Early winter harvest

Its officially winter here and we are still lucky to harvest some warm-loving vegetables at this early week of winter. The warm-loving vegetables does take such a long time ripening but the vegetables taste excellent. I guess things that have to wait for, sometime worth the wait. Its fun to see other gardeners harvest basket around the world, so come and join in Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday.

We had some eggplants and enjoy it as eggplant fritters. I grew several variety of eggplants each year as I found that each year some does well and some does not, most importantly the weather effects the flavour of certain variety. This year the best performer in our garden was Bonica eggplant. I did not like the flavour of Bonica eggplant very much last year but this year it tasted much better and was the most prolific as well. The bonica eggplant is growing in partial shade and the fruit is protected from the harsh sun. The bonica eggplant tasted good not bitter at all and the flesh was nicely soft. This is the 3rd year we grow eggplants, the first year our eggplant award goes to Early Long Purple, 2nd year best performer was Lebanese eggplants and this year Bonica. This year I grow Early Long Purple and Lebanese eggplants in a location which they received full sun almost the whole day, so the fruit could not grow well and it tasted somewhat bitter when previous years it tasted good. We also harvested some rainbow chards, carrots, golden calwonder capsicum and a yellow crookneck squash.

Snail and slugs are getting active at night now and attacking our Da Cheong Chae green leaves as seen in the photo. Harvest the first biggest watermelon radish in our garden. I wanted to let it grow bigger but was worried that it will become hotter. But surprisingly, it was sweet and no hotness like other radish sometime if you let them grow older. The watermelon radish goes into the chicken tom yum my husband made. Fresh chillies and cherrytime capsicums freshly available in the garden at the moment for picking. We finally cleaned up and disposed end of season cucumber plants today. Only a few cucumbers were left on the plant to harvest. I will sorely miss cucumbers until the next season come again for us.

We harvested our first broccoli for cool season this year, rather small head. Its the first time we managed to harvest broccoli this early, we usually start to harvest broccoli for cool season at the end of July. After 3 times re-sowing 'Jack Be Little' pumpkin seeds because the heat wave kill the plants, we finally harvested  2 pumpkins today. The first sowing was mid-spring, second sowing early summer and the third desperate attempt was end summer. There was no problem with seeds germination. The problem was that the adult plants from the first and second adult plant batch were not able to survive the extreme heat. By the time the female pumpkin flower from the third sowing start to bloom, the weather was getting to cold. The first week when the female pumpkin flower bud bloom it managed to open and be manually pollinated. However, the week after that because of the cold weather none of the female flower bud bloom. It was risky sowing the seeds at the end of summer and we were just lucky to get some pumpkins. For the cucurbits family perhaps the last sowing batch will probably be mid-summer in our garden. I was trying to extend the cucurbit family season this year but I think I extend it too much by sowing seeds until end summer.