The Urban Farmer's Almanac

I was on such a canning kick early last week dealing with the blueberries and tomatoes.  Unfortunately it wore off quicker than I would have hoped and I was left with piles of tomatillos, corn and peppers and no motivation.  I shoved the corn and peppers in the fridge, but left the tomatillos on the counter thinking I would be reminded that they needed to be dealt with ASAP.  I managed to avoid looking at them until I noticed a gooey substance leaking from the bag.  I opened the bag and was horrified to find hairy mold growing.  I felt my big plans for a year’s worth of green salsa (my favorite) as well as the money we spent on them going into the compost pile.  I thought I might be able to salvage a few so I put on my industrial rubber gloves and attacked the bag.  I was happy to find that I only really lost 3-4 tomatillos and was able to salvage enough for a respectable batch of salsa.  I roasted some peppers from Yakima and followed another recipe from the well used Ball canning book and I have to say I am happy with the results.

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We allowed Hannah to choose one crop for the garden this year (Robbie is not yet rational enough to be given gardening authority) and she chose baby bear pumpkins.  Pumpkins are such a great crop for kids to watch since they can really see them growing on the vine and turning colors.  Each day since its emergence she checked on it and the day finally came for the first one to be picked.  She really wanted to carve it, but we convinced her that drawing faces with washable markers was almost as cool.

Hannah and her baby bear

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Wow.  We had quite the harvest today.  Dan has been out of town camping the last four days. With him gone I did not have the time to harvest much from the garden each day, so the cucumbers got a little out of control (those guys grow fast!).  In addition much of our long awaited produce has finally reached ripeness – squash, pumpkin, tomatoes, etc.  We haven’t had a ton of yield for most of the summer, which I am sure is related to the things we chose for the garden as much as it is to the terrible summer weather.    Now we are finally enjoying some bounty.  We need one of those Thanksgiving horns for our table or something.  The squash should keep well for a while, the larger tomatoes will be dried in the dehydrator  for “sun” dried tomatoes packed in oil (we just used up last year’s crop this week), but we will need to deal with the other things in the next few days.

Fall Harvest

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Its been a very mild (some would say non-existent) summer in the Northwest.  Add to this the fact that tomatoes are notoriously hard to grow here anyway and I am surprised we have anything to show from our tomato starts this year.  We had good luck last year growing our tomatoes in the hoop house.  This year, however, not much has grown out back, but we’ve had great luck with the cherry tomato plant in our front bed.  Who knows why it did so well.  We assumed it got a lot of radiant heat from the concrete stairs behind it, but what to we know?

Its great to be able to go outside grab a handful of tomatoes when a meal arrives.  I actually do not really like raw tomatoes (shudder, gasp – gardener treason!) but my kids love them.  Tonight for dinner I grabbed a cucumber, a handful of tomatoes and a bowl of blackberries (courtesy of our neighbor’s out of control bushes that are trailing over the fence) and had dinner.  Of course the protein of tonight’s dinner was frozen chicken nuggets, but no one’s perfect right?  Anyway it seems everyday there is another harvest of tomatoes to serve up and we may have permanently found a new place for our heat loving plants.

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