Harvest Monday - 30 August 2010

The harvest this week was small. And it was a singular harvest. Most of the beginning of the week as cold and wet. Nothing was growing much except the fall seeds that sprouted. The rain stopped on Wednesday, but I waited until Friday to harvest. I was hoping waiting a day would make the cherry tomatoes not burst open when I picked them. I'm not sure it helped much. I lost about half the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes and all of the Principe Borghese tomatoes. The Gabrielle Ann did fine. I lost a few here and there, but overall most of them stayed intact.

So my harvest was small this week - barely over 10lbs. However I continued to can tomatoes from the week before. I made one pint of tomato juice and about four pints of tomato sauce. I put most of it into smaller jars, one cup and 1/2 cup jars, because then I will have whatever size a recipe calls for.

• Beans 0.09 lbs
• Cucurbits 1.63 lbs
• Pepper 0.26
  
• Tomato 8.44 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 10.43 lbs
  
• Total for the year 215.05 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $603.00
  

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

The Pieces Coming Together

My new kitchen is so unlike the old one. The old one had no counter space to speak of but had lots of storage space since it had a pantry right in the kitchen. A big walk in pantry with shelves on three sides and pegboard for the pots on the fourth. I so loved my pantry.

Fast forward to today. My new kitchen has more counter space than both my last two kitchens combined. It is a fabulous place to entertain as there is a huge granite counter to put a buffet or snacks on. But sadly it lacks storage space. I didn't want the cabinets hung from the ceiling which would close in the space. The whole bottom floor is open and I wanted to keep the open feeling. But where oh where to put all my jars?

On Wednesday I finally got my storage space. The kitchen area is very close to the basement stairs. So we had shelves built going down the stairs. They work out perfectly for food storage. Many of them are made to be just the height for pint canning jars and they fit two jars deep.

Bottom five shelves

Top four shelves

All shelves

On the other side we put in some hooks for whatever. Whatever right now happens to be some of my garlic, some of my onions, some store bought onions, and my grocery bags. You see the store bought onions? Have you ever picked out your vegetables based on what container they come in? I saw this nice mesh bag and thought how nice it would be to reuse if I ever got onions of my own big enough to go into it.

It is so nice to have all my canning jars off the floor of the dining room. Well most of them. The empty ones are still there. But that wasn't all that happened that day. We also got our office furniture delivered. It was a really happy day for me. It let me unpack all those office boxes which were also sitting on the dining room floor.

The furniture was custom made locally by Cherrystones. They did a wonderful job. And if you notice out the window, you can see my garden from here. I love looking out everyday and seeing the tomatoes and marigolds.

But the excitement never stops. Yesterday the landscapers came. Whoohoo! We are finally going to have a yard. You know with real dirt and not just subsoil and weeds. I'll have paths. The townhouse mates will have a hot tub on their side and I'll have a vegetable garden on mine. Well at some point we will have all this. They say it will take four weeks to finish. I'll have a future post on this as I got permission from our landscape designer to put the plans up. I was wondering if I would ever get my house together, but slowly but surely the pieces are falling into place.

Rain, Glorious Rain

Market Miracle after the rain

For the last four days we have had rain. Not heavy pouring rain, but drizzle and gentle rain. We only got just under 2". I wish we had gotten more. We haven't had a really good rain for more than a month. Hot and dry has been our summer fare. These last days however have been in the 60Fs (15C-20C).

The days of rain weren't in the forecast in advance. One day yes, but not the multiple days with cool weather. But I lucked out. I planted some fall crops right before it started. The lettuce, radishes, and turnips were planted a few days before it started and I put cardboard on them to try to keep in the moisture. Sad, but it worked. The plants under the cardboard germinated well, the ones that weren't didn't germinate until the weather turned.

The second planting was on Sunday morning right when this all started. I pulled out 5 of my dying tomatoes (Heinz which had finished producing already, Opalka and the three Chinese heirlooms). Now I have 5 really healthy ones (GabrielleAnn, Cherokee Purple who is trying to take over the world, San Marzano, Amish Paste who is running a close second to taking over the world, and Market Miracle), one unhealthy one that won't stop producing (Chocolate Cherry), and one OK one (Principe Borghese). In addition the peppers and marigolds in front of the three Chinese heirlooms were taken out as that 6' long section was to be my planting area.

German Beir Radish from Jody

Once the tomatoes were out I watered the little bit of soil for half an hour to try to get it wet enough to plant. The soil just soaked it up and asked for more. I couldn't believe how dry it was. This morning when I went out this planting was up. It is filled with brassicas: Fun Jen, Tatsoi, two kinds of bok choy, and Chinese broccoli. Once it dries out a bit this morning I'm going to go out and put a row cover on that section.

I'll have to keep them well watered. The forecast is for dry weather again and on Sunday the 90F s (32C+) hit again. Drat. I was hoping we would stay in the high 70Fs and low 80Fs for a while. I much prefer the pleasant weather.

I still have no space to put in some overwintering spinach. But I think that will go in later once the rest of the tomatoes are pulled. If summer ever ends. I suppose if it never ends, I'll just keep getting Cherokee Purple tomatoes. It just keeps growing. It has taken over the top portion of the Heinz's old cage. I couldn't take the cage out because of it. And it is starting to take over the San Marzano cage. San Marzano just can't compete with the vigor of Cherokee Purple. I swear that Cherokee Purple plant has world domination on its mind.

Harvest Monday - 23 August 2019

Tuesday's Harvest

More Tuesday's Harvest

Thursday's Harvest (18lbs of tomatoes)

More Thursday's Harvest

Thursday's Basil

Sunday's Harvest

More Sunday's Harvest

As you can see I had a bumper tomato crop again this week. I came within a few ounces of beating my weekly harvest record. I pulled out four of my tomato plants and picked any of the green tomatoes that had any chance at all of ripening. I didn't add them into the harvest totals. I'll weigh them if and when they turn ripe.

And I finally went over 100lbs of tomatoes for the year. And 200lbs of produce. Whoohoo! Last year's harvest was just over 70lbs of tomatoes and I have six healthy plants still left with tons of tomatoes still on them, one doing OK, and one trying to die, but I can't pull it up since it keeps putting out so many yummy tomatoes. This is surely the banner year for tomatoes in New England. I don't remember ever having such a good year. (My apologies to the west coast. I know how you feel since we went through that last year).

On the preserving front this week I've canned 26 pints of various salsas, tomato sauce, and tomato juice.

• Beans 0.39 lbs
• Cucurbits 5.55 lbs
• Herbs 1.11 lbs
• Greens 1.11 lbs
  
• Pepper 1.71
  
• Tomatillo 4.59 lbs
• Tomato 34.04 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 48.49 lbs
  
• Total for the year 204.63 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $564.45
  

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Spicy

Well on Tuesday I picked 18lbs of tomatoes. It is no where near Granny's 80lbs, but for me I'm happy enough not to have to deal with processing 80lbs of tomatoes. In addition I pulled out and harvested my tomatillos so I had a lot of those. I wanted to wait until it got cooler on the weekend, but some of the tomatoes were getting soft as where some of the older tomatillos. So it was salsa time.

It took all day to process both kinds of salsa. I love how the tomatillos get sudsy when they are washed, though I hate their sticky texture. They are so easy to make salsa with as I just chop them up in the food processor. The only hard part about that salsa is peeling a million tomatillos. Well chopping up all the onions and peppers is time consuming too. The onions were store bought, but the peppers were harvested this week from the garden. I used a lot of serranos to make the salsas spicier.

Tomato salsa is harder than the tomatillo salsa as I have to peel and squeeze out all the guts. Though there is an advantage to this. I use the guts to make tomato juice. I let all the guts sit in a strainer while I'm doing the rest and they drain right out. I only had a three jars of tomato juice as I mostly used paste tomatoes and they have very little guts and juice. And I made a nasty mistake with them. I forgot to add the citric acid. Tomatoes aren't acidic enough to can plain. The salsa recipes have lime juice and vinegar to make them acidic enough, but not the tomato juice. So this morning I was up and reprocessing those three jars again. Usually I'm really careful to make sure the right amount gets into the jars, but since I was doing salsa I wasn't thinking about it.

Yesterday's bounty: 8 pints of Annie's Salsa, 7 pints of Salsa Verde, and 3 pints of tomato juice. I used one and a half cases of my pint jars. I will need to buy more before the main apple season hits or I won't have enough for applesauce. And while I'm at it I really need some more half pint jars. I wouldn't mind a few smaller cans of tomato sauce. Hmm and I need an ice tray. I used to use the ones from my old fridge, but my new one has an ice maker. I often freeze some small batches of tomato sauce for even smaller uses. You never know when you need just a couple of tablespoons and I hate opening a big jar just for a little bit.

Now I think I'll take the weekend off from processing tomatoes. My counter is almost empty. If only I could keep myself away from the tomato plants for a couple of days I can keep it that way. But the odds are slim.

Start of the Fall Garden

I won't have much of a fall garden this year, but I wanted something. Since there was no space available, I decided to make some. The tomatillos were starting to yellow and I had plenty of the little fruits to make more than enough salsa verde for the year. So out they came.

Basil Roots

I also pulled all but two of my parsley plants and one of my basil plants. I have enough preserved for the year. I just need some for fresh eating and those ought to be enough. I'm throwing out more basil than I'm using right now. The basil has been amazing this year. Those stems you see are close to 3/4" wide. Their roots went a couple of feet out into the bed and through the chard. I'm guessing the chard will be happier now that they are gone.

Still in the bed from left to right: basil, chard, parsley, bunching onions

I had gotten my seeds out from the fridge, but forgot to get the lettuce seeds, so right now they are getting to room temperature while all the rest are planted. In the back I planted a row of dwarf curly kale. Then some Tokyo turnips (from Mac) and some Oasis turnips. The next row was for radishes. The Munich Bier radishes (from Jody) got one side of the row and the French Breakfast (from Jane) got the other. The next two rows will be Red Sails and Deer Tongue in the front as soon as I can open my seed container.

The weather has been very hot and dry up here. I wish I could have some of last year's rain right about now. It took forever to get the soil moist enough to plant in. I figured the poor seeds needed a head start so I put some cardboard over most of it. I hope that is enough to keep it at least a bit cool and moist.

The radishes and turnips are a trial. They may not work out. In my old garden I needed a row cover over them to get them to bulb up. I'm not putting one over them right now so it is a gamble. But this garden has different insects than the last one. So maybe I'll be OK. I'll never know unless I try.

Saucy

Monday I was busy making sauce. Yes Monday. I get behind sometimes. It isn't just my tomatoes that I get behind on. Sometimes my blog just doesn't make it on the high priority checklist. Especially after Monday. Harvest Monday takes a lot of time to go through all those posts you put up. It is fun but time consuming. But anyway I digress.

Sauce is so much easier to make than salsa. Salsa I have to boil the tomatoes for a minute or two so I can peel off all the skins. Then I have to get rid of all the tomato guts and cut out any cores or cracks. But sauce is easy. I just quarter the tomatoes and squeeze out the worse of the insides. I don't do a great job and it takes just a few seconds. Then I toss them all in a pot and let them boil for about 2 minutes (just themselves, no water). Then into the Victorio strainer they go. It still takes time, but comparatively it is very fast. And easier on the back than sitting at the table getting out all the tomato guts. I so love my strainer. Too bad I can't make salsa that way.

Sadly I had eight jars that needed processing. My canner takes seven pint jars. So I had to process twice. By the end of that time the house was so hot an humid. I had all the windows opened.

But here they are. Seven pints of sauce and one of tomato juice. And extra in the fridge that I'll probably use to make more salsa later. I had an empty kitchen counter - for about half a day.

Harvest Monday - 15 August 2019

Monday's Harvest

Tuesday's Harvest

Wednesday's Harvest

Thursday and Friday I was in Waterloo with my daughter dropping her off at school. So I have no harvests those days. When I got back on Saturday I had a huge harvest. I took a photo of it, but sadly the flash card wasn't in the camera. I really need a camera that won't let me take a photo without the card as half the time the card is in my computer.

The harvest that day was much like Wednesday's harvest, but it had more of everything and featured Big Chili II peppers.

So instead I took a photo of my kitchen counter this morning. I think I have to deal the the tomatoes today so I can reclaim my work space.

• Beans 0.33 lbs
• Cucurbits 4.56 lbs
• Herbs 0.74 lbs
  
• Pepper 0.65
  
• Tomatillo 2.89 lbs
• Tomato 30.23 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 39.41 lbs
  
• Total for the year 156.14 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally 366.05
  

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Walking Through the Garden

Well walking "through" the garden might be a bit wrong. The gardens is along the driveway, so I walk on the driveway showing you various photos along the way. It is a long and thin garden.

The first section is in front of my neighbors tomato plants. The basil you see on the left hand side was cut halfway back at the end of last week. Not that you can tell right now. They love it here. This area would make a great little herb garden section. The chard is behind the basil and not easy to see in this photo. The parsley was chopped to the ground yesterday so you can't see it at all.

The tomatillos are so strange. The normal one is on the right and half the height of my big one. I love the big one. It is so much more productive than the little one and easier to peel too. I've saved some seed from it. I hope it didn't cross with the other one, but has just its own genetics. Whatever weird sport it is, I want to keep it.

Between the two fence gates are my cherry tomatoes. EmmaAnn used to grow in the middle but was pulled early on as she was too diseased and couldn't keep up with the others. The Chocolate Cherry on the left is dying. Strangely he has some branches that are growing along the driveway on the ground and they are doing just fine. GabrielleAnn is the monster on the right. She really is taking over the world. If I had a cage ten feet tall she would be taller than it. Right now she just flops down and loops back up. And she is making her way over to the top of the Chocolate Cherry cage. She has a leaf or two that has issues, but mostly she is very healthy. Go Gabby.

The next section is the main tomato area. I have so many plants shoved into this spot. The bed is only 2 1/2' deep. And there are tomatoes along the back and peppers and marigolds growing in front of them. With the crowding and the fence along the back, I'm pretty happy that we had a dry year. This would be bad if we had a bad tomato disease year. The marigolds are ground control marigolds. They like to grow up, but I push the branches to the front so they don't shade the peppers and tomatoes too much. They can handle just about anything even having their branches half broken off by my treatment.

The top section of the garden is about 6" taller than the lower section. It gives the plants a taller planting bed, but it gets morning shade from the maple tree nearby. The above photo is the sunniest part of this section. It has two determinate tomatoes (that would be 6' tall if they weren't flopping over due to cages too small for them). Behind the tomatoes are my Kentucky Wonder beans that give me about 6oz of beans every week. Just enough for one. Then comes the eight cucumber plants. They are diseased and the disease spreads, but the cucumber plants put out nice new foliage faster than the disease can kill. So they are doing great. Go cukes!

The back section of this garden has a lot more shade. It has my dried beans and my squash. Despite the shadiness, the butternut squash has been pumping out babies like there is no tomorrow. Sadly the groundhog has eaten most of them. I have one squash left that he hasn't found. I've covered the area in bird netting as I've found lots of rodents hate it. They get it caught in their feet. So I'm hoping the groundhog will be deterred, but honestly I'm not hopeful. He ate one small squash protected this way yesterday. I need EG to come take care of my problem.

Protected squash

Squash almost all eaten by the groundhog

That is not the only squash issue I've been having. My zucchini blossoms have been attacked by ants. I've never seen this issue at my old house. They eat out the bottom of the blossom and the flowers aren't setting. I can pick them small right when the blossoms close up, but they aren't setting big ones anymore. It also means I can't pick squash blossoms anymore as the ants infest them before they open.

Dehydrating

I've been doing more than canning to preserve the harvest this week. I've been busy dehydrating. For the last couple of days I've been working on my Principe Borghese tomatoes. My other cherry tomatoes finally decided to start tasting sweeter so now these ones can fulfill their true destiny as a dried tomato. I've never dried tomatoes before. I'm a bit iffy on when I should stop. I figure very dry means they keep better, but they are probably better to use if they are the consistency of fruit leather. This batch I dried pretty well. Next one will be dried not as much. It is always fun to play around with things to see how they work.

The funny thing about "sun" dried tomatoes is that I've never in my life bought them. So I've never used them. But I figure they will make great pasta salads in the winter. I'll have to explore how to use them more.

This morning I mowed my parsley down to the ground. I had four plants and got a huge pile of leaves.

They are in the dehydrator drying away. I'm hoping they will be done by tonight. I don't like to leave them going overnight as they can get too dry and hot without me watching. Some year I'll buy a really good dehydrator.

Pickles and Relish

As the produce threatens to take over my counter and refrigerator yet again, I decided it was time to do some more preserving. I hate when my produce rots before I can get to it. I took the weekend off from canning because I needed a break from it, but Monday afternoon I was ready again.

The first on the list was the pile of cucumbers in the fridge. I used Pat's Zucchini Relish recipe that Granny posted with cucumbers instead of zucchini. I doubled the recipe. It still didn't do much to take down the number of cucumbers. But I was on to sauce. I made some tomato sauce and some tomato juice.

With some juice that I didn't can, I made a great discovery. My fresh tomato juice makes a much better Bloody Mary than the tomato juice from the store. I couldn't find the regular vodka (probably lost in the basement somewhere after the move) but citron vodka is a great twist to the regular one. I didn't drink this until the evening though, after I was done with the canning.

Then today I finished off the cucumbers by making a big batch of refrigerator pickles. Sadly later that day I went out and found I had yet more to pick. It is never ending in August. Especially with the weather being so good.

Those weren't the only refrigerator pickles either. I made some from the jalapenos I picked last week. Last year I found I liked using them from the pickle jar instead of from the freezer. So this year I'll pickle quite a few and only freeze a little. The Sweet Cherry Peppers have been ripening. I'm making sweet pickled peppers with them. I'll chop them and use them on sandwiches. Yum. They only come out in ones or twos from the garden so refrigerator pickles are the way to go for them.

Then the zucchini got grated for winter bread and soup. I still have some beans to cook up and some chard to blanch and freeze, but I cleaned out the fridge a bit at least. Until the next time I venture into the garden.

Harvest Monday - 9 August 2019

What a harvest week. I have my biggest weekly harvest ever recorded (though this is only the second year I've been keeping track) and my garden this year is smaller than it has been in the past. The reason is of course the weather. It has been spectacular for warm weather crops. Usually in New England our warm weather crops struggle, but not this year. This year they are going crazy.

Dried Beans

Shelled: Red Kidney, Ottawa Cranberry, Black Coco. So far the harvest hasn't been all that good for dried beans. And the Ottawa Cranberries are about half the size as the ones I grew last year. The beans are in the shadier part of the rock wall garden. There is a maple tree that hangs over some of them. Hopefully they will be more prolific in the future. So far all the Black Cocos have been picked, but not all of the Kidney or Cranberry beans.

Others picked last Monday are cherry tomatoes

And the larger tomatoes and tomatillos

Tuesday's basket is mostly tomatillos that were canned as Salsa Verde

Wednesday featured a lot of tomatoes

Thursday I picked a lot of peppers for salsa

Saturday I had to cut back my basil as it wanted to flower (also Chard)

Saturday's tomato bounty

On Friday I showed you that I cleared off my table after making salsa. Now it is worse than it was before. I'll have to can again sometime this week. Maybe it will just be tomato sauce as it is a lot less work than salsa. I do need more salsa though.

• Beans 0.79 lbs
• Cucurbits 5.51 lbs
• Greens 1.22 lbs
• Herbs 1.22 lbs
  
• Pepper 1.73
  
• Tomatillo 7.73 lbs
• Tomato 30.38 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 48.56 lbs
  
• Total for the year 116.73 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally 209.35
  

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Losing It

I've been losing the battle with my counter. I do love the new counter. It is huge compared to my old one. But my husband tells me if there is a horizontal surface I will find a way to cover it. It was slowly being taken over by mostly solanums with a few alliums and legumes thrown in for good measure.

Yesterday I dealt with the huge poundage of tomatillos. Today I tackled the tomatoes. This time red salsa. Or more precisely Annie's Salsa (not Granny's dog mind you, but a different Annie). I'd never made it before. It gets rave reviews, but occasionally someone doesn't like it. I liked it quite well. Yum. It took forever to make, just like the Salsa Verde yesterday. Sadly even with that pile of tomatoes I didn't have enough for a full recipe. I did 3/4 of it. The paste isn't mine, but I did make the sauce to add in. And I ignored the sweet peppers and made them all jalapenos and serranos. My jalapenos are almost sweet. I wish the serranos had punched up the heat a bit more, but sadly the finished product is a bit too mild. I think if I mixed it with Granny's last batch, I'd have perfection.

I had a lot of kinds of tomatoes in this salsa. I'm really trying to find the best canning tomato for me. Well I found a clear winner in the taste category. Heinz 2653. But I'll go down all the tomatoes. And no photos. I peeled them all before I even thought of it.

First I have three Chinese heirlooms that I'm growing - two of which have ripe tomatoes, Early Kus Ali and Hong Yuen. They all say they are good all around tomatoes and make great canners and great sauce. Well I beg to differ. The taste is fine, but not spectacular. They do not hold up to saucing. The typical way to make sauce (or tomatoes for salsa) is to put them in boiling water for a couple of minutes then peal them and take out their guts (seeds and gel). These tomatoes don't have a thick skin. They have a very thin skin and lots of gel. They are definitely not saucing tomatoes. Hong Yuen is a good canner for a whole tomatoes. The tomatoes are relatively small and they are so cute skinned. If I hadn't needed every bit of tomato I could muster I would have canned them whole.

Then I had a handful of real paste tomatoes, San Marzano, Opalka, Amish Paste, and Heinz. San Marzano and Opalka were fairly similar. Their taste was OK, but not great. They were dry as paste tomatoes should be. They both had a similar shape which was elongated and thinner on top. Amish Paste stood out as a good fresh eating tomatoes. It can't hold a candle to something like Cherokee Purple but very good. It had more gel than the other paste tomatoes which could have been the reason. The gel holds a lot of the flavor for fresh eating tomatoes. Amish paste is a slightly elongated tomato with a point at the tip and a decent size for paste tomatoes.

Then came Heinz. It was in a class by itself. The tomatoes were a bit smaller than the other, but it was dry. It didn't taste sweet but had a very full rich acidic flavor to it. It is by no means an fresh eating tomatoes. It is not sweet enough for that and has no juice. But as a paste tomato it far outclassed the others in the pack. It is an early determinate, but doesn't seem to be holding up well to the diseases of the area. It could just be because of the heat. It is supposed to be a good tomato for cooler weather, which means good for our usual years.

I had two others that I used - Market Miracle and Cherokee Purple. It is kind of a shame to put Cherokee Purple into a sauce as it is so good for eating fresh, but I needed every tomato I could get. It takes the prize this year on fresh eating flavor and beauty. Market Miracle wasn't quite as tasty as it was last year. I think it shines more as a cool weather tomato than a hot weather tomato. Also last year it wasn't in the shade of a freakishly tall determinate.

Two tomatoes have been left out of this taste/use test. Romeo is maybe the largest paste tomato you can grow. I guess that makes it easy to process. It is a bit later. It is also the weirdest tomato I have. Its vines are very bendy. They don't like to go up. If it could crawl on the ground it would be happy. Also it doesn't put out a great deal of thick foliage like most tomatoes. It is scraggly. In addition some tomatoes are shaped differently. Some are plum shaped some more oxheart like Amish Paste is. The other is Peiping Chieh. It is the other Chinese heirloom and hasn't gotten ripe yet. I hope the wait is worth it.

And after I was done clearing off a good amount of space on the counter, I made the mistake of going outside to chase a squirrel away from the tomatoes. I saw six tomatoes knocked off on the ground. So now the counter incursion is starting again.