What are you harvesting today?

One thing I'm NOT harvesting is pears. I planted a little pear tree a few years ago, and this is the first year it's had a crop - well, five pears actually. I was planning to pick them today, as they had been very underripe last time I checked, but yesterday I noticed that the whole crop of pears had fallen on the ground, and most had been scoffed by the blackbirds! No wonder they sounded so cheerful in the morning.
The fence which runs just behind the pear tree is in urgent need of renewing, but I had stuck to my guns and said that I would like the work to be done after the pears had ripened. Now I have no pears and no fence!!
To add insult to injury, we went to Tewkesbury market this afternoon at closing time, and bought a large punnet of pears for 50p, so maybe I was making a big fuss about nothing! Ah well, hopefully next year I'll pick them earlier...

Oh no Dandelion! Sounds terrible!

Oh hard luck Dandelion. My new Victoria plum has had quite a decent little crop this year, though finished a couple of weeks ago.

I am harvesting a few autumn raspberries (Polka) which are lovely, but never very many at a time. Courgettes have slowed down but still chugging along. Runner beans - no idea what has happened. After a small flush of beans last month, now no flowers or beans. Plants seem ok though.

S'funny what you say about the self-watering pots, Ploshkin. I've consistently had my best plants and best crops ever since I started using them. It may be that they address the particular problems I have been experiencing, but not yours. Also, regarding your comments about under-watering tomatoes for better flavour, again I've had my best flavoured tomatoes when using them - though that may be more down to the fact that we live in the SE and they get longer to ripen.

Picked off the Bloody Ploughman apples this morning. They didn't quite come of easily when lifted, as is always said to be the way of checking ripeness, but I khow from experience that if I wait for that to happen I'll be picking them up off the floor bruised and full of wasp holes. I've packed one for my lunch, so I'll soon find out if I judged it right.

Also picked some Italian wild rocket -this is indeed wild in my garden; I have not needed to sow it for years now. At this time of year it is flowering and gets rather peppery and hot, which is good to me. That's gone in my lunchtime sandwiches too !

Tonight I plan to dig the rest of the potatoes, some carrots and maybe a bit of beetroot, and pick off any raspberries.

I am getting rather fed up with courgettes by now, in both senses !

Am nursing a sore foot, after a butternut squash I had harvested and left on a shelf in the porch rolled off and hit my big toe. It's better today, and has stopped bleeding, but for a while I thought the toe might be broken. Am relieved that I don't have to go to hospital, because this would mean becoming a statistic. How many other butternut squash-related injuries have there been so far this year?

A few years ago I had to go to the hospital after getting poked in the eye by a runner bean.

I can't think of any harvest-related injuries that I've had - though both of yours made me laugh!

I do remember having the step ladder out to reach apples on the tree. I was on the top platform and one side of the ladder started sinking into the ground. No prospect of getting down without upsetting it, so I was yelling for my husband to come and rescue me, with my tiny tot son hanging on to the side of the ladder for all he was worth looking petrified, bless him. I think he would just laugh now and let me fall off!

This whole grow-your-own thing is obviously more dangerous than I first thought!!

Having ignored the plants because they really weren't doing anything, today I found a perfect, big head of calabrese on one plant.

Good thing you found it before the caterpillars or slugs did! I've passed a slug in our garden a couple of times at night, when I've been out to lock the chickens in, which must be well over six inches in length. My youngest said that it was about the length of a baby's arm!!

Hooray, at long last I'm getting a good supply of runner beans - the way the weather's been I thought they might get caught by frost before I had any.
I've just dug the last of my potatoes - first earlies so they've had a good innings. The last few will go in the freezer for Xmas dinner. I'm just about to go out & pick a modest crop of damsons from the tree in the garden, it's the first fruit I've had from it.

I need another week to get any more runners - they're tiny little ones at the moment, a second flush (if that's the right term!!). We've hardly had any yet this year, as the few that were produced in the summer went from little immature ones to dreadful old toenaily ones within a very short time.

Well pleased this morning.  I was unexpectedly at a loose end yesterday evening, so went to the lotty and picked off all the Borlotti, Flageoulet and Greek Gigandes beans that were dry, thinking that the weather would not hold for ever - and sure enough, I woke up to a rainy start to the day !  Lots of beans this year - I think the flageoulet type (soissons, from the Organic Garden Catalogue) are a great bean - so versatile, I use them in Mexican dishes - great in a chilli baked in the oven in a hollowed out squash, but also in Cassoulet, and Greek φασολια (Fasolia) dishes.

I also pulled some carrots, cut the odd small calabrese, a box full of rather nice raspberries and brought back 3 pumpkins.  Don't want to risk some low life nicking them again !

When I got back I cooked Madhur Jaffery's beetroot with onions. with some beets I dug out last time - they were a bit ugly but tasted good.

We've now got a crop of lovely runner beans - at least, they look lovely! Am hoping they taste as good as they look, as we have friends coming for a meal tonight!

Courgettes - in October!  That's definitely the last of them now.
Runner beans going well & good old Mr Fearn's too although now a bit curly with the lower temperatures.
Can anyone advise on saving bean seeds (I definitely want to grow Mr Fearn's again next year).  I'm not very good at seed saving.  I left the pods on a couple of the plants several weeks ago & they've gone quite big & lumpy.  As it was going to be near freezing & then wet I took some of them off with as much stem & leaf as I could & hung them in the greenhouse to hopefully dry.  I have left some on the plants in case that wasn't the right thing to do.  I can't get the whole plants out because they are twined round bean netting & I know that the pods will never dry on the plants because the frost or wet will get them first.

I accidentally left a few beans on the plants earlier in the season which have dried well. But I've also picked pods which are beginning to go leathery and dried them off further in my shed, until the pod is crisp and more brittle. I podded tham last weekend, and they're now sitting in take-away curry containers on my desk, waiting for me to bage them up into paper bags.
What you said you've done sounds right, P, but if you have any problems let me know as I've saved lots of Mr Fearns and will have plenty spare.

Collecting the last bits of things today. Last of the beans. Last of the calabrese. Probably near the last few courgettes.

Loads of carrots left though. I'll soon be bored of carrot soup !

We've eaten the last of the Beauty of Bath apples (it's a very small tree, so the crop isn't huge.) They are cooking apples, but very sweet, so they don't need much extra sugar. I picked some Winter Greening apples, which are hard green small cooking apples - some are still not ready to be picked. They're more a subsistence food than a luxury!

I picked more courgettes today. I've had a cloche over the fruiting end of the plant as I've been trying to get one to marrow size. Picked it today as I know I'm pushing my luck. Not as big as I would like, but enough to make some marrow and tomato chutney. The autumn raspberries are still chugging along - tasty, but only ever a few at a time. They usually end up on my breakfast.

Dandelion wrote:We've eaten the last of the Beauty of Bath apples (it's a very small tree, so the crop isn't huge.) They are cooking apples, but very sweet, so they don't need much extra sugar. I picked some Winter Greening apples, which are hard green small cooking apples - some are still not ready to be picked. They're more a subsistence food than a luxury!

Silly me - not Beauty of Bath but Beauty of Kent. The first is not a cooking apple at all!!

I still have courgettes ! One plant is nearly dead, but the other which has grown into a nicely sheltered spot by the greenhouse is still going.

It's been a strange year. No big gluts, but perhaps this is a good thing - instead I've had a steady supply of just about ehough veg. Oh, I'm forgetting the carrots. Got a lot of those to eat ...

I went to put some cuttings on the greenhouse staging & found that there was a load of nice, ripe tomatoes on my abandoned plants. They're really tasty too. The warm weather must have helped them along - they've not had any water for weeks in fact I was about to clear the plants out.

I'm intending to try my first brussel sprouts today, they're a good size.

My first ever November courgette.

freebird wrote:My first ever November courgette.

I went to dig over where the early potatoes had been the other day, to get out anly left over to avoid volunteers next season. "Why are you digging there ?" asks DW. "The potatoes were over there !". Aha. I thought the potatoes had not yielded so well as I expected - DW normally digs the earlies as she needs them, and by a communication error she didn't know about the second row ! Bonus row of Charoltte potatoes

Ooh, bonus CH!

I didn't exactly harvest anything today, but we did eat some carrots that were harvested some time ago. 15 months ago, to be precise. They been languishing in the fridge since I pulled them up. I'd get them out from time to time and look at them, all curly and twisted, and think oh I'll deal with them another day. They were still in perfect condition, and tasted excellent in our beef stew this evening.