Harvest Season

Harvest, 8/26

So....I haven't posted in a little while - BECAUSE I'VE BEEN GARDENING MY TAIL OFF!    And I've even got some other people involved in my capers (ie, fermenting...the final (?) frontier).   More on that later....

So....what happens in the garden (even a postcard-sized urban garden) in August to keep a girl too busy to blog?   Everything. 
  Since last update, I've harvested ten pounds of potatoes, "roasted" three batches of tomatoes in the oven, harvested all the cabbage and set up 3 quarts of fermenting sauerkraut in my kitchen, along with fermenting some dill pickles (which I think are all doing ok!), harvested a few pounds of beans and made them into refrigerator dilly beans, made carrot pickles, onion pickles, bean pickles, Indonesian pickles, eaten muchos cucumbers, a few eggplants, made eggplant/garlic spread, made greek Tzikiki (sp?!) (cucumbers and yogurt), made Indian-style daal with beans, tomatoes, "hot" peppers and tomatoes, watched the peppers start to turn yellow/red and then rot, had some tomato poachers come and pick in our garden, made a bomb-ass tomato sauce, canned seven half-pints of raw tomatoes,  harvested and dried half the onions, made two different kinds of salsa (mango and cucumber), and even harvested like, three squash.  

Long story short, we have more food than we can easily eat, but not enough to justify a huge canning operation, so I've been cooking some, eating some, giving some away, freezing a little, canning a little and using pickling to take up some of the slack.

Whew.  


So, I would love to tell you how to do some/all of this...and report on my experiences....but today I'm trying to go and harvest the potatoes/onions from the community garden before IRENE comes into to town to blow our house down.  (actually, I'm just trying to get them out before they get waterlogged with three inches of rain).


In short, more blogs coming soon on pickling, fermenting, tomatoes, potatoes, onions and tzikiki, but for now, a few pictures.  :)

Garden tomatoes, ready to be "roasted" in 250 degree oven

This is how I cured my onions...on a milkcrate, on my shady porch for 2 weeks.  (funny how after eating the young ones all summer there aren't really that many left to save....)

Proud pickles!  In salt brine w vinegar, garlic and grape leaves...