Garden is Looking Good!

 Our garden has really been loving the warmer temperatures we've had the past few days.

The swiss chard is going crazy. We're giving it away in big bunches! We have eaten some, but it is way more than we can keep up with ourselves. Funny, for a crop that we didn't even plant!

The squash is starting to grow big, finally, and the peas are loaded with blossoms!

Tomatoes are hanging in there, but haven't put on much growth yet. Spinach is about done, carrots are getting big enough to harvest soon. 

In my flower box, the bachelor's buttons have lots of buds but haven't started opening up yet. Cosmos are getting big and bushy--I will need to thin them soon. Zinnias are up but haven't put on much growth yet, and same with the dahlias.

Winter squash, looking towards peas and tomatoes.

Tomatoes

A Bit of Last-Minute Canning

 

We decided about a month ago that we weren't going to do any canning this fall. 

Nope, none. No time--especially not with trying to sell our house and pack. 

Just no.

Then we harvested 4 buckets of apples from our apple tree. 

Wormy apples, most of them, but good tasting despite that.

Then before frost hit, we harvested tomatoes galore--bins and bowls and strainers full. Also, 4 buckets of green tomatoes. Plus onions, peppers (sweet and hot), cucumbers.

I just couldn't stand to see all that produce go to waste!

I made some comments about giving it away, but deep down, I didn't want to! My kids had worked so hard on their gardens this year and we were blessed with this abundant harvest. 

I just had to do something with it.

So. We had already packed all of our empty bottles, and some of the canning equipment, like the Vittorio strainer for applesauce. 

Moms to the rescue! I knew my mom still had her Vittorio strainer, and bless her heart, she also had bottles that she just gave to me! 

I had stocked up on lids last year, which was a good thing, since they are very scarce this fall.

So last week we did our homeschool Monday through Wednesday, then we were off to Grandma's Wednesday afternoon.

Thursday was applesauce day! 

It was so fun to can with my mom! It was actually the first time I've been able to do that.

She has a pretty slick setup for canning in her new house, let me tell you.

25 quarts of applesauce, done!

Then Friday we went down to my mother-in-law's to take care of the rest.

She had offered to just do it for us, but we couldn't let her do that.

We came bearing all of our tomatoes, onions, and peppers, several spices, and various other assorted canning things we could round up.

I think we all underestimated the sheer amount of tomatoes we had to process.

She kept pulling bottles out of her garage--by the time all was said and done, we had used up every last bottle on her shelf, except for the extra small half-pint sizes.

We did 28 quarts of regular red salsa on Friday.

Saturday we did 14 quarts + 7 pints of green tomato pickles.

Since we can't even open those for 3 weeks, we won't know how we like them until after the move.

We finished up the day Saturday with 21 pints of salsa verde, also using the green tomatoes.

Phew!

In addition, I have a big batch of barbecue sauce that I need to finish up here at home tomorrow, and get it canned. It was way to vinegary for my taste, but we ran out of bottles, so I didn't finish working on it. We will have to pull a box of pint jars out of storage to put the BBQ sauce into!

It's ironic that we made so much salsa this year, since I haven't made it for several years.

I hadn't found a recipe I liked, so it seemed a waste of time.

I am happy to report we all tried the salsa--both varieties--and liked them.

That's a relief!

So after I can BBQ sauce tomorrow, then I'll really be done. For real, this time.

No, I mean it.

Second wave of packing up starts this week! 

We are a little more than 2 weeks out from moving truck.

Frost Bouquet & Late Fall Chores

 The light frost 2 nights ago was just a warning.

Forecast predicted a hard frost for last night.

It was time to bring in the last of the flowers and veggies.

Making a frost bouquet is easy--you just cut everything you possibly can!

I did not get to all of the cosmos, and I left some things that are a little tougher than most--the salvia and catmint, among others.

The other thing to bring in were the last of the tomatoes and squash.

I was surprised how many little squashes there were.

I've still got one small patch of carrots out there to harvest, but that's about it.

Sure enough, we had a hard frost last night.

The garden's looking pretty withered and sad this morning.

It will be time to start clearing out the vines and plants that are left, now.

As much as I love the vegetable garden, it's always satisfying to me to get it cleared off and "put to bed" come late fall. 

Other late fall chores to do:

** Empty flowerpots and put away in the shed.

Although it's the more expensive route, I always dump all the dirt from the flowerpots into the garden and start fresh the next year. I don't usually add fertilizer to my flowerpots over the summer, so the few times I've re-used the dirt, my plants did not thrive; the soil was too depleted. 

** Put deck chair cushions away in the shed, as well.

My kids have a clubhouse in the top of our shed--they will be delighted to have some nice soft cushions to sit on up there! The trick is catching a long enough break in the weather so that they're all dried out before I put them up there.

** Empty hoses as much as possible and put them away in the shed.

** Blow out sprinkler lines and turn it off (we get someone to come do this for us.)

** Weeding or last transplanting.

Ready, set, go!

Last Week's Harvest + Digging Potatoes

The kids had a half-day of school last week, so we took the time to do some digging!

First, we harvested all the ripe tomatoes, and surprisingly, found a few more cucumbers and squash coming on. We had 3 scattered patches of carrots left--my daughter's, plus 2 in the family garden.

She dug up hers, and I did 1 of the 2 family patches.

We're still enjoying the veggies!

This week has gotten warmer again all of a sudden.

I may have to actually water the garden again this week!

I also harvested some seeds from my poppies in the cutting garden.

Poppy seed-head bouquet!

I love the poppy seed pods. They are beautiful in their own right.

They add some nice visual interest to flower arrangements, too.

These were each like little maracas--when I shook them I could hear the seeds rattling around inside.

I poured them out into a labelled envelope for growing next year.

I would love to have a whole big patch of poppies, of all different colors.

Wouldn't that be fabulous?

I also gathered some of the seed pods from the California poppies.

Saving seeds is fun and easy too!

Maybe I'll do a post on it sometime.

After that, I decided it was time to dig up the potatoes.

This is a lot of fun--in fact, potatoes are some of my favorite things to harvest.

All the above-ground parts of the vines were dead.

It looked like bare ground.

Look what was hiding under there, though!

[The kids have decided bare feet for potato harvest are mandatory.]

It's always so exciting to see those potatoes come up with the shovel!

I didn't get as many as I have some years, but there was still enough to eat for awhile, anyway.

Those teeny-tiny ones are extra good in the crockpot with a roast.

Yum.

There are beets under the potatoes, as well. Not very many, not very big.

Slowly but surely, we're getting the garden cleared out!

It feels good.

Plus, after we were done harvesting the potatoes, my 4-year old got out his trucks and tractors and played in the dirt for 2 hours. Once things are planted, I don't let them step in the garden much at all--they have to stay on the blocks. I guess there's more than one reason to look forward to harvest!

What have you harvested lately?

Have you found any good dirt to play in?

Roasted Garden Tomato Sauce

Okay, I did end up making some of this extra delicious tomato sauce last week, and I even took a few pictures! A cooking blog this is not, but everything looks better with some illustrations, right?

In case you missed the earlier link, I used this recipe from Our Best Bites.

If you click on the link, they've got the printable step-by-step recipe & instructions.

We had all of these tomatoes to use up, plus the 2 bowls-full of the same size from last week.
[These are the rest of the onions. I probably should have pulled them all up a few weeks ago, as some of them were getting eaten by bugs, or something.]

My little 4-year old was my best helper, as big brother and sister were in school.

He especially loved using the kitchen scale to weigh everything.

(The recipe calls for 2 lbs. of tomatoes, but he decided all of the vegetables had to be weighed!)

I have found that this recipe is pretty forgiving.

You blend everything up at the end anyway, so you can totally sneak in some other veggies!

In addition to our tomatoes, both cherry tomatoes and regular, I had 2 yellow squashes that needed to be used up, so I cut up one per batch. My smaller garden onions were perfect--I probably put in 2-3 per pan, and we used up 4-5 of our smaller garden carrots per pan, as well.

After you prep everything: wash, stem, peel, etc., then you just chop everything up, into roughly the same size pieces.

Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt & pepper (as per the recipe), and put it in!

Here's the first pan, all ready to go in oven.

Pretty, isn't it?

 Our top oven is a convection oven.

This was in the convection oven, on 285 degrees F for about 2 1/2 hours.

It's a bit overdone.

The tomatoes are more like dried tomatoes, and you can see the one corner is quite brown and crispy.

That's okay, though! They have great flavor and will go in the blender, anyway.

I did pull out the ones that were completely brown and crunchy, first.

This pan was in the lower oven on 300 degrees F (no convection) for about 2 hours.

This is more what you want.

You can see it's a lot juicier-looking than the first pan.

I combined the entire contents of both pans in my food processor.

I also added 1 cup of beef broth, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tsp of minced garlic (from a bottle), and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Blended it all up.

I did not add any herbs or spices, beyond the salt & pepper prior to baking.

I will add those depending on what I use it for.

It was so delicious, I could eat it with a spoon.

Seriously. Yum!

From this double batch, I ended up with around 6 cups of sauce.

I divided them into 2 quart-size freezer bags, let them cool completely, then put them in the freezer.

This makes wonderful spaghetti or pizza sauce, and it's also really good as a tomato-basil soup, if you add in some cream or milk on the stovetop, and some basil.

As far as using your harvest, this project is comparatively easy and very satisfying.

Basically, the main work is chopping things up.

I hope I'll get enough tomatoes to make at least one more batch before frost!

This Week's Harvest

We've gotten all kinds of veggies from the garden this past week!

I've been harvesting carrots as I need them this year, instead of pulling them all up at once and processing them, like I have in other years.

Garden carrots are the best! They are so sweet.

Pretty much everything from the garden is so much better tasting than store-bought.

It's amazing.

This was quite the haul of cucumbers!

[Sorry about the shadowy picture.]

We've been eating 2-3 per day.

I think if I ever want to can pickles I'll have to plant 2 or 3x the number of cucumbers, because we love eating them fresh!

Check out the huge carrot on the left!

My youngest decided that was the daddy carrot.

He peeled them for me, and arranged them all by height order. :)

I'm excited for all these tomatoes!

We have been putting them on pizza, chopping them up for tacos, and just eating them fresh with a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Yum.

I may have enough now to make a batch of my favorite Roasted Garden Tomato Sauce, from Our Best Bites. I will probably add some squash to the sauce, too. It's the only vegetable I've been struggling to use and keep up with! This recipe has great flavor, and you don't have to skin the tomatoes! Also, it's a smaller batch, so you can do one cookie sheet at a time, as the tomatoes get ripe.

(Canned tomato sauce takes 40 lbs of tomatoes to make 14 pints of sauce, or something crazy like that. I have never made home-canned tomato sauce for that very reason.)

What have you harvested lately?  

Garden Harvest, past 2 weeks

The best thing about August is all the vegetables that start pumping out the produce!

So far, we've just been eating the tomatoes fresh or on sandwiches.

The squash has been a side dish a couple of times now.

Yes, those are blackberries in the bowl at the top.

We have a wild blackberry vine at the very tippy-top of our slope.

We have talked a little bit about how skinny is too skinny to pick cucumbers. :)

I'm excited for all these cucumbers and beans!

I dropped the ball on the beans and didn't get any planted in the empty spaces this year, so we probably will just get enough to eat fresh. That's okay. We'll enjoy them while we have them!

Good thing we really like cucumbers!

We've been eating 1-2 per day. It's awesome.

 * * * * *

What are you harvesting from your garden lately?

Pineapple Sage Jelly

I planted pineapple sage this summer, more just for fun than anything.

The leaves smell and taste like pineapple!

I imagined delicious pineapple-sage lemonade and ...that's about it.

Well, it is doing fantastically well, up here on my top vegetable terrace.

I've got so much of it, unexpectedly, and realized that I have never actually cooked with it.

Or even know what to use it in.

So I started doing a little Google research.

I found some intriguing recipes for things like:

Pineapple Sage Pound Cake

Pineapple Sage Salsa, Corn Fritters, and Smoothies

Plus, many people recommended using it for cooking with chicken and pork.

I considered just drying it, but several sources said that it loses its pineapple flavor when dried.

Then I found Lemon Verbena Lady's recipe for Pineapple Sage Jelly.

It sounded quite intriguing.

So I decided to do some adventure cooking!

Preparing the herbs: chopping them up after washing them.

Partly, this picture is to celebrate the first time using my stick blender's little food processor attachment. Yay!

Here's what I got out of it: 4 half-pints (+ a little extra)

We tried it out the other day.

We put it over cream cheese and had it with crackers.

It was delicious!

Lemon Verbena Lady suggests using it as a glaze, as well.

I think it would be really good as a glaze for baked ham.

Yum.

I was surprised at how many stems it took to come up with 1 1/2 cups packed leaves, but there's still quite a bit up there. I just need to remember I have it, so I can start experimenting with it some more.

Have you done any adventure cooking lately?