THE TOMATO STATUS REPORT

16 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Canning & Preserving, Harvest, Jellies & Preserves, Peppers, Tomatoes, Vegetable garden

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banana peppers, brussels sprouts, canning, canning rack, delicata squash, Italian plums, Japanese eggplant, mangoes, mustard greens, pears, pink icicle tomatoes, red plastic mulch, tomatoes

AS YOU SEE, THERE ARE PLENTY OF TOMATOES. Mostly green yet. I’m not convinced that the red plastic mulch is a big improvement to aid ripening. Seems normal to me, even taking our meager summer weather into consideration. I think Ill skip the red plastic next year. We have had our share or ripe ones to eat, so not a big complaint.

Yellow flame tomatotes

Always a few crazily shaped ones.

Pink Icicle. I may save seed from this one.

THE REST OF THE VEGETABLE GARDEN is humming along.

Delicata Squash

Anaheim peppers

Japanese eggplant

Banana peppers

I planted a section of mixed mustard greens to use up old seeds: Osaka Purple, Gold & Ruby Streaks, Mizuna, and Ho Mi Z. Makes for a zesty salad mix when young and it looks pretty too.

Brussels sprouts are forming nicely and should be ready for Thanksgiving dinner!

THIS WEEK’S CANNING REPORT

Gingered Pear Preserves with a splash of cognac made on Wednesday are the first of the pear larder. They are a mix of Bartletts and Rescue. A little over four pounds yielded seven half-pints.

Daughter #2 has an Italian Plum tree and we picked about 4.4 pounds on Tuesday.

I kept out one pound for eating, split and pitted the remaining plums, and slipped them into freezer bags for later use. Straight out of the freezer and onto cake batter for plum cake. An easy and tasty winter treat.

Today another two pounds of pears teamed up two large mangoes for Pear-Mango Preserves. This one is my own combination. A little sweet and a little tart from the lime juice.

Pear-Mango Preserves Yield about 6-7 half-pints

2 large mangoes cubed to make 3-4 cups

2 lbs. pears, cubed (about 4 cups)

1/2 cup fresh lime juice

3 c./ 1.5 lbs sugar

8 oz. apple or pear cider (regular, sparkling or hard)

One 4″ cinnamon stick

about 8 basil leaves bundled and tied.

Combine pears, mangoes, lime juice, cider and half the sugar in a large saucepan. Bring to boil, add cinnamon stick and basil. Reduce heat to medium and cook 15 minutes. Add remaining sugar and cook over med-low until thickened. Turn off heat and let stand one hour.

Sterilize jars and heat lids. Check thickness of preserves. If too thick add a bit more cider or water; remove cinnamon stick and basil and reheat. Fill jars and process 10 minutes full rolling boil. Remove canner lid and let jars stand 5 minutes before removing.

ONE LAST thing. I hate the canning rack that comes with the big enameled canners. They are awkward to handle with jars. There are many jars that don’t fit the racks. I have a 12″ diameter cooling rack that fits perfectly and any size or shape jar sits flat without tipping. Additionally, if I flip the rack upside down, I can squeak the quart jars into the canner. I saw this post on Northwest Edible Life and thought it a quite ingenious solution.

Today at Outdoor Emporium I saw a really sweet aluminum stock pot with a nice rack; it would easily accommodate quart jars and was $32.00. It was very much like this one. It is tempting as my old enamel canner is starting to rust after 35+ years.

Enough canning and harvesting for a while, I hear Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons calling…

AUGUST MASH-UP–PART TWO

12 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Canning & Preserving, Harvest, Ornamentals, Uncategorized, Vegetable garden

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camping, canning, garden chores, harvest

BY THE THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST there is plenty of deadheading to do. As I started this tedious chore I felt inspired to create a bouquet using the more interesting deadheads (August 18th above) and have continued to add to it (as of September 8th below).

The same day that we dug the iris I enlisted the extra hands to help clean the garlic. With three pairs of hands we cleaned four varieties in no time. Yesterday I cleaned the remaining 25 heads. Total garlic harvested: 142 heads.

CANNING began in earnest with cherries, apricots and zucchini in late July.

Since spring-like weather persisted well into June the cherry and strawberry harvests were late. I put up five half pints each of strawberry and cherry preserves in the last week of July. These were modeled on a low sugar preserves recipe from Eugenia Bone’s blog post of July 18th.

PEACHES started showing up in the markets mid-August so I made peach preserves (seven half pints) and froze sliced peaches in half pound bags (5). At the end of the month on our way home from Palmer Lake, I bought more peaches (fifteeen pounds) and about four pounds of the last (!) bing cherries at Lone Pine fruit stand in Wenatchee. The cherries were wonderful and I put up 8 more half-pints of preserves. The lovely looking Glowstar peaches however had a difficult time fully ripening. They became 6 pints of what I am calling Ice Cream Peaches; kind of like a loose, syrupy preserve flavored with vanilla beans and Calvados brandy. They taste yummy!

The bulk of tomatoes remained firmly green even with the red plastic mulch until the last week of the month. And at that, only a handful or two had ripened.

We spent the week of the 22nd happily lazing about at Palmer Lake in northeast Washington. The DNR campground is small and was surprisingly short of visitors for a change. The water was warm, the weather was warm, we paddled around the lake, and I caught up on my travel journal. There is good birdwatching habitat around the lake; cherry and apple orchards to the east and some walnut orchards and open pastures to the north. Tom saw an Indigo Bunting! We have been ‘bunting hunting’ all summer on our trips to eastern Washington–too bad I missed seeing it. We saw a muskrat one morning in Palmer Creek and a beaver in the water at our campground on our last morning.

I LOVE FINDING something new and unknown to me. On one of our walks we spotted a hatching of Box Elder bugs, boisea trivittata. I snapped this photo so I could identify them when we got back home. Apparently they are a nuisance in most areas, but we had never seen them before. According to Wikipedia “They may form large aggregations while sunning themselves in areas near their host plant (e.g. on rocks, shrubs, trees, and man-made structures).” That is just how we saw them.

Time to move on to Septet

GARLIC & PICKLES

22 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Canning & Preserving, Vegetable garden

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garlic, harvest, pickles

AFTER 18 DAYS AWAY FROM HOME we returned to garlic ready for harvest and zucchini ready to be pickled.

GARLIC HARVEST was later than normal but there were still plenty of green leaves left on most of the stalks to insure good wrappers when dry and only one variety had started to fall over. I harvested Inchelium (26), two types of hardneck (50), an unknown softneck variety from friends (28), and a dozen Itlaian White, which after three generations are finally to golf ball size. Still left to harvest is Chesnok, (another hardneck type) that looks like it needs another week or so. I lay the garlic on the potting bench for about two weeks to cure before completing the cleaning and trimming for storage. The potting bench is on the north side of the house and protected from rain by wide eaves.

Here’s a look at the vegetable garden; the lettuces and zucchini plants seem to be most vigorous, but everything is doing pretty well in spite of the mixed-up weather.

This is where the zucchini pickles begin. Yesterday I picked enough zucchini from three plants to make the first batch of Bread & Butter style pickles. The variety is Costata, a firm fleshed, ribbed type that held up well for pickles last year.

Step one is the sliced zucchini and onions, salted and covered with cold water and ice cubes for two hours.

This little slicer is the simplest form of a mandoline and is still sharp after forty years of use and a must have to make quick work of slicing zucchini and onions.

I found a use for the garlic scapes: I peeled them and placed one ‘head’ into each jar of pickles.

Five pints of pickles, the first of the season. Now the wait for the cucumbers to really come on so I can make my friend Betty’s dill pickles.

THE TOMATO EXPERIMENT

02 Thursday Jun 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Tomatoes, Vegetable garden, Weather

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fava beans, tomatoes

I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE THAT JUNE HAS ARRIVED! But, we may have 70° days ahead according to the NOAA forecast. WOOHOO! We have not had a 70°+ day around here since early November 2010.

And, I think that we have finally hit the 50° for steady, average overnight temperature (I hope). On Sunday I put some of the tomatoes into the ground. As you can see from the photo above, I am using SRM-Red Plastic Tomato Mulch. I bought this product from Territorial Seed Company a few years back and never got around to using it. Yesterday afternoon the soil temperature 6″ below the red plastic was 64°, while 18′ away the soil temperature was 59°; so it makes a difference. I will use this same technique with some of the remaining tomatoes and plant some without at the same time for a control.

Before we took off on a ten day trip two weeks ago, I planted the cukes, squash, lettuce, broccoli, and brussels sprouts starts. And over the weekend I planted seeds (quite a bit later than normal) for radishes, fennel, beets, carrots, and two kinds of celery. I have had mixed success with celery in the past, but decided to try again.

Just waiting now for the fava beans to be ready for harvest and that will free up some additional space for the remaining tomatoes, eggplant and pepper starts.

The garlic is looking very good this year, must be the prolonged cool and wet spring weather.

And lastly, a couple of nice heads of Slyvesta Butterhead lettuce near harvest size.

READY TO PLANT

11 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Vegetable garden

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chicken manure, compost, vegetable bed

I FINALLY GOT MOTIVATED and cleaned out a couple of wintered over vegetable beds and prepared them for planting. I began by laying down alfalfa, bone, cottonseed, and kelp meals as my first layer.

COMPOST is the second layer and piled on about three to four inches thick. I used to sift the compost, but it was so much extra work and all it really achieved was to remove some sticks and stems not fully composted. I finally decided that the compost could finish breaking down in the beds; it has worked out well ever since. Anything that is obviously large or not broken down is pulled out and returned to the bin. I’m happy and so are the plants.

COMPOSTED CHICKEN MANURE is the last layer. Since I don’t raise chickens I have to buy this product. I became a believer in chicken manure when I used to raise chickens many years ago. I now favor Gardener & Bloome products after an unpleasant surprise (chicken bones in all 18 bags!) with Whitney Farms chicken manure two years ago. The Gardener & Bloome product is better composted and has less odor.

NEXT STEP is tilling it all in with my favorite garden device: the electric Mantis tiller.

The tilled beds.

FINAL STEP is raking into shape. The raised beds are about twelve inches high and about thirty-six inches wide when finished. I water with rubber drip/soaker hose. The paths between the beds are just wide enough to maneuver a wheelbarrow through and covered with wood ‘play chips’ to keep the weeds and the mud down.

This is one of the lettuce volunteers that I have frequently mentioned; ready to move from the path into a newly tilled bed.