Today’s harvest. August Ratatouille or eggplant cacciatore?

August Update – Other things growing in the edible garden….

Harvest Monday

Pulled up almost all my carrots. They’re getting stringy roots off the main carrot so probably means its done growing. something quite satisfying a out pulling up carrots, you never know how big it will be and what shape!

The yellows and oranges are easy to grow. The reds are tougher. Although all my seeds are a couple of years old.

So colourful!

And I had to harvest all my mustard greens as they were beginning to flower. So many leaves! I washed and chopped them up and stirfried them with olive oil, garlic and salt. Simple. Added a bit oyster sauce for extra flavour.

Another handful of tropic prince bland peaches and my first homegrown artichokes! Will write a separate entry for those 🙂

Here’s the bigger and tastier tropic beauty peaches.

Tropic Beauty peaches.

Tasty Tropic Beauty peaches

These taste SO good. They’re bigger and tastier than the Tropic Prince peaches this year. Last year was the reverse. Yum!

Peaches galore! 2012 much more plentiful than 2011

I’m quite impressed and proud of these little trees – if you have been following at all, I bought these little $10 trees from Home depot in these tiny little 1/3 Gallon containers around winter 2010-2011 and last season I had half a dozen or so peaches from each tree. This year is doing much better and my trees are still alive! check out all my fuzzies! Hopefully they will get close to regular store bought peach size, I hope I removed enough baby fruit to allow these ones to flourish.

The Tropic Beauty is slightly ahead of the Tropic Prince peach maybe by a couple of weeks. The fruit are bigger. I believe I prefer the taste of the tropic prince though. Either way, one can’t help but get excited over these cute little babies.

I do have the same problem as last year though with the brown speckling on the leaves that will eventually make all my leaves drop. I believe it’s some kind of mold or fungus spore spread disease that Is hard to control once it has started and spraying when dormant is the best bet. I bought some horticultural spray oil which is supposed to help with disease but I bought the natural all season one instead of the dormant one. Next year I will try the dormant spray oil.
My trees survived last years disease so hopefully this year will be fine too. The trunks of these trees are much sturdier but still need extra support when carrying the weight of the peaches.

Peach blossoms gone, in with the mini peaches and new leaves

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My little peach trees seem quite happy in these pots but while I was potting up some of my other container trees, I decided to check the peach roots – the tropic beauty root ball is quite spongy and full of roots. Didn’t look desperate for potting up but I just did it anyway since the fresh dirt will probably be very welcome.

Before potting up a size – check out all the little pea sized peaches!

 

 

And this is after.

 

I need to get a bigger pot for the Tropic Prince, but I’ll see how the Tropic Beauty does first before fiddling with them both at the same time. Just in case 🙂

 

 

Tropic Prince Peach blossoming – lots of pics

The bees love my little peach trees! There’s always one or two bees buzzing around every time I go out to check on my garden.

The Tropic Beauty Peach flowered a few weeks before this Tropic Prince. This one is the tropic prince tree.

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Flowers on the Tropic Beauty are almost done and the leaves are coming in and looking healthy.