2020's First Frost

This was a week of last harvests in the garden.

On Tuesday I picked one more basket of ripe tomatoes.

Most were roasted, blended, and then slow cooked into about 3 cups of tomato paste. The large yellow tomato in the upper left of the photo was saved for our last tomato sandwich of the year, which we eat today. It was a BAT - bacon, arugula, tomato.

Thursday (October 1) was a forced harvest, as we were expecting our first frost. I picked one more basket of tomatoes at varying stages of ripeness, including many green tomatoes. The biggest harvest was peppers; I had loads of sweet peppers on plants at a variety of stage of maturity, but most were still green. I also picked plenty of jalapenos, a few ripe Fatali and Scotch Bonnets, and plenty of immature hot peppers. The pepper harvest filled the bottom of a large plastic tote.

There are about 3 gallon bags of whole peppers in the fridge, and the rest have been chopped and are freezing on trays. I expect there are at least 2 gallons of chopped frozen peppers. Chili base for the winter shouldn't be a problem. I need to figure out what I'm going to do with the hot peppers. I think I'll make one jar of candied jalapenos. We've never had them and I'm wondering if they'd be a good canning project next year. I'd also like to make another hot sauce, but may need to chop and freeze some for winter soups and stews.

I thought I had four ripe banana melons to bring in, but three of them had suffered significant damage from insects or other critters. That left me with one—just the second banana melon I've gotten all year. This one was much more ripe and flavorful than the first; my husband and I ate the entire thing before dinner. I definitely want to grow melons again next year, but I'm not sure what variety.

I also brought a large bunch of celery in before the frost, just in case the other plants didn't make it, and I snipped the last stems of basil. A walk through the garden this morning confirmed that cold-hardy veggies like celery, Swiss chard, carrots, and rutabaga are looking great, while the frost claimed everything else. Sunday night is bringing another frost. In fact, as I write this it's already 31.5 degrees in the garden.

Dave at Happy Acres hosts Harvest Monday for gardeners around the world to share their bounty.

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. 

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.

Seed Starting Update: Peppers & Brussel Sprouts

Today was pepper starting day! I used to start peppers and tomatoes on the same day, but I'd end up repotting the tomatoes two or three times before they made it to the garden. I doubt I really got that much of a head start that way, so this year I'm planting the tomatoes the minimum of six weeks before they go out in the garden. I'm giving the peppers the full eight weeks though, because they take a while to size up. It's somewhat depressing to realize that it's still a full eight weeks before I'll be planting my warm weather plants out.

I prepared my seed trays, and the first packet of seeds I opened was Chervena Chushka. This is a new pepper for me this year. It's supposed to be prolific and sugar sweet. I thought it would be excellent for salads and relishes, as well as for snacking. I was extremely disappointed to open the packet and find only two seeds. The packet was supposed to have 25, and I needed to plant 12 to fulfill my needs and my friends that had requested this type. I didn't want to mess around with planting two seeds, so I pulled out a 2012 packet of Big Red peppers from Pinetree and planted those instead. I also emailed Seed Savers to let them know my packet was under-filled. I hope they send me a new one; those peppers sounded delicious!

Here's what peppers got planted today:
Big Red (sweet)
Bull Nose Bell (sweet)
Chocolate Beauty (sweet)
Mini Yellow Bell (sweet)
Jalapeno (hot)
Chinese Ornamental (hot)
Joe's Cayenne (hot)

I'm hoping the sweet peppers do well; I've always had hit or miss luck with them. I'm planting 32 pepper plants total, and at least 24 of them will be sweet peppers. I need a lot for roasted tomato sauce, salsa, and relish, and I want to have a lot of chopped peppers in the freezer to use for chili.

I also planted my brussel sprouts today (Long Island Improved).

It's gorgeous outside (compared to our previous weather; today it's in the 40's), so I might try to stake out the hedge garden border. If I can get a shovel in the ground, I'd like to plant my currant bushes tomorrow.