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.

Beans for Mother's Day

On Mother's Day, I planted the first of our beans—pole beans. This year I'm growing Purple Trionfino and Rattlesnake beans. I like these because they're purple, which makes them easy to pick. Every year that I've grown beans I've lost my trellis to severe thunderstorms, so this year I'm trying something different—bamboo teepees. Yup, I'm finally growing my pole beans on poles. The teepees have 6 poles each, and I planted 6 seeds per pole as the packet instructed. That sure seems like a lot of beans. Of course, less than 24 hours after planting a line of sever weather came marching through, and the teepees seem to be taking it well. Once it stops raining and it's a little less soggy outside, I'll plant the next round of beans—favas (first time growing those).

Yesterday I also transplanted four heads of red leaf lettuce, seeded three square feet of chard (4 seeds per foot), and planted nine square feet of beets (9 seeds per foot). I potted up about half of the pepper seedlings, and will do the rest later this week. The biggest task was to move a bunch of woodchips from the back of our lot line (where the landscaper got a little overzealous and encroached on our neighbor's lot) to the front of the garden to give the hedge some growing room. My job was easy—lay down newspaper 20" from the hedge line. Aaron actually hauled all the woodchips from back to front. He did an excellent job.

On Thursday, my father-in-law delivered the new arbor and gate he made for us. Isn't it gorgeous?

The gate (not pictured) will be attached to two 4 x 4's that need to be dug into the ground. They'll attach directly to the front of the gate. This year, I'm planning to grow Morning Glories up and over the arbor (I got some seeds for free with a Seed Savers order). Next year, perhaps beans, malabar spinach, or even some squash or melons. Once those posts are in the ground, nothing will pull this over.

Since I'm linking this to Daphne's Harvest Monday post, I should talk about what I harvested.

See that fresh basil on top of the chicken parmesan? I harvested the tops of three seedlings so I could garnish the dinner I made for me and my parents. It was a useful harvest, not just because it was DELICIOUS, but because I normally pick the top off the basil early to encourage it to branch out and form additional stems. For the record, the sauce was homemade, but from a local farmer's tomatoes because I didn't have a garden last year.

Garden Lessons

The garden season is not entirely over (it better not be - there are a lot of green tomatoes on my plants), but I've gotten through enough of it to reflect on things I want to do differently next year. Some of my readers who are more experienced gardeners may say "duh," but this is only my third year of gardening (fourth if you include containers). Hopefully, I have about 50 years of gardening ahead of me. My husband has urged me to write these things down so I don't have the same frustrations next year.

We need to learn how to deal with pests.

Whether flying, crawling, or scampering, this year's mild winter has made every pest invasion more extreme. There are a variety of measures I can take to keep the pests out of my garden.

• Dig our chicken wire barrier down into the ground.
• Last year, when I put up the chicken wire along our chain link fence that encloses the garden, I didn't dig it into the ground. I knew I should have, but we had already felled 4 trees, added 4 large beds, hauled in garden soil, and constructed a serious trellis/gate. I needed to get plants in the ground, not dig in the chicken wire—or so I thought. The ground-level barrier worked for a year, but this year I've seen mice and chipmunks running free through the garden. They've definitely learned to burrow. Either this fall or early next spring, we're going to have to invest some serious sweat equity - digging in approximately 125 feet of chicken wire.
• Invest in some hoops and cover fabric.
• If the mice do end up getting in, I don't want to let them have my beet harvest again. I know the hoops aren't 100% necessary, but I think I'd like to have them to extend the growing season anyway. I wish I would have purchased some immediately after I discovered the devastation in the beet patch - the entire fall bed (beets, chard, turnips) has had all of its leaves eaten by some type of critter. I dont' think it's going to make it. Hopefully this covering will also keep our plants protected from the bugs that infested our garden this year - at least until they're established enough to need pollinating.
• Figure out how to outsmart the slugs.
• We've tried beer traps. We've tried treating with Sluggo (maybe not frequently enough?) The fact is slugs are still decimating many of our crops. They seem to love our soil, and I need to find a way to get rid of them.
• Pay more attention to my summer squash and cucumbers, and Aaron's hops.
• I think these need to be sprayed much more often than we did (we use pyrethrin). That, or I need to plan to have two rotations of these plants so I have more maturing after the first planting is lost to the bugs.

We need to make better use of our available space.

• After harvesting the early bed, most of it stayed empty (except 4 rows of pole beans on 2 trellises) because it was too late to plant the melons I had planned for that bed. I could have, however, planted more summer squash in that space—it would have started producing fruit right as we started severely cutting back our powdery-mildew and squash vine borer infested leaves and stems.
• Some things can be planted closer together (garlic), while others need to be farther apart (onions, tomatoes, beets).
• I need to give up on planting in the ground on the back fence line (it's overrun with weeds from all the neighbors) and add a few smaller raised beds back there. They'll be perfect for determinant tomatoes, bush beans, or smaller root veggies like beets and turnips.

I need to build better tomato cages.

• I have these great tomato cages that store flat (they're made up of 3 poles and 9 connectors/supports each), but I consistently assemble them backwards. I face the supports the wrong way, so as the plant grows it busts out of the cages. Simply snapping on the supports facing the correct direction will fix this problem—yet I've managed to screw it up for 2 years.

I've got to make the basil last.

• Believe it or not, I think this means planting less of it. I have a tendency to plant too much basil, which results in my inability to keep up with harvests and the premature yellowing of the plants. I need to be ruthless when I harvest so the regrowth continues until the tomatoes are all ripe.
• Related - when I have a glut of basil, I need to make pesto, even if there is a bunch in the freezer. I'm looking at a pesto-free winter because I didn't make pesto in June when I should have.

It's time to start identifying my preferred varieties.

• This is most important for me in regards to the plants I grow a lot of and put up for the winter—tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, zucchini, garlic.
• Tomatoes: I started growing exclusively heirloom tomatoes because it seemed the most authentic type to grow. Don't get me wrong - they're delicious. But, I need a large portion of my tomatoes to be suitable for canning. Most of the heirlooms I grow are delicious slicers, but they don't put out the volume to give me enough for canning.
• This was the first year I grew some determinant varieties, and Polbig (an early hybrid) is definitely a keeper. It put out tons of fist-sized tomatoes that are perfect for canning, sauce, salsa, etc.
• Blondkopfchen, an heirloom cherry tomato, is definitely a keeper. It takes longer to ripen than some other cherries, but its huge clusters give me an enormous amount of tomatoes at once - they're perfect for roasting, fresh eating, and soon I hope to give them a try in my newly-purchased dehydrator.
• Moonshine is my favorite slicer, so that heirloom will still find a place in my garden.
• Amish Paste, however, is on its way out. The huge tomatoes would be great, except they always split on me, and I end up cutting off way to much to get rid of the damaged parts. Also, I only get a few ripe tomatoes a day - not enough at once to put up anything of consequence.
• Matt's Wild Cherry tastes delicious, but it sprawls way too much for me (the plant is so tall I can't pick the highest clusters) and it annoys me that the fruits seem to ripen in a set order on the cluster - those closest to the stem ripen much faster than the fruits at the end of the cluster. This means more time spent picking, as you can only pick one or two fruits from each cluster at a time. I appreciated that they ripened the earliest, though - so I'm on the hunt for another early-ripening cherry tomato.
• Heinz was on trial in my garden this year, and it will probably get another year. The fruits are small, but they take longer than the Polbig's to ripen, meaning I have an extended canning/preserving season.
• According to this list, I might end up with only 5 or 6 tomato varieties each year (assuming I try something new every year). I need to realize that that's ok. I've got lots of other fish (veggies?) to fry.
• Beans
• I've only been growing beans for 2 years, but I've learned a variety of lessons. 1) Don't plant a double row in front of the trellis - the leaves will grow so thick you'll never find the beans! 2) Don't freak out about getting them in the ground as soon as we're clear of the last frost. Better for them to get a start to grow healthy stems than to be set back by cold, wet weather. 3) I need to stagger my bean planting. This year I planted up until July and I think I'll get everything harvested before the first frost.
• Ideal Market tastes delicious, but it's hard to find in the mess of beans. I'm going to stick with beans that have some sort of color to them so they're easier to pick.
• Using that criteria, I think Rattlesnake and Purple Trionfo Violetto are keepers.
• I'm going to actually grow my pole beans on poles (teepees) next year. The beautiful trellises my father in law makes keep getting blown over in the wind.
• I'll likely try growing edamame again next year, although every single seed failed to come up this year.
• I'll need another year of trials on growing dry beans. The bugs and slugs were so ruthless this year, they didn't get a fair shot.
• Cucumbers
• Actually labeling my cucumbers will likely help me determine which ones I like :) I had a hard time with germination this year, then ended up planting them way too close together. Next year will be better. My husband loves pickles, so I need to plant a lot of pickling cucs and just a few slicers.
• Zucchini & Summer Squash
• I'll probably just stick with black beauty and yellow summer squash. They're solid producers, I can freeze a bunch, and they're easy to process.
• Garlic
• This was the first year of growing garlic, so it won't actually be until the fall 2013 planting that I can make intelligent choices based on their storage qualities. However, based on what I've seen from our Music variety and what I've heard about its storage qualities, it's a keeper. In fact, it might be the only one I plant this fall. We'll see.

I'm sure there's more......but there are another 6 weeks left in the garden season to get it all out of my head and onto the blog, right?

Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard - July 5, 2012

It's the summer of jam.

I haven't been good about blogging about the jams and jellies I've been canning, but I've definitely been busy making them! So far this summer I've put up strawberry and peach jam, as well as basil and garlic scape jelly. I've made sweet jams for three years now, but this will be my first year attempting savory jellies. I see many cheese and cracker appetizers in my future, or maybe savory thumbprint cookies.

Strawberries

First, strawberry jam. I made a dozen half-pint jars, and basically used the recipe on the container of low/no-sugar pectin I purchased, with the exclusion of lemon juice (the Ball canning book didn't call for it, so I felt safe). I only used half a cup of sugar for every two cups of crushed berries, and this is by far the most delicious jam I've made yet. I only have eight jars left after sharing some of the deliciousness.

The crushed berries separated from the juice...but I can deal with that.

Peaches

Next, I made peach jam. My mom tipped me off to a traveling truck that brings tree-ripened peaches from Georgia to the upper midwest. I had never worked with peaches before, and I'm glad my husband was kind enough to help me blanch, peel, and slice the peaches. We ended up with seven quarts of frozen peaches for pies or smoothies, and 10 jelly jars of jam. I don't think I've ever had peach jam before, but I must say - it's delicious. I wish I would have doubled the recipe so I'd have 10 half-pint jars.

This is what half a bushel of peaches looks like.

I used the recipe from the Ball canning book.

There were plenty of peaches left for fresh eating, and this delicious peach cobbler.

Basil

Next, I found myself with a glut of basil well before the tomatoes (or any other summer veggies) were ready to harvest. I decided to take a foray into the land of savory jams. I used a Taste of Home recipe, although because I was using low/no-sugar pectin, I only used two cups of sugar. Even then, this jam seems overly sweet. I got nine jelly jars (one went home with my parents). I haven't tried it since it set.

Garlic Scapes

Even though I've already harvested my garlic, I'd been saving the garlic scapes for a day when I had time to make the recipe I read a few weeks ago on Gardener of Eden. Again, I modified the recipe slightly. I used more garlic scapes (probably 1 1/2 cups) and only a cup of sugar with my low/no-sugar pectin. Time will tell what this tastes like with my modifications. I got nine jelly jars (again, one went home with my parents). 

With almost 100 heads of garlic, we were swimming in scapes this spring and I was desperate for something other than a stir fry.

Not the most beautiful color...

Not jam!

I did put up one non-jam item. Using Daphne's brine recipe, I made my first jar of refrigerator pickles for the season. My cucumbers are just now flowering, but I was able to pick up a hoop house-grown cucumber at the farmer's market last weekend. These are delicious, even though my dad says "they taste too much like cucumbers." I'll be making a lot more of this brine.

Jar gifts

A former co-worker sent me a message on Facebook a few weeks ago offering up some extra jars from her grandmother's house. I gladly accepted her offer. She dropped them off while I was at work on Tuesday, and to my surprise she left five boxes of half-pint, pint and quart jars. There must be well over 100 jars in the boxes, some new in the box, and all very high quality. Looks like I'll be able to put up anything that comes out of the garden - hoping for an increased variety of pickles (including squash, green beans and carrots) and hopefully some whole tomatoes. No pictures of the jars - I haven't actually gotten around to unpacking them.

Want more?

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