Coming home to a good harvest

As I mentioned yesterday, we have been away for a 4-day mini-break holiday in Vienna, so I had not had the opportunity to pick anything from Tuesday last week until Sunday, the day after we got home. The weather here in Fleet had been mostly warm and sunny while we were away, so lots more veg had ripened, and harvesting was vitally necessary. With so many other things to do on Sunday I have not had time to write much for this post, so this is really just a record of what I harvested.

Top of the list is the first of my "Pingtung Long" Aubergines, now about 10" long, and weighing 175g
More Runner Beans, approx 605g
More French Beans (green, yellow and purple), approx 275g
More tomatoes, both large varieties and small, including some "Sungold", 1.75kg
A couple of big "Hot Portugal" chillis
One "Iznik" cucumber
8 Beetroot, about golfball size
656g "Charlotte potatoes"

Here they are in close-up... [Note: this is not the full harvest - just a selection posed to look pretty for the camera!]

The "Charlotte" potatoes were ones from the second planting (end of June). The yield was very small because the plants had contracted blight and I didn't want to leave them any longer and risk losing the whole lot. This batch is only 656g, though the quality of the tubers is very fine once more. "Charlotte" has certainly been the best performer all round this year.

As you can also see in my next photo I picked a lot more green tomatoes, because I had to destroy three complete plants since they were riddled with blight ("Incas" and the 2 x "Speckled Roman"). Some of them were showing touches of colour, so I am hopeful that many of them will ripen in due course.

The beetroot are developing slowly this year, which suits me fine. We find that we can't eat a lot of beetroot without severe consequences to the digestive system, so little and often is good!

These "Orkado" and "Ferline" tomatoes were picked last Tuesday just before we went away.

With those and what I picked on Sunday we now have a bit of an accumulation of fruit - well over 5kgs actually...

I don't want to use the word "glut" because that implies having too many of something, and I definitely don't think we have got too many tomatoes. Jane has a long list of tomato-based dishes she wants to cook, so the backlog will soon be drastically reduced.

I expect lots of other people will have been harvesting nice things this week, so why not head off to Daphne's Dandelions, like me, and see what they got...