How to actually process tomatoes!

I'm re-posting the link to my friend Janelle's blog, where she actually tells you in some detail how to do the things I airily whisked onto my blog, not giving y'all the hint that I spent hours trying to figure out how exactly to (safely) dry, roast, freeze, puree and can tomato products.   It's definitely a learned art, and Janelle gives good directions.  (also bomb-ass pictures).

http://creativehomesteading.blogspot.com/2010/08/tomatoes.html

My only note of caution about preserving is to always follow a recipe and to never, ever try to preserve something in oil.   I had one book tell me to let my dried tomatoes sit in olive oil, to make "a delightful sauce for soups and salads".   I thought, ok, added garlic and it quickly turned moldy, thank goodness, because that turns out to be a fairly perfect botulism environment.   Vinegar kills just about everything it touches, and is safe (thus we have pickles, catchup, mustard and mayonaise), but if you want to make a flavored olive oil, I'd use it within a few days and store it in the fridge.   For the dried tomatoes, they might be acidic enough to be all right, possibly add some vinegar to the mix and nothing else,  but I'm still leery.   

More on canning soon - hopefully with pictures!

Preserving and Perservering

Beans

Well, it's August, and you know what that means: full on harvest time.  Yes, there are still many chores to be done, but I feel like in August the bulk of the work shifts to inside the house - what to do with the tons of produce we get.   This year we got a CHEST FREEZER, and so instead of having to stand over a hot canning bath if I want to keep something, I can just pop a lot of stuff in the Freezer.  Like those beans.  Cool.

And, in this garden, you win some, you lose some.  I think I got 1.5 beets, after all that fussing over them.  I (fingers crossed) will have 1 really nice canteloupe.   And the squash bit it, hardcore.   In general, my plants seem to be able to fight off most bugs that attack their leaves.   But we got squash vine borers, that get the part of the plant that goes into the ground, and pretty much finishes them off.   So no squash.

But we are pulling in 5-15 tomatoes a week, including some heirlooms, 3-4 cucumbers, and maybe 20-30 new beans every time I look outside.   The onions, potatoes and garlic are in, so I can cook with those, and the eggplants are producing on schedule.   Peppers - well, lots of green, we are holding out for red.   And I'm trying to coddle some late-summer lettuce, bok-choi and peas - so, in general, I'm feeling pretty well fed.

The food goes into stir-fries, pesto, tomato sauce and salad.   I also got ambitious with the tomatoes and beans:   The umpteen beans got turned into a sort of bean-based pesto type dip, that is really delicious, and frozen for future parties.  (Babs Kingsolver calls it "frijole mole" - most people seem to think it's: strange but good)
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/Frijole-Mole.pdf

Into the freezer can now go pesto, bean dip, tomato puree, roasted tomatoes, and whole beans.   I'll get to canning and pickling in a week or two, when it's a little colder.

And with the tomatoes, I"m trying it all.   I've peeled, cored and seeded plenty of my over-healthy romas to make from-scratch sauce, run them through my roma-3000 (or whatever it's called) to freeze the puree, and even bought extras to put away. - well, I bought about $10 of almost-ripe heirlooms at the farmers market to try preserving.   As per my book (The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food, by Janet Chadwick), I sliced the tomatoes up thin and left them in Dawn's food dehydrator until they became, and I quote, "leathery" and put them on my shelf, and also roasted a bunch at 225 degrees, with olive oil, to freeze (note to self: 6 hours waaaaay too long for thin sliced tomatoes to roast - anyone want burnt-up tomato chips?).

So, to all my friends who have cooked with me, and to Dawn who has suffered the effects of my vegetable mania ("OK, so I'll cook the carrots and the beets together, the beans on their own, we'll mash the potatoes, oh yeah and the corn, and what about a salad....?"), thanks for the help.    I'm excited for the cooler weather and some canning, because who doesn't feel good with jars and jars of home-grown food on their shelf?

Sunday in the garden + potato salad recipe

I spent this Sunday afternoon  as I've done for the past couple of weeks: in the garden.   There's lots of other stuff I should be doing on Sundays - writing, grocery shopping, paying bills or getting my car fixed.  Looking for work in the fall.   But there's something truly seductive for me about the backyard on a quiet weekend afternoon.   It's at the point right now where the garden needs a few hours of work a week, and then it will be more or less happy.   But its just a wonderful thing to do, on a day to myself, to give attention back to the plants that will feed me.  Last week I fertilized the nightshades, peppers, and vines, and planted about nine more feet of carrots to come up this fall.   Even out in the hot sun, I love puttering out there: stringing up cucumbers that are trying to grow upside-down, pulling crabgrass out of the beds, checking the tomatoes to find out that we have FIVE new super-ripe Roma tomatoes.    Deciding to cook them up into sauce, and invite a friend over for potato salad.  Pulling up a few big, bulbed out onions, tiny beets, yanking out a few purple carrots that after 2 1/2 months are finally big enough to eat.   Emptying out a couple potato buckets to find out how they did, pinching suckers off the tomato vines, harvesting basil or sorrell, or transplanting teensy, tiny little lettuce plants from the shady part of the yard.   After a week full of work and driving around, errands and deadlines, it's nice to slow down for a few hours, exist in greenspace, and tend to something - All this week, I'll know that my garden will grow healthier, and more food will be ready because of the work I put into it.  

Upstairs, I cooked the onions under low heat, skinned and seeded the tomatoes, and stewed them together for a little bit of sauce, along with salt, pepper and some basil.  Ate it for lunch over raviolis - without any extra sugar, the tomato sauce was a little acidic, but full of flavor.   Potato salad tonight was a little bit more complicated, but the basic idea is fresh, boiled potatoes, oil, vinegar, a little bit of mayo, and anything fresh from your garden you want to add....

Hot Summer Harvest time

So after much too much time away, and several technical difficulties (many of these pictures were taken with the tiny camera on my Blackberry, thank you very much), I am back, and better than ever.

Last week, with temps in the 90s, rendered me completely incapable of caring about anything that wasn't air conditioned.  I guess that's why I'm a gardener and not a farmer, huh.   But a short visit with my friends at First Root Farm, for a writing-and-gardening workshop (what could be better?!) re-energized me, and I've been working my butt off in the garden, trying to catch up.  I got rid of the spring veggies - harvested the bok choi, cut down the last of the somewhat dead peas, and general clean-up.   Into every generation, they say, a Weeder is born, chosen to fight the crabgrass, the clover, and the lamb's-quarters that threaten the garden.   And right about now, I think that might be me.

A note on the farm - it's two friends of mine who founded an acre farm and CSA on a national historic park in Concord, MA - really inspiring and lovely - they welcome community helpers, and sell some kick-ass organic eggs, so check them out if you are into local farms.  http://firstrootfarm.wordpress.com/.




Other tasks: stringing up the tomatoes and cucumbers, more weeding, transplanting some underperforming cukes, and some squash that really randomly got into my columnar apple trees, more weeding, and HARVESTING!  The garden is just big and fertile right now, and a lot of herbs have gone to seed (note the gigantic dill), and they are all buzzing with parasitic wasps and flies, and other beneficial insects that help protect the cucumbers and beans.  The bean teepee has just started, and I'm pulling up a few (purple!) carrots, teensy beets, the garlic, an eggplant, a first zucchini, and the first round of potatoes!

I'm "curing" the onions in the basement, which basically means I set them on some old upturned pots and let a fan blow on them for a few weeks.  After that, they should be ready to store for as long as it takes us to eat them.   They say to harvest garlic when 1/3 to 40% of the leaves have turned brown.  Then wait for a dry day and gently dig them up with a shovel...or wait until they look entirely dead, like I did, and pull them up by their roots, which I also did.

Garlic!

For the potatoes, it's always a bit of an oddessy - most of mine are ready after 60-80 days, but I plant them so early, and then it takes weeks for them to sprout, so I never know when to start counting. Once they flower, you should be able to harvest baby potatoes after about two weeks.   My roommate, from Northern Maine potato country, said to start harvesting them when the stalks start looking a little dead and flopping over, and mine were starting to do that, so I dug them up.

In the beginning, potatoes in pots.   Then, two months later, the pots got filled with dirt, the vines grew, flowered, and pretty much died.   But never fear, it's time for harvest!           

I love the way red potatoes look in the dirt.  It's like finding Easter eggs when you start to dig.  I stuck a shovel into the dirt under the plants, then started using a digging fork. I dug them up very carefully, but still speared a few with my fork - ate those last night!    The rest can get stored in my dark-but-air-circulating onion cabinet in the basement all summer and into the winter..if they make it that long.   We plan to eat these right quick.   These are a  "red thumb" variety of fingerling potato - they are not just red outside, but threaded with pink color inside - really beautiful and delicious.  These are the soft and creamy potatoes I was talking about.   The whiskey barrel did better than any other kind of growing - I was just rooting around the bottom for about fifteen minutes, pulling up more and more potatoes.   Good to know for next year. 

More pictures soon, but I'll leave you with one of my least favorite garden pests....they haven't been too bad this year, but in a rainy year they can get out of control - until I pour Sluggo on them (it's organic, don't worry) and then they just go away, poof!   Maybe some day I will have ducks to eat them in a very circle-of-life like manner, but for now, I loves me some Sluggo.

This sucker is seriously three inches long.

Escape!   Escape!  

(he didn't, don't worry)

(splat, bye bye sluggie!)

Strawberries, Late June Thai-style stir fry and one tough flower garden

It's been ten days since my last post, and there are plenty of updates.

1) Strawberry season has flown by - Dawn and I went strawberry picking at Land Sakes farm in Weston to get a couple of quarts of the extra-sweet June-bearing strawberries for jam. We pretty much ate all of our fruit as soon as it came in, and so we bought a few quarts at the you-pick-it operation. Land Sakes isn't certified organic, but it used to be, and they say they haven't changed their practices since they stopped getting certified. I wanted to find somewhere organic because strawberries are supposed to soak up chemicals like a sponge - and we were not disappointed. The strawberries were at an orgasmic peak of ripeness. More pictures posted when we actually get our jam on.

(Dawn is very excited about the strawberries!)

2) We went to the Cape last weekend, and over the summer solstice, apparently summer happened. We came back to a million snap peas, big tufts of lettuce, some carrots, big radishes, etc.  Now the work of the garden is mulching, weeding, harvesting and cooking - the trick now is to actually use the stuff I grew while its in season.    Tonight I got to make my first all-garden dinner.
I wanted to make a stir-fry from this magical period when my ichiban eggplants overlap with the peas, bok choi, and garlic scapes. Recipe below.

 Stir-fry satisfaction.   Squishy eggplants with crunchy peas and delicious, fried garlic scapes - Seriously delicious. 

3) Last, I put in a sweet perennial garden at a rental house on Cape Cod. Since no one will take care of these plants all summer, I wanted to make sure they were hardy. I split up my wild yarrow, moonshine coreopsis and some unkillable groundcover, transplanted some lillies and some yellow coreopsis that were growing nearby, and put in an echinacia I bought. Here's a picture of it at the beginning of the summer - we'll see how it looks by the end, after the deer have had plenty of time to feast.

Late-June Thai-style stir-fry w/brown rice and fried tofu.

Ingredients:
One package firm tofu

potato flowers and, garden stir fry and birthday apple Trees!

So - garden updates:

1) one, it's been wicked cold and rainy in the past couple of weeks, so pretty much nothing has grown - or shrunk, so I guess it's even steven.

2) two, we have some food in the works - little tiny eggplants, raspberries and some bok choi.





 3) three, we're making another garden dinner tonight - with a little help from Boston Organics.   Homegrown green onions and bok choi in the stir fry, along with onions, garlic, broccoli and squash and various Asian condiments.   This time of year we just have a few garden items ready: radishes, lettuce, Asian Greens, green onions, peas and herbs, so I try to find ways to work them into dinner when I can - I find they add a lot of flavor.

4) Plus, we have some new, odd, exotic flowers....

Potato flowers!   Who knew that such ugly plants could grow such nice flowers.....some folks say you can harvest right after they flower, but I'm still waiting a bit.



Last, best birthday present ever:  Columnar Apple Trees....

Now I will possibly have apple trees growing in my backyard - of my rental apartment.   Apparently they will grow right off the tree.   More updates as they grow.

Permaculture and the backyard garden

Permaculture stands for "permanent agriculture."   To learn more about permaculture, check out my last post.   I had a love-hate relationship with it, but there were some Permaculture slogans that, after three or four years of planning my own garden, (and much to my chagrin) have become part of my own basic philosophies in gardening. Enjoy.

1) Plant in “zones”

In permaculture, a "zone map" becomes an intricate diagram of an entire farm: zones zero through five indicate a range of planting activities, from an herb garden all the way out to a semi-forested orchard-and-grazing area, for all those sheep I will never have. But the concept is practical: