Harleysville Homestead: November 2012

Fall Vegetable Garden crops

We planted our cold weather plants in September. Carrots and purple cabbage

Broccoli

Cabbage

Soybeans, Scarlet Runner Beans, Snap Peas

After our Scarlet Runner Bean plants didn't produce any bean pods in the heat of the summer, they did grow pods as the weather cooled, and we were able to pick some pods that were developed, and they were huge!

The beans are funky, from pink to purple. It turns out that only the purple ones dried correctly, so the pink ones weren't fully developed yet.

Dried snap pea pods that were left of the plant were harvested for seeds. Look like we have way too many. Oh well.

The soybeans did very well.

We blanched and froze them.

Pumpkins and Gourds

The pumpkin vines started great, but then we think they got bacteria wilt or something else nasty from the stupid squash bugs and cucumber beatles. We sprayed the bugs with horticultural oil, but there were too many of them. Next year we'll have be better with our organic bug control.

We only had a single pumpkin make it's way to ripen. All the rest died as the vines died. The vines kept growing, but then wilted from the roots out. Its like the dying sections were chasing the growing part.

The gourds on the other hand, completely covered our arbor that we built in a couple of weeks. They also spread about 30 feet in along the ground, and climbed the adjacent spruce tree.

Birdhouse variety

Snake variety

Martin House variety

Hot Pepper Jelly and Fermented Hot Sauce

We canned a batch of hot pepper jelly from some of the Red Zavory and Jalepeno peppers.

Then for the last batch of radom peppers, I decided to try to make some fermented hot sauce.

The peppers were stemmed, then pureed, then salt added, and some whey off the top of some yogurt, to give it some "good" bacteria to ferment.

Similar to the method for traditional pickles or sauerkraut. The salt brine is enough to kill off bad bacteria so that Lactobacillus can ferment the sugars and create lactic acid, which is a natural preservative, as it lowers the pH. It's supposed to give the peppers a better flavor.

Carrots and Sweet Potatoes

The harvest of multi-color carrots was pretty good. We planted a second round of regular orange ones in late summer for a late fall harvest, as they are supposed to end up sweeter in the colder weather.

Our sweet potato vines went crazy, and actually produced a ton of huge potatoes. But when we went to harvest them, all but about 5 potatoes had been completely eaten by voles. The voles tunneled in under the bottom of the boards that are the sides of the beds. Next year we might do the potatoes in buckets instead to try to prevent that.

Garden Late Summer

Our two best vegetables by far were the tomatoes and peppers, which all went crazy. The tomato plants eventually grew out the top of the bird netting

We had to stake up the pepper plants because they grew so many branches that all had heavy peppers

Sweet potato vines expanded all over. Unfortunately the zucchini and squash plants in the back were decimated by squash bugs and rotted.

We put up two different grape vines on the arbor we built over the entrance to the garden.

We finally got the fence painted too

Watermelons

The watermelon vines we had did pretty well, with each one producing multiple watermelons. The only issue we had was determining when they were ripe inside. As the first one we picked to early and it wasn't pink inside yet.