Plum Harvest!

 

We have plums!  Remember when friends helped clear the blackberry from the back of the farm in December 2011? [See the photos in A Brief Tour of Habitat Farm, Spring 2012.]  Well, it turns out all that blackberry had been choking out plum trees that have been there for generations.  After we gave them room to breathe, they returned the favor by giving us fruit!  

Heaping half-pint containers like the one you see in the photo are going for just $2 each right now.  We're selling them by volume (as many as will fit in one of these little containers for two bucks), but just to give you an idea, the half-pint container in the photo is holding 10.75oz of plums--2/3 of a pound-- so at $3 per pound you could fill up on plums for canning, jamming, and dehydrating.  (Which is what we plan to do with whatever's left over.)  Just send us an email to let us know when it would be convenient for you to come get some!  

There's plenty more than what we harvested today, as you can see from the photo below:

Potato Harvest.

 

We harvested these potatoes on August 25th, 2013.  This is a variety called Red Lasoda that we found at Naomi's Organic Farm Supply.  We harvested the entire row (roughly 15'), 12 plants, because the plants were diseased, or had succumbed to a pest.  The leaves were riddled with little holes, and the plants were stunted--barely 6" tall in most cases.  They also had not matured like potatoes normally would: flowering, then dropping their flowers and drying out.  Still, they formed a good amount of beautiful tubers, with pristine, bright, rosy-red skins and creamy white flesh.  (They're still covered with dirt in the above photo.)  And they taste great!  The skins are very thin, so we are treating them as new potatoes.  But for around $7 investment in the Red Lasoda potato seed this past spring, while we didn't get the crop we had hoped for, we at least feel we got our money's worth. 

[Note: the $7 is a rough estimate.  We spent $20.93 in March on 3.22 lbs of potato seed of various types, including German Butterball (sown under cover on March 27th), Red Lasoda (sown April 28th), and French Fingerling (sown June 2nd).]

Here are a couple of our Red Lasodas all washed up and ready for cooking:

Eggplant Harvest.

We harvested these eggplants on August 16th, 2013, from about 24 plants.  Our eggplants are spaced at 1.5 foot spacing over two rows totaling 32 feet.  Half of the plants were started indoors on March 23rd; the other half were started a bit later, on April 6th.  By now, the plants are about 2' tall, and producing decently-sized fruit.  This variety is one we found through Kitazawa Seeds, called Ping Tung Long.