In My San Diego Garden and Kitchen
It is September and bell pepper season. With warmer days, mature plants are yielding well. The Baby Belles are great for snacking or adding to salads and they’re prolific.
‘Red Beauty’ bell pepper
The red peppers are huge and I let most of the peppers go the distance. Unfortunately, opossums and rats know just when they’re perfectly ripe. I should have picked four yesterday. I lost them overnight. The critters seem to be trap savvy so I erected various barriers around the bed to discourage them and picked the ripe and nearly ripe peppers.
My second plantings of bush green beans require picking morning and evening to catch them at the thin profile I prefer. ‘Provider’ is prolific and ‘Royal Burgundy’ is just kicking in. Baby zucchini is all the remaining plant will produce so I harvested these and pulled the plant.
Chopped zucchini blossoms sauteed with red peppers and red onions make an extraordinary quesadilla.
A more favorable winter (rain and more chill) caused the ‘Gordon’ apple tree to produce a small crop. It has not done well since we lost a neighborhood pollinator. A half dozen very large apples were also shared with the opossum. We got four, he got two before we picked them all. Our second crop of ‘Dorsett Golden’ apples looks promising. We covered it with gauzy netting so we don’t lose apples to critters and birds.
That one large apple, a few stalks of rhubarb and a handful of frozen berries made a late summer fruit crisp last week.
We gathered and processed 18 pounds of strawberry guavas last week. I grab a few of them off the tree, warmed by the sun and all the volatile oils lending peak flavor and pop them in my mouth. The seeds don’t bother me.
The crop is labor intensive and my husband is not enamored with guavas, yet he helps me gather and sort. Each guava is handled three times—first when picked, second when sorted and finally when washed for cooking. I revel to think of all the antioxidants formed while baking in the sun. I stir the puree into plain yogurt, make jam, use in smoothies and mix with sparkling water.
I roasted the last of the tomatoes, froze some and on a cooler day made roasted tomato soup. I’m ready for some soup weather and the transition to fall.
Even my Sunday church bouquet gives a nod to the seasonal change.
See what other garden bloggers harvested last week at Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.
