Today In The Garden - 9/5

There was nothing to harvest in the garden today.  I took some newspaper and covered up the bits of the boxes where I'm not going to be planting anything else this year.  The newspaper should kill the weeds underneath, and help get the spot ready for next spring. 

There's still some lettuce in this bed, both some soft stuff, which I don't really like all that much, and some romaine, which I'm rather fond of.  There are a bunch of beets, too, although they''re still pretty tiny.  I hope that the weather holds out until the beets are a bit bigger.  I really like beets, particularly little, sweet ones.

I've got a lot more tomatoes coming.  There are a lot of green ones, and quite a few starting to turn red.  I'm really happy with the way our trellis system worked this year.  We have the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers planted in a narrow raised bed with a beam about 6 feet up.  The beams were the outline of the garden our first year.  We got some 4' x 8' galvanized repanel (used to reinforce poured concrete) and attached it to the planks on both sides of the raised bed and to the beam at the top.  It's got a 6" x 6" grid, so it's easy to reach in to weed or harvest.  It was seriously cheap and much easier than putting up string to support the crops.  It may be a bit tough to clean off this fall - the beans in particular have wound themselves tightly around the mesh, but I figure that a wire brush ought to clean the stuff off once it's dead and brown. 

It's been a good year in the garden, despite the rather cool weather.  I'm already looking forward to next year.


FT

Tomato Sauce

Hubby won't be home until late tonight, and I've got a bunch of tomatoes that need some attention, so I guess tonight I'll make tomato sauce.  I've got to make it work with the stuff that I have and hope for the best.  That works for me.

I thought I had some fresh garlic, but it was far from fresh.  Do you remember the part of the movie where the mummy disintegrates into dust?  That's what my fresh garlic was like.  I had a jar of garlic with about a teaspoon left in it, but that also has been in the fridge too long.  Rather than resort to powdered garlic, I think that I'll just do the maters and some herbs in the sauce and worry about sauted onion and garlic when I go to use the sauce. 

So here's what I'm doing...

I cut up about 6 pounds of  fresh sauce tomatoes (mine are Romas and Opalkas) into larger bite-sized chunks and out them in my big wok-like fry pan (I don't have a dutch oven at the moment or I'd be using that).  I've turned it on at low heat (about medium-low on my stove) and put the cover on.  I grabbed a handful of basil, thyme, chives and parsley out of the herb garden, crushed it up and threw it in there.

After about a half hour, I took the cover off.  The tomatoes are heated through and getting mooshy, and I want some of the liquid to evaporate.  I cooked it for about 2 1/2 hours, until I had to leave to go pick up hubby.  A good deal of the liquid evaporated, and I've got a pretty chunky sauce. 

It's Saturday morning and I just took the sauce out of the fridge and put it back on the stove.  I'd like a little more of the liquid to evaporate, but I think I'm going to leave it chunky rather than squish it through a seive. 

After an hour on the stove (med-low), it's looking pretty good.  It smells pretty good, too.  I've turned it off so that it can cool down.  I started picking the herbs out.  I didn't chop them up, just scruntched them up and threw them in there.  The thyme leaves all fell off the twigs, so they're still in there.  The chives are rather stringlike and the parsley is just big gobs - looks like of like canned spinach.  Some of the basil will stay in there. 

Once it's cool, I'm going to put it in freezer bags, about 2 cups to a bag.  I wish I had a silicone muffin pan.  Freezing the sauce in that would make it really easy to pull just what I need out of the freezer.  I'll have to try that next time. 

FT

Today in the Garden - Mon 8/31

Only tomatoes today.  I picked the big one I was nervous about.  It weighed just shy of one pound.  A couple of the Romas I picked might not have been ready, but they were sitting on the ground and I didn't want some bug to get to them before I did.

There weren't any beans tonight.  I saw a couple of blossoms, but not many.  I think it's just too cold.  They're not happy, so they're not reproducing.

My peppers are really unhappy.  I just don't seem to do too well with peppers.  Right now I've got 5 pepper plants and 3 peppers, and it looks like that's all I'm going to have.  That's just not right.  Although it does square with my experience with peppers.  The two years prior to this that I planted peppers I got one fruit per plant. 

Next year I'm going to set aside a little pepper bed and coddle the danged things, and see if I can get them to set more than one fruit per plant.  If I can't, that will be the end of peppers in my garden and I'll use the space for something else.  This isn't that big a loss, really.  None of us would really miss them if we didn't have them.  If we got a bumper crop of them we'd end up giving them away, which, while a nice thing to do, doesn't fill up the freezer for the winter.  And that is my goal - to grow enough veg to feed the family year-round. 



FT

Yesterday in the Garden - Saturday, 8/29/09

It's sunny out today, but windy and a bit chilly.  It's 11AM and not yet 60 degrees out.  I didn't spend too long out there weeding this morning.  Bucky the cat came along, as he usually does.  He likes to patrol the garden.  There was a hummingbird in there that wasn't too happy to be sharing the space with us, but he moved on.

I did get some nice stuff out.  Here's today's load.

The cucumbers are really taking off.  There has been a lot of rain recently, I imagined that helped.  I really like the seedless, burpless, soft-skinned nature of these cucumbers.  I don't remember what variety they are - I'm sure the nursery tag is around here somewhere.  They don't have a whole lot of flavor, though.  They're almost too mild.  They miss a bit on the nice, fresh cucumber-y aroma, too.  I think that next year I'll plant some of these and some regular cucumbers, too, and see which I prefer.

The beans are Kentucky Wonder pole beans.  They're slowing down a lot recently.  I think that the cool weather isn't encouraging them to keep setting flowers.  I let the vines get a little too tall.  I'm going to have to get a stool out there to pick the beans or cut off the tops or I'll have some of them getting too mature up there.

Only a couple of tomatoes today, but I got a bunch yesterday.

 I think that I have enough Romas to make some sauce.  And enough cherry tomatoes to make the family happy at Sunday dinner.

I have one big Celebrity tomato that's just about ripe -

He's got to be getting close to a pound.  I  just have to make sure that I get to him before the bugs do. 

From now on, I'm going to start my tomatoes myself instead of buying plants.  This year I started some, but I was inconsistent with the grow lights and they got to be kind of spindly.  I didn't think that they were going to do very well, so I bought some plants, too.  The plants that I started are doing better than those I bought.  Big, fat healthy stems, and they're setting lots of fruit.  Next spring I'll start all my own plants, but I'm going to have a timer on the lights so my seedlings should do better.

FT