2011 August 2-3 harvests and work

On Tuesday, 2011 August 2, Bruce, new volunteer Kathleen, Lance, and
Terri (grandmother of Kathleen) harvested 18 summer squash, 8
cucumbers, tomatoes (22 cherry-size, 23 small yellow pear, 13
larger red), about 7 pounds kale, about 4 sweet yellow banana
peppers, 11 weedy purslane plants, and some collard greens.

All of the collard plants (which were in bed B3) were pulled
after the harvest because they had many aphids.  The only
ordinary greens still growing in the garden are chard (half
of bed E2) and the Vates blue curled kale (in most of bed A6),
which has been productive much longer than expected.  Purslane,
usually regarded as a weed, is edible and can be used in salads
or cooked, so we took some to Open Heart Kitchen.  Some of the
kitchen staff have eaten the purslane, but we are told that the
customers object to it.

Other work included removing gravel from four planned raised beds,
removing weeds from a pile of dirt that is planned to fill those
raised beds, pulling some particularly unpleasant weeds near
the garden area (puncture weed and star thistle; both can be
painful), noticing more damage to lettuce (blamed on wild turkeys),
observed and attacked bindweed flowering within tomato beds,
and other weeding.

Open Heart Kitchen is the single important customer of the garden.
In an informal talk with Open Heart Kitchen, we learned (or re-learned)
that they can always use lettuce, garlic, red and green peppers,
tomatoes, summer squash, winter squash, and other greens like
kale.  We have begun to think about forecasting harvests to help
the kitchen with planning and were told that one-week forecasts
will help a lot, since menus are planned about a week in advance.

On Wednesday, 2011 August 3, Bruce, Diana, Lance, and Ruth (listed
alphabetically) harvested 13 summer squash, a tub of chard,
16 onions, 138 sweet yellow banana peppers (these are small),
8 cucumbers, 3 red tomatoes, 7 small yellow pear tomatoes,
a couple gallons of basil greens, and about 10 squash blossoms.

The onions are large but some are starting to rot at the bottoms
(they share a bed with tomatoes and are receiving too much water),
and will be finished within a few weeks.  The banana peppers are
probably starting to produce in large quantity.  Other pepper
varieties do not yet seem ready for harvest.  We could, but do not yet
plan to, harvest immature fruit; first we want to learn how large
the fruits of various varieties grow.  This was the first time we
picked much basil; several people in the kitchen were ecstatic.
Some of the people in the kitchen want squash blossoms; we picked
them after the rest of the harvest, by which time they were already
quite limp.

Other work included weeding and tying many tomato vines to their trellises.