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.

Harvest Monday: August 24

I neglected the garden during the week, saving all my harvests for the weekend. But Friday - Sunday I brought in over 30 pounds of tomatoes, four pounds of beets, a handful of hot and sweet peppers, a large bunch of basil and a lone 8-ball zucchini (the squash beetles are having a field day in the garden).

Here's what the harvest looked like. Well, most of it. In between harvesting and washing and preparing and doing the dishes and making the kitchen messy and cleaning it again I forgot to photograph a few things.

Friday was a mixture of Juliet, Roma, and cherry tomatoes with some fatali and scotch bonnet peppers and some green peppers This particular sweet pepper variety is meant to be picked green, and therefore was the first to mature in the garden. I also have some red peppers and chocolate peppers that have been growing well, but just started to show some color this week.

On Friday night I combined the freshly-harvested hot peppers with some I'd stored in the fridge and attempted to start my first lacto-fermented hot sauce. I'll report back in a few weeks how that went. Prior to putting them in the food processor, weren't these peppers gorgeous?

Saturday was all about the tomatoes. I brought in 25 pounds—6 pounds of Juliets and 19 pounds of Celebrity and Roma. The few green Celebrity tomatoes had fallen from the branches. They don't even have a hint of orange to them so I'll probably do some sort of green tomato preparation.

While picking the tomatoes I spied this very large beet and decided to pick it before it became woody. It's the first full-size harvest of my Lutz Winter Keeper variety.

On Sunday I pulled my golden beets, as they'd started to get heavily attacked by some sort of bug. Because of that, the greens were a loss and went into the compost pile. Once trimmed, they weighed in at 3 pounds, 10 ounces. I also harvested a large bunch of basil, which I forgot to photograph. 

I had to drag the sprinkler out to the garden to water on Sunday, since we haven't had rain for over a week. This is the first time I've had to water the garden in over a month.

In terms of using the harvest, it was tomato palooza on Saturday. I made a 1.5x batch of Annie's salsa (10 pints canned + 1 quart for the fridge), dehydrated 9 pounds of Juliets (yield: 1.5 quarts). 

I also roasted a large pan of tomatoes. The roasted tomatoes were blended into sauce, which I combined with a too-thick roasted sauce from the fridge I'd made earlier in the week that also included carrots, zucchini, and onions. The resulting mixture was still too thick, so I pulled one of my "failed" jars of crushed tomatoes from a few years back out of the pantry. I'd ended up canning mostly tomato water with a little pulp on the bottom. Opening the jar, it still smelled distinctly like tomato, so adding that to the sauce served thinned it without diluting the flavor. I ended up with just over a gallon of sauce, which is frozen flat in Ziploc bags in 2-cup servings. 

Last, but not least, I roasted up the beets. We'll eat plenty fresh this week, but if I have extra after a few days I'll dice and freeze for use in grain salads this winter.

Every Monday gardeners around the world share their harvest. View all of this week's Harvest Monday posts, hosted over at Happy Acres.

Harvest Monday: August 17

This week was all about tomatoes. I brought in three harvests, on Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and they were mostly tomatoes with a few peppers and zucchini thrown in. There are some beets ready to harvest but I'm letting them sit for a bit.

Here's what I harvested from the garden this week.

With all of these beautiful tomatoes, they were the stars of our meals this week. We had BZT's on Monday (with no lettuce, we replaced it with a grilled zucchini slice and it was pretty good), panzanella salad on Tuesday, and more BLTs starting on Thursday when we got some more lettuce.

The panzanella salad is tossed with olive oil and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. I used red tomatoes from the CSA and the yellow tomatoes are Mr. Stripey from the prior week's harvest.

Over the weekend I started to process the tomatoes. 5.5 pounds of Juliet tomatoes went into the dehydrator. This is the first time I dried them as halves rather than slices, per Dave's advice. They took a little longer than I expected (about 26 hours), but they were worth the wait. Not only are they absolutely delicious (my husband says they taste like tomato fruit rollups), but because I dried them skin side down, the dehydrator trays are still clean! Cleaning up trays after dehydrating sliced tomatoes can be a pain. You've converted me, Dave. Will do another batch later this week.

Another 7 pounds of Celebrity and Mr. Stripey went into some salsa for canning. I use a tested recipe from Annie, a contributor on the Houzz (formerly GardenWeb) Harvest forum. Annie's salsa is our favorite, and I'll try to make at least two more batches this summer. The Celebrity tomatoes were perfect for this recipe, with their fleshy consistency. They were also extremely easy to peel and deseed. I got seven pints for canning, and about 3/4 cup leftover that I used on a smothered burrito for brunch on Sunday.

If you'd like to see what other gardeners around the world are doing with their harvest, head on over to Happy Acres, where Dave hosts Harvest Monday every week.

A Preview Of (Canned) Things To Come

I've been traveling for work, so the blog has been neglected. The garden is busting at the seams though. I hope to have some updates this weekend.

In the meantime, I just ordered this. I'm so excited to can soups, stews, chili, stock, corn, beans, etc.

All American 21.5 Qt Pressure Canner

Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard - August 30, 2012

It's been such a crazy week, I posted this on Wednesday thinking it was already Thursday. Needless to say, all this was done before this week started.

I couldn't keep myself out of the kitchen this past week.

First, I harvested the outer stalks of my neglected celery plants and cut them up to freeze in our awesome new freezer with cooled shelves. Everything freezes super fast in this fine piece of machinery (that is, until our 1/2 cow comes and there's no more room on the shelves). I ended up with 2 quart bags full of chopped celery.

Then, I dealt with the green bean harvest that had been piling up. I also took the chance to try out our new FoodSaver. With sales and coupons, we ended up getting it for $30 at Kohl's a few weekends ago. These are frozen in packages that are the perfect size for a meal for the two of us (just over a cup of beans).

Then, it was on to canning. First, I pulled out the "accidental tomato paste" I made last year (that's what happens when you take a nap while you're making sauce) and tried making taco sauce for the first time. It tasted pretty good on the stove - we'll see how it works off the shelf.

I also made fiesta salsa. Although a lot of tomatoes go into salsa, I chose this recipe mainly because it also used cucumbers, and I've been trying to get through the huge pile of cucumbers I overbought when I made pickles. I've yet to find a salsa recipe I like that gets canned, so we'll see how this one holds up.

I also put up about 1/2 a gallon of tomato sauce (frozen in 2-cup portions), but didn't get a picture during the cooking. I used a recipe for "quick blender tomato sauce" that just involves coring and quartering the tomatoes and throwing them in the blender with garlic, basil, parsley, and carrots, then reducing on the stove. It was an excellent way to use the two quarts of canned tomatoes that hadn't sealed during canning the weekend prior, as well as some extras I had sitting around.

I haven't gotten a Kitchen Cupboard post up in awhile, so here are some other things I've been up to:

Mom and I had a marathon tomato canning session on
August 19. I bought 50 lbs of tomatoes at the farmer's market
for $30. She planned to make the trip and I didn't have nearly
enough tomatoes ready, so now I've really got a lot!

I also canned over 40 jars of pickles in July, but apparently haven't taken photos. Perhaps they'll make an appearance in a season-ending pantry photo.

To see what others are doing with their harvest, visit the Gardener of Eden.

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?

Join Robin over at the Gardener of Eden for more Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard posts.