mom and I harvested about 70 Comice pears from a small tree in my backyard. Our tree is crammed into a small space in between our house and a fence that is only about 6 or 7 feet away from the house and runs parallel to the house. The tree has grown upright in between the house and the fence. This tree was planted by the previous owners of the house. They didn’t pick the best spot, because the tree doesn’t have enough room to grow any wider. However, our Comice pear tree has managed to produce an abundance of pears nearly every year (except the years I didn’t net the tree). This is an example of how a fruit tree can be grown in a small space in a backyard and still produce high quality fruit.
In my opinion, Comice pears are the best tasting variety of pear. In fact, they are one of the best tasting fruits. The comice pears we have harvested from our tree taste even better than Bartlett pears. Our comice pears are very sweet. They are sweeter than Bartlett. Bartlett pears tend to have a bit of tartness, although I am a big fan of those pears as well. We also have a Bartlett pear tree.
Like all pears, Comice pears need to be picked while they are still unripe, and then ripened indoors. The worst thing about Comice pears is having to wait so long to eat them. Comice, Bosc, and D’Anjou pears need to be kept in a refrigerator for at least a month after harvest. After a month in cold storage, they can be brought to room temperature to ripen properly.
September 28 2009 | Pears | 4 Comments »
This photograph shows our neon eggplant with a large purple fruit hanging on it. We are also growing millionaire and nadia eggplants. This is the second year we have grown eggplants in our vegetable garden, and I have been pleased with the harvest both years. Our eggplants are slow growers early in the season and don’t produce fruit until later than many of our other garden vegetables. But by August, when the summer heat really kicks in, our eggplants started growing faster and producing a decent amount of fruits.
Last weekend, my partner and I made Wolfgang Puck’s vegetable gratin recipe using our home grown tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, thyme leaves, and onions. The rest of the ingredients we used in the recipe were store bought, including the mushrooms we added to the recipe. Even with the two of us working together, it took nearly three hours to make it. It takes a long time to fry all that zucchini and eggplant.
But the end product was absolutely delicious! This vegetable gratin recipe is one of my favorites. We have made this recipe several times in the past, and we both think that this time it tasted better than ever. I attribute that flavor in part to using mostly home grown produce. The eggplants we used were so fresh, because I picked them that day, and the neon eggplants had a nice creamy white interior. I picked the zucchinis only a few days before. And all of our home grown eggplants and zucchinis had very few of the scratches, blemishes, and wrinkled spots I often see on commercial produce.
August 30 2009 | Eggplant | No Comments »
Last week, I harvested our first Hale’s Best cantaloupe fruit from the vines growing in our vegetable garden, as shown in this picture. This is the same cantaloupe shown in the photo in my July 25 post. Although I can’t say it was the best cantaloupe I have ever eaten, it was sweet and more flavorful than the typical store bought cantaloupe. However, it was small – only about 5 inches long. But I am happy just to get a small cantaloupe that’s tasty. Last year, we harvested a larger cantaloupe, but it wasn’t at all sweet.
I know that our climate is not ideal for melon growing, because the average summer high temperatures are not hot enough. So I consider this cantaloupe a partial success. I have also harvested a few more cantaloupes that are only about 3 inches long. Now I just have to figure out how to get them to set larger fruit, like grocery store cantaloupe. Perhaps, they need more fertilizer. I only gave our cantaloupe plants a few applications of water soluble fertilizer back in the spring. Perhaps, many more applications of fertilizer might work better. Maybe I will try more fertilizer next year.
August 30 2009 | Melons | 3 Comments »
The fruit on our O’Henry peach tree is ripening. Our tree has far less fruit on it this year than last year, because I pruned it more during the dormant season. I discussed my pruning technique in an earlier post. The tree only has about 40-50 peaches this year, compared with about 200 last year, which is a more reasonable number for our needs.
This year’s crop of peaches are much larger than they were last year. They are nearly the same size as grocery store peaches. However, the ones I have tried so far taste about the same as last year’s crop. Reducing the size of crop greatly increased the size of the fruit (nearly twice as large), but it doesn’t seem to have affected the flavor much.
O’Henry is a good tasting peach, but our O’Henry’s don’t have a very sweet flavor. They have slightly more tartness than sweetness. I really want to grow peach and nectarine trees that produce exceptionally sweet fruits. So last March, I planted a white snow beauty peach tree and a white snow queen nectarine tree. Snow beauty and snow queen are supposed to produce fruits that are more sweet than tart. Here is an interesting article from Dave Wilson Nursery about white peaches and nectarines.
I sprayed our O’Henry peach tree twice early in the year for peach leaf curl. See my last post about spraying for peach leaf curl. The spray appears to have worked well. Our tree had only few leaves in the spring showing signs of leaf curl. The vast majority of the leaves were and continue to be very healthy looking and curl-free.
August 23 2009 | Peaches/Nectarines | 2 Comments »
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