September Notes

A post with no pictures. Imagine that.

September has been a heavy month in my mind. Wisconsin's COVID-19 cases keep rising (daily case are nearly 10x what they were when we had the stay at home order), the politics surrounding the presidential election are ugly, I see systemic racism around every corner, yet I still have a job to do, a household to contribute to, and a garden to care for. I haven't felt like taking the time to blog about harvests, though. Here's a summary of the month's happenings, for posterity.

As September nears its ends, my tomatoes are still producing (mostly Juliets, although there are a few straggler Celebrities), peppers are doing wonderful, and I finally got my first ripe banana melon. I'll consider growing the banana melon again; it's the perfect size to use a melon baller, making the serving easy. Mine tasted like a mild, floral cantaloupe. I suspect the flavor would be more concentrated if I watered it more regularly. I've harvested carrots and the first rutabaga for roasting—the carrots are gorgeous, and I'll wait for the first frost or two to kiss the rest of the rutabaga. Some celery was harvested for pork stock I made.

I roasted the first few red kuri squash, which have been curing for about a month. I didn't realize the skin of this winter squash would be both edible and delicious. It's a nice, easy roaster. Also harvested my one and only butternut squash, which has now been curing for a week. Usually I have them in abundance; either my seed was too old or the area I planted it in was too shady.

Cooking and preserving has been in high gear. I canned 7 quarts of beets from the garden, continued to make and freeze or eat tomato sauce (some of which joined some Swiss Chard in a delicious vegan lasagna I made for a dinner with friends), froze nearly a gallon bag of chopped sweet peppers, and cooked my dried beans for the first time in a soup along with Swiss Chard ribs, carrots, and blended roasted veg (red kuri, carrots, rutabaga).

Then came the apples. I get 5 pounds of apples per week in the fall in a CSA share from a local farm. I dehydrated a half gallon jar of apple slices, and then decided to go big and order some #2 apples - 100 pounds of them. Mom came for another visit and we canned 26 quarts of applesauce, 10-ish 4oz jars of apple syrup (failed jelly), and 8.5 pints of apple butter. Just today I made the last remaining apples into applesauce that I stored in the fridge; probably about another 3 quarts.

The cover crop I planted is looking fantastic. Since a frost still isn't in the 10-day forecast, I think we'll end up having to mow it at least once this fall. As it germinated, it was clear I seeded some areas better than others, so I ordered some more seed and resowed some areas of the new garden yesterday. By mid October I should have most of the existing garden cleaned up and planted with cover crop for fall as well.

My seed garlic arrived about two weeks ago. I ordered from The Garlic Underground, which is just 35 miles from my house. I'm hoping that means their garlic will be well-suited for my garden's micro-climate. Planting will commence a week or two after our first frost.

I've also done a bit of garden-related reading. I ordered a stack of 10 books during Chelsea Green Publishing's Labor Day sale, and so far I've made it through Growing Great Garlic and Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land. While written nearly 30 years apart, both had good lessons for me.

Lastly, we purchased a weather station for the garden! I'm hoping it will better help me understand my microclimate, and will also provide some electronic record keeping of our temperature and rainfall. You can take a peek at my local weather conditions.

That's the highlights of the garden for the last three weeks. 

Labor Day Canning Extravaganza

I enjoyed a 4-day weekend for Labor Day this year, and spent most of it either in the kitchen or the garden. Since putting up food is just as important as growing it (if you want to enjoy it all year), I'm documenting some of my preservation here. And because I'm damn proud of what we got done on a "leisurely weekend." (We = my mom and I. She was my kitchen and garden helper Friday - Sunday.)

Tomatoes. Oh, the tomatoes. We had 36 pounds of tomatoes to process, and took care of the first 20 on Friday afternoon. We washed, peeled, quartered, removed seeds and gel sacs (saving them in a bowl to address later), and heated them according to the Ball crushed tomatoes recipe. We filled almost five quart jars (the fifth was less full than I would have liked, but I topped it up with juice). The remaining two quarts (7 fill my canner) were filled with tomato juice left in the pot, and also strained from the discarded gel sacs. To get that juice, I ran the discarded liquid through a food mill, and then poured through a fine mesh sieve. Into the boiling water canner it went, and then we had a mess to clean up and I had dinner to prep (we had country style ribs with roasted potatoes and steamed green beans).

The weather was gorgeous on Saturday, so we spent it in the garden prepping the expansion area for cover crops, which I seeded after dinner. Aaron was a big help in this endeavor.

But on Sunday, it was back to the kitchen, and tomatoes. The remaining 16 pounds went into a double batch of roasted tomato soup. This recipe doesn't rely on the boiling water peeling method. Rather, you wash, half, deseed (again, saving that goop for juice), and then roast the tomatoes. After roasting they should just slip from their skins. But not so easily if you've accidentally overcooked them, or used very small tomatoes, or maybe ever. This was a tedious job, and I was thankful for my immersion blender so I didn't have to spend even more time transferring soup from pot to blender to bowl and back to the pot. As anticipated, this recipe filled 6 quart jars so I processed one more quart of tomato juice along with it. While the soup was in the pressure canner, I sliced jalapeños and made pickled hot peppers for the first time, since Aaron eats them on pizza. I processed 7 half pints in the hot water bath canner while the pressure canner was depressurizing. Everything was done at about the same time.

Monday could have been a day of rest, but I had more hot peppers I wanted to process. I made an orange hot pepper jelly, substituting yellow fatali hot peppers and some red and yellow yum yum sweet peppers for the jalapeños in the Ball recipe. This turned out very spicy, but should still be good on some goat cheese with bread or crackers. I canned 12 four ounce jars and had about 10 ounces left to store in the fridge.

Grand total: 33 jars of preserved food this weekend. Not bad.

Harvest Monday: September 7

I passed peak tomato without even noticing it.

After picking another 30 pounds on Thursday evening, I realized there wasn't an overwhelming amount of fruit hanging on the vines. Sunday morning, I harvested just a handful. We'll have tomatoes here and there for another 1-3 weeks but I believe the days of 30-pound harvests are long gone.

Looking back, the first tomatoes ripened around July 26, came in at a steady but manageable pace for the next 3 weeks, and then kicked into high gear for 30+ pound weeks for the next 2-3 weeks, and now we're back to the steady trickle. It's interesting to look back at the calendar because it feels like I've been harvesting and processing tomatoes forever.

Here's the photo evidence from Thursday. In addition to the tomatoes, I got some nice peppers.

My mom and I processed 20 pounds of the ripest tomatoes on Friday, resulting in 5 quarts of crushed tomatoes and 3 quarts of tomato juice.

Saturday was a work day, prepping the garden expansion area for cover crop seeds, which I managed to sow just before sunset, followed by my husband raking them in with the lawn tractor. It was just in time, as the rains came overnight. This is the first year I'm planting a cover crop. I hope it goes well. I went with an all-purpose garden cover crop mix from True Leaf Market. 

While cleaning out a portion of the garden, I pulled my first few carrots (gorgeous, but long; I probably let them go too long) and the rest of the Jacob's Cattle bean plants. No photos though.

Sunday was dreary; perfect for more canning. First, I went to the garden during a break in the rain to pick the majority of my basil. I also ended up with a handful of tomatoes and some more gorgeous peppers.

Mom and I tackled the Ball roasted tomato soup recipe for the first time, doubling it. We ended up filling almost every square inch in my oven with trays of roasted tomatoes.

16 pounds of tomatoes and hours of work yielded the expected 6 quarts of roasted tomato soup + 1 quart of tomato juice. This better be darn good soup! While the tomatoes were processing, I put together a batch of pickled jalapeños that could be water bath canned. My husband eats pickled jalapeños on his pizzas frequently, and we've always purchased them at the grocery store. I hope he likes the home canned ones, because jalapeños are easy to grow and quick to pickle. When I put them in the canner, I had both burners running a canner, which I think was a first for me.

Sunday dinner was wood-fired pizza from a local farm, but I made a salad of tomato, basil, mozzarella, olive oil, and a balsamic reduction.

This post is part of Harvest Monday; visit Happy Acres to see what other gardeners are harvesting this week.