Here in the basket I have some tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, the leftovers from my summer crops. The quality of these late season crops is not as good as it used to be a month or two ago, but I am so happy to have them right now. They make good company for the abundant kale that we’ve been eating this week but I repeatedly forgot to photograph.

This year is a perfect treat for me to have these plants still so productive since I’ve planted a very small fall garden. In three weeks I will start remodeling my current garden, I hope, to get more growing space and better critter protection so it didn’t make sense to fill the garden with crops that I would have to rip up before maturity. I am in love with my summer nightshades, they manage to stay productive even though the nights are getting cool around here. They are making the most of our periodic heat spells. I hope they can get going just a little bit longer.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

Let’s start with some background. My peppers plants, planted back in April are still going strong. They have a lot of green fruits on them which are ripening slowly but surely. It’s been hot lately, but it was pretty cold a week ago, so they have seen quite a range of temperatures. Most of them are Corno di Toro and Jimmy Nardello, two Italian sweet pepper heirloom varieties.

Here I am happily chopping some Corno di Toro for a stir fry. As I am chopping I take a bite, I taste the familiar sweetness of these Italian peppers and then, ouch, it burns? Wow, this thing is hot! Hot like a New Mexico chile. But it doesn’t taste like a chile, it tastes like a sweet Italian pepper. Sweet and burning hot all at once. What’s wrong with these peppers?

I have been harvesting for a few months now from these very same Corno di Toro plants, and not once I got a spicy pepper. Not once. Actually, I’ve grown this variety for several years now. Never got even a hint of spiciness from them. So I am really surprised. Is it this bouncing from 50 degree days to 90 degree days we’ve been having this fall? Or maybe the shorter days of fall?

In any case, hot peppers make a great addition to any stir fry so after the initial surprise into the wok they went. Dinner turned out great and now I know not to take a big bite from my formerly sweet peppers.

If you look carefully in the chaparral around the garden, you will always find some plant in bloom with tubular red flowers. It might be the discreet blooms of a Dudleya, the sudden burst of red of an Indian Pink, the pendant blooms of a Heart-leaved Penstemon, any time of year you will find one native plant or other offering sustenance to our resident Anna’s hummingbird. Right now, late in the year, when most plants are busy bringing forth new leaves, the California Fuchsia is blooming.

There is a lively clump of our native Fuchsia in the orchard, between an apple tree and some raspberries, hugging a rock. As I was taking these photos a female Anna’s hummingbird came by several times, looked at the flowers, looked at me, looked at the flowers and flew off.

I kept trying to make myself as small and still as possible so I could photograph the hummingbird. To no avail. It simply was not comfortable having me around or otherwise didn’t like this clump. In any case, it didn’t stop to feed on these flowers and I didn’t get a photo of a hummingbird on a California Fuchsia for you.

For the last ten days I’ve been living inside a cloud, literally. Rainy season on the mountaintop can be like this, slow constant drizzle for days, a shower here and there. So far we’ve got a little over two inches of rain, enough to wake the chaparral out of its summer dormancy. The sun just came out, the fog is slowly receding in the distance.

The lingering moisture will not last long.

A natural moss and lichen garden.

Annual Mediterranean grasses germinate immediately, all it takes is a quarter inch of rain. Those in the photo must be some Bromus species, I am not sure which one. If they are lucky and the rain continues they will out-compete native annuals, which are slower to germinate. If the rains stop now and don’t come back until the end of the year, this Bromus won’t make it and the natives will have a better chance.

Native perennials are waking up, like these two Dudleyas (D. lanceolata), full of water and vibrancy, ready for a new growing season.

I am the one who is not ready for a new growing season. After all the work in the summer garden and all the putting food by I rather wander around the chaparral with my camera. The garden can wait, whether the carrots or the arugula go in a few days earlier or later, it doesn’t matter. As long as I plant the garlic and the favas on time…

Right now I am out here on the rocks with the moss and the dudleyas, the sun is shining, I can finally see the ocean after ten days of living inside a cloud.

Second half of October, a dreary day, non stop drizzle, and summer comes to my kitchen counter. This is how it’s been all week: tomatoes and more tomatoes, lots of tomatillos, beans, some eggplants and peppers, a bit of basil, a melon every other day, and dahlias. I’ve also been picking a steady supply of lettuce, onions and nopales.

I am now harvesting the vegetables that ripened during our most recent heat wave. There are still plenty of green tomatoes and peppers on the plants waiting for the next few hot days. There are melons ripening on the vines.

I am curious about the tomatillo plants: will they put out another flush of flowers and fruits? Hard to tell, but they’ve surprised me before. Such are the delights of the lazy gardener. A few weeks back I thought the tomatillos were done for good. The plants looked overpowered by powdery mildew and I was just waiting for a good moment to pull them out, clean and plant the next crop. I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t do it. Today I find the mildew basically gone and the plants heavy with new fruit. You can see them up there, on the counter, that’s a large salad bowl they are in.

I have Italian black and Russian red kale waiting to be picked in the garden too. I am not even getting close to them. I’ll have a long winter to eat kale. For the moment I’ll stick to the tomatoes, the peppers, the eggplant. For the moment I am not ready to let go of the fruits of the summer, and neither is my garden.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

Lots of ripe tomatoes on my kitchen counter right now. It was slow ripening for the tomatoes this year. It was slow. Now, in these very hot fall days I’ve got an overflow of perfectly red, almost too ripe tomatoes. Almost too ripe, so ripe you can just peel them with your fingers, that’s how you want your tomatoes for gazpacho.

For a good amount of gazpacho, enough for a large gathering or to simply keep in the fridge for a refreshing drink on a hot day (a hot fall day here) you’ll need:

• 2 generous lbs. of ultra ripe tomatoes, peeled and seeded (I don’t bother seeding them)
• a small cucumber, peeled
• a small sweet pepper, green or red (I prefer red), seeded
• 1/2 a small onion
• 1/2 a cup to 1 cup of extra virgin olive
• 1 to 2 tablespoons of vinegar (red wine, balsamic or sherry) depending on the acidity of the tomatoes.
• salt to taste
• the crumb of a thick slice of day old country style bread, soaked in cold water (not more than 1/2 lb.)
• cold water
• a few ice cubes

For the garnish you’ll need extra tomato, pepper, cucumber and bread.

Blend all the vegetables, the bread, the oil, and salt together until very smooth. Add 1 tablespoon of vinegar, taste, and add some more if you feel you need a bit more acidity or a bit more punch. Chill in the refrigerator. That’s it, this blend is your gazpacho. It is really that easy but you can play a bit more with it depending on how you’d like to serve it.

You can serve it in one of two ways, as a soup with garnishes–gazpacho at its most classic– and as a drink, great as a snack for the kids while they run a round playing in a hot summer afternoon.

To serve gazpacho as a soup, you will transfer the gazpacho from the blender into a soup tureen and put the tureen in the refrigerator to chill. You will then dice your extra tomato, pepper, cucumber and bread and place each one of them in their own separate bowl. When it is time to serve, you add a few ice cubes to the tureen and stir to make sure the gazpacho is really cold. Then adjust the thickness of the gazpacho with extra cold water if needed. There is no one ideal thickness for a gazpacho. It has to be evenly smooth, but some people like it thicker others like it thinner. It’s up to you and your family to determine what your home style is going to be. If you choose to thin it with water adjust the salt accordingly. Finally, you bring it to the table with the bowls of diced vegetables and bread so that everybody can garnish their gazpacho to their own taste.

To serve it as a drink you need your gazpacho much thinner than you need it to eat as a soup. You achieve that by adding a lot more cold water at the end, by omitting the bread crumb altogether or both. Again, if you add water you’ll need to adjust the salt accordingly. Now all you need is a bunch of thirsty kids running around your yard with a soccer ball and you are spending a little afternoon vacation in Spain without leaving your home. Growing up in Spain I never saw adults drinking gazpacho. It seemed that the adults ate it at the table with a spoon and garnishes, kids drank it in a quick break from their games. Maybe I was not paying attention to what the adults were up to…

These days I enjoy gazpacho in my California home, for lunch on a hot afternoon, sitting at the table, with each diced garnish served in its own separate bowl.

This week I am excited about these four kabocha squashes. This is all the winter squash I got this year, my smallest winter squash harvest ever. For a while I thought I would get none, so I am happy to have at least a few. Looking at the bright side, those are four heavy little squashes that I will not have to worry about keeping safe from mold and rodents during a long winter. They won’t last long…

Week after week the plants seemed so happy. They looked verdant and lush, unblemished, perfect. I’ve never seen such beautiful winter squash vines in my garden. Now, here’s the catch: those gorgeous plants did not produce female flowers. You tell me, what good is a squash plant without female flowers?

Every day I checked, ready to hand pollinate any female flower that came up. Most days I came back to the kitchen with a good handful of male flowers and no pollination needed. The total for the whole summer were five female flowers. One didn’t take and here you have the other four.

I guess it was our unusually cold summer that did it. Does heat trigger female flower production in squashes? It looks like it…

We eventually got heat, in the fall. As soon as the heat came powdery mildew covered those perfect verdant vines entirely. I’ve had it with the squash this year! I just pulled the plants, took the four kabochas, and didn’t even check whether they were ready for harvest or not. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t ripen properly, they’ll be eaten soon. I do hope they developed at least some of their characteristic sweetness. I do hope.

While the winter squash was driving me insane, another heat loving cucurbit was doing surprising well, a melon, the Ambrosia cantaloupe. I had chosen this variety precisely because it needs less heat than other varieties to develop an intense sweet flavor. I covered the soil with IRT mulch and hoped for the best. I couldn’t have chosen a better year to give this cantaloupe a try. We’ve been having a steady stream of pretty decent melons. Not fantastic, but better than any other local melons I tasted this year. They are as good as I can expect in cool weather and the last few ones harvested during these recent hot days have been very sweet. All in all a success that makes up for the poor showing of its cousin, the winter squash.

I’ve also been harvesting a variety of other heat loving vegetables: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, tomatillos, green beans have all been plentiful. A bonus of the cool temperatures was a constant supply of lettuce throughout the summer. Now that it is hot, the lettuce is starting to bolt but it still tastes pretty good. To round up the harvest I have some kale, onions and nopales.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

Yesterday it rained here, in sunny Santa Barbara. The first rain of the season and a good one, over one inch. I’m celebrating. Last time we saw any rain was May 17th, almost five months ago. What a joy to step outside and feel the moisture on my face.

A couple days ago it was just dust and now look: a puddle! After the long summer drought puddles are exciting, believe me.

And moss, that’s exciting too. It was just this wiry, scratchy, dark mass attached to the rocks. A little bit of rain and it wakes up, bright green, vibrant and soft.

Of course the sun will be back soon enough, this weekend is expected to be warm. It could be another month or two until the next rain. We’ll see. Right now I am celebrating: it rained yesterday, the rain is back!

When it is hot and I have baskets of veggies all over the kitchen it’s not time for jam, not time for sauces, stews or ratatouille. I wash the vegetables, I do not peel, or chop them, and I cook them minimally, if at all possible outside. And I do not can, never on a hot day, I pray that my freezer is large enough.

Right now I have an overflow of purple tomatillos. They get husked and quickly blanched for one minute. Once cool they can go straight in the freezer. I used to roast them but no more, blanched tomatillos end up being more useful for our cooking style.

I’ve also got baskets of eggplants and peppers. Those get grilled. I grill the peppers and long eggplants whole, just coated with olive oil. I do prick a few little holes in the eggplants for steam to come out. The fat Italian eggplants and zucchinis get cut into thick slices, coated in oil and onto the grill they go. Again, once cool straight into the freezer, peel, seeds and all. Actually, I do pull the stems out, it slows me down but it saves freezer space.

The one step where I need to slow down, is peeling the spines off nopales, on the grill behind the peppers. There is no way around this one. I take a deep breath and set out to slowly and carefully take every spine off. Then they join the peppers and eggplants on the grill and in the freezer, either whole or cut in stripes.

Grilled tomato halves can also be packed and frozen as they are. I like to process some of them a bit more, just a bit more. I will run them through a couple pulses in the food processor and pack and freeze the resulting puree. If the peel is loose I will take it away before pureeing. I don’t bother seeding the tomatoes, I don’t mind the seeds at all. Pureeing the tomatoes does not involve heating so if at that point I still have energy left I’m glad to do it.

This has been the bulk of my preserving this year. I didn’t get any cucumbers. The cool temperatures and the nematodes did them in, so one less thing to do. Unfortunately it’s also one less thing to eat. Oh well… Since I don’t like pickled or frozen green beans we are eating beans every day at every meal. I don’t need to preserve greens since they grow year round in my garden. Any excess goes to other kitchens or the compost pile.

We are getting a heat wave these days in southern California. This means fruit is ripening nicely in the garden, a new round of grilling and freezing awaits. I am praying that my freezer is large enough.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.