Maybe This Is It...

Every time I think we have seen the last harvest of our Summer Garden Guy comes in with a big bowl of stuff. We are still getting tomatoes, mostly the little ones, but a few Golden Delicious and Black Krim, and we actually got 3 Painted Serpent cucumbers - they are really tasty and look so pretty with their two tone green. They reminded us of the swan gourds at Ila and Stuarts!

The Cold Weather Crop Is In

Well, no matter that it's October 16th and 80 degrees here, our winter crop is in the ground and looking good.

Capitalizing on our summer garden learnings we have planted quite a lot more of the things we really love in hopes to be able to both eat and can those items.

The winter crop includes; snow peas, sugar peas, onions, carrots, (from seed) broccoli, (from both seeds and seedlings) brussel sprouts (both green and red) I had no idea there were red brussel sprouts! Spinach, kale (both red and yellow), celery, parsley, and assorted lettuces.

We also planted a few fava beans to see how they would do and a little cauliflower, which is not my favorite but Guy loves it.

We also planted a few acorn squash and pumpkin, from seed, so we will see if those come up, we've had good luck with squash so hopefully it will work.

We were hoping to plant some parsnips and rutabegas but have not seen any of those seedlings available in the area, next year we'll have to get ahead of the game and do those from seed.

Lessons Learned and End of Summer Harvest

Well, it's been too long since I blogged about our garden, I first wanted to share this photo of our end of summer harvest, I think it is beautiful and really defines our garden.

Fresh summer veggies, wonderful herbs, and beautiful fragrant flowers.

What you see pictured are our Zucchini, Machinaw Eggplant, Tomatoes, Mini Watermelon, Butternut Squash, Sweet Basil, and two of our wonderfully fragrant roses in delicious deep summer colors.

Lessons Learned

We loved our tomatoes, all of them, and will plant even more next year, but wait about 4 weeks in between plantings so that we can keep up with all the canning that will be needed to reap the benefits of their prolific production. The pruning of the unproductive tomato branches, those without blossoms, really did work to bring on more tomatoes and give the growing tomatoes more light.

We need many more pepper plants, next year we are planning a pepper patch with 4-6 plants each of several different kinds of peppers. We really did not grow enough peppers to meet our needs this year and so that will be a new strategy for us.

We will plant more Machinaw Eggplant, this Japanese Eggplant was the perfect ingredient all of our Thai dishes, and we eat quite a few, due to its tender skin and quick cooking. An added bonus, it looked so pretty growing in the garden - we will also plant this a little earlier in order to extend the productivity, this year we ended with several off color eggplants on the vine that never made it to full fruit due to weather issues, that is so sad!

Forget about the strawberries, until we have enough land to plant rows and rows and rows of strawberries we cannot seem to get enough berries to pay for the land they are using - next year we will use this land for the peppers.

We will not plant pole beans, they did not grow nearly as well or prolifically as the bush beans, next year it will be bush beans all the way, and we will again plant this in two waves to keep the beans coming all summer and give us additional opportunity for canning.

Fresh Pack Canning

Today was our first day of fresh pack canning. We picked tomatoes on Monday and then again today and ended up with close to 40 pounds of the following varieties, Abraham Lincoln - a large red tomato, Golden Delicious - a juicy yellow tomato of varying sizes, Stupice, a medium red tomato, Black Krim, a juicy deep purple tomato of varying sizes. All are heirlooms and have incredibly rich flavor.

Look at the big smile on Guy's face as he is filling these bowls with tomatoes, we love the harvest, it is worth every bit of effort that goes into the garden up front.

We decided to fresh pack these, we (the royal we because Guy did all of this) simply picked, cleaned and quartered/halved the tomatoes, then packed them tightly into pint jars that were warm, at least 180 degrees, from the oven, thanks for the tip Mom. We packed the tomatoes so tightly as to can them in their own juices, only adding a tablespoon of lemon juice to help with the acidity, and a pinch of salt.

Previously we had canned about 20 lbs of Super San Marzano Roma tomatoes, those we canned with green pepper, garlic and onion to use in all of our Italian sauces/soups come winter.

While the canning is quite a process, and made me very nervous at first, I have found that like most things, if you go slow, read up before hand, ask a lot of questions and follow directions the end result as as you expected if not better.

Now we have in our garage, 18 jars of fresh packed heirloom tomatoes, 7 jars of Italian style chopped tomatoes, 4 jars of basil/garlic tomato sauce.

Now its time to get out into the garden harvest a few more green beans, fertilize the eggplants and start planning the layout for the "Cold Winter Crop". We are thinking, sweet peas, parsnips and turnips, more beets, potatoes, broccoli, brussel sprouts and are looking for additional suggestions!

For Ila

I had to post this picture for my Aunt Ila, she loves tomatoes with feta and balsamic vinaigrette almost as much as I do so I know she will appreciate this photo.

We had a combination of our Heirloom, Golden Delicious, Abraham Lincoln, and Stupice tomatoes in this salad. We cut up a little of our home grown basil, added some feta and balsamic vinaigrette and we had a veritable tomato feast!

Nothing better than homegrown tomatoes!

Just budding out...

We have seen for the first time now the Machinaw and Casper eggplants we put in the ground more than 3 months ago, little tiny fruit, no bigger than 1.5 inches have appeared - very exciting. The Machinaw is a from of Japanese eggplant so it will be great in our Thai Curry and other Asian cooking dishes. The Casper, yes so named because it is a white eggplant, is supposed to have a thinner skin than the traditional Italian Eggplant and we hope to be able to slice bread and bake/fry that for various Italian dishes.

Equally exciting is the appearance of little itty bitty melons, really no bigger than a large jaw breaker at this point and so cute!

Things continue to move along out in the garden, we have one mystery squash, I'll have to post a picture of it and see if anyone out there knows what it is, I'll do that next week.

Blake and Kendra, Living Garden Gnomes

We had a lot of fun last week in the garden.

Our seven year old twin niece and nephew stayed with us for a few days last week and couldn't wait to get out in the garden and pick some strawberries and vegetables.

Of course they only ate the strawberries, but they enjoyed picking everything.

The tomatoes are really coming on now, I think it has something to do with the fact that our temps have hovered between 90 and 105 for the last two weeks!   I've been able to share tomatoes with friends and family and think that by the first part of next week I will once again break out the pressure canner and can some tomatoes, the Super San Marzano, an heirloom Roma tomato will be perfect for diced tomatoes and marinara sauce.

Our yellow beans have been a little tough and leathery in the latest harvests and I am wondering if it is time to call it a day with those and plant something new in their place.  Has anyone else had this experience?  The green beans continue to be tender and yummy!     

We are still seeing as much zucchini as we can handle, and one of the gnomes picked our first crook neck squash of the season, more to come I am sure.

We have watered the garden every day, and on days that hit 105 or better twice a day!  I think it is working as we have not yet lost any plants in this heat wave.

The corn continues to grow well, looks like we will see at least two ears per stalk, yay us!       We can't wait to sink our pearly whites into those pearly whites!