Summer in TYs Veggie Patch Comes to a Close

yodelaaaaeeeeeeooooooooo! Time to cut back some of this summer overgrowth, among other things.

Out with the old, in with the new. A new TY tradition, new gardening gloves for the season. Goodbye, Summer 2010, and hello Autumn/Winter 2010-11. ")

Y wasted no time in ripping out the carcasses of our summer garden. Many trips were made to the compost bin holding areas.

All the while, I harvested about 140 pounds of worm castings.

Kitchen vegetable and fruit trimmings were turned into black gold, thanks to the mighty red wiggler worm. I gathered up the worms and castings from the bin, then split out the worms from the good stuff. Some wormies made their way into the garden, but the vast bulk of them are headed back to the bin where 120 pounds of fresh kitchen trimmings await.

This stuff is velvety-fine.

As rain threatened, we began to plant the fall garden. Here Y puts in heirloom sweet English peas. I asked Dad what his favorite fall garden crop was. Sweet English peas were at the top of the list. We've never tried these before, so hopefully we'll figure it out and will be as wowed by the sweet green delights as William Garner was.

As we began to plant, tinkling rain began. Here is a closeup of a pea seed about to be covered.

As rain poured, we moved into our outbuilding. Here I preps peat pots for broccoli, cauliflower and collards.

God willing, we'll actually remember which one is which tomorrow. Yes, there are name stakes in the peat pots. But Y couldn't find a grease pencil in time, so we're depending on geography and our wonderful memories to help us remember (please, Lord, let us remember which is which).

A couple of pictures of the last harvest of the 2010 summer. Y not only dug up the remnants of Summer 2010, but harvested along the way. Beautiful, ain't it? We took a lunch break and ate an amazing cut assortment of black beauty heirloom tomatoes, the sweetest, tastiest tomatoe there is (in my opinion).

Ooops.... forgot the okra. That huge one is for drying for seed. Next summer's planting will be here before you know it. :)

The first, albeit late, green bell pepper of the season! That'll be $2.99 please. (And DANG, it smells hot. I know Y has her hopes up, but so do I. Personally I love home-grown hot-as-holy-heck peppers, but she's sooooooooooo hoping a sweet bell arrives. Regardless of how this one tastes, it's win-win.)

I spent lots of time harvesting worm castings. I also screened and refined a batch to see, well, if we can sell this crap. (And I'm not speaking coarse here ... this is actual, truth-be-told worm poo, the best fertilizer in the whole world. Maybe someone will want to buy it off of eBay tomorrow. Let's see!)

Overview of garden - before and after.

Box #1 - before and after. We planted leeks & beets.

Box #2 - Before and after. Here we planted peas, turnips, garlic, spinach, kale.

Box #3 - before and after ... here we kept the bell peppers and fresh parsley. I added a top-dressing of worm castings.

Box #4 - before and after. "Thyme is on our side, yes it is." That's thyme in the foreground, with mariachi peppers allowed to turn red, plus and a little bit of basil in the background"

~J

Doing Some Traveling as of Late

We've been bad farmers. For the last two and a half weeks we have not given TYsVeggiePatch much attention, although we have been harvesting lots of tomatoes, okra, peppers, and basil.  We've been traveling quite a bit which has been most enjoyable.  But we're home now and getting back on track with the garden. Tom has rearranged his schedule so that he spend a little time each morning tending the garden.  That way we'll slowly whittle away at some end of summer garden tending.  This Saturday we'll hit it hard and pull out some overgrown plants to make room for fall veggies.

In the meantime, here are a few pictures from our travels.

We were in Asheville two weekends ago and had a picnic along the banks of the French Broad river in Hot Springs.  It was so relaxing to be in the mountains, right on the river.

This past weekend I participated in RAM (Riverside Artists Market) in Jacksonville, FL.  I sold one yoga mat carrier, one eye pillow and four headbands!  My mom & dad came over for the day to hang out.  We had a very nice visit.

The majority of the rest of our days in Jacksonville were spent here, by the pool at our downtown hotel.

~Y

Canning Day

"It's canning day! It's canning day!"  That's what I excitedly said when I woke up Saturday morning.  I knew it was going to be work, but I was excited nonetheless.  Tom and the cats thought I was crazy.

We started by sterilizing the jars.  I love that we can use the dishwasher for this.  Not only does it clean the jars, it keeps them hot so they don't have to be in a pot of water on the stove waiting to be filled.  That frees up a burner on the stove for another use.  Plus, it keeps the jars all tucked away until we're ready for them.

We harvested all the mariachi peppers left on the plants, except for a few small ones, and any tomatoes that were ready to go.

We decided to make peach jam to give as gifts so we bought 23 pounds of peaches from the Kings Drive Farmer's Market. We woke up bright and early Friday morning and headed to the market to buy fresh South Carolina peaches.  We also bought NC trout, NC blackberries, corn on the cob and onions.  All for $25!  The tomatoes and peppers shown here are from TYs garden of course.

Then the preparation began.  Tom de-seeded and de-veined the peppers.  He made sure to wear gloves so his hands wouldn't absorb all that heat.

Meanwhile, I cleaned all the peaches and dunked them in boiling water....

then in ice water to make the skins easier to peel.

Once the skins were removed we diced them up and added lemon juice, pectin and sugar to make the peach jam.  We made three batches in all.

We took the clean, hot jars out of the dishwasher one by one and filled them up.

After a quick 10 minute water bath, the jam was done and lookin' purty.  We used 10.5 pounds of peaches to make 12, 12oz jelly jars and 4 pint jars worth of peach jam.  With the left over peaches I also made two peach/blackberry crisps and of course we ate a peach or two here and there.

After roasting the peppers we put them in jars and set them in the pressure cooker for 25 minutes or so.  (The photographer got a bit wrapped up in what was going on and didn't do as good a job taking pictures of ALL the steps so you'll just have to imagine roasted peppers coming out of the oven and into jars.)

Sunday was tomato day.  We started by giving the tomatoes a quick dunk in boiling water until the skins cracked....

then a dunk into ice water to stop the cooking process.

The two steps above sure made it easy to take the skins off all these tomatoes!

After taking the skins off, we cut the tomatoes into big chunks.

Canned them up and put them in the pressure canner.

Once the pressure hit 11 pounds we started the timer and waited for the prescribed amount of time.

This is the bounty that we created this weekend!  We ended up with 3 pints of roasted peppers and 6 quarts of tomatoes (plus the aforementioned peach jam).  It certainly took a while to do, but we both really enjoyed ourselves. We kept thinking about what we will make this winter with our "put up" vegetables.  It really will be a joy to use our own, home grown produce for soups and stews.

~Y

Tending and Eating

The rainbow peppers are starting to make an appearance. I can't wait to cook with these for the first time. I'm pretty sure we'll hear "cha-ching" every time we pull one of these off the plant.  That'd be the sound of money in our pockets. Up to $3 a pop for these guys in the grocery store.

Banana peppers are coming in full force as well.  They've been a good substitute for bell peppers in recipes that call for a half a bell pepper.  Two to four of these equal about a half a bell pepper.

The mariachi peppers are turning beautiful colors. Tom found out that the longer these stay on the vine and the darker in color they get, the hotter they are. This coming weekend we'll harvest just about all of these, roast them in the oven, and do our first canning! We'll be sure to post lots of pictures of that process next week.

About three more cantaloupes have appeared! We heard the "cha-ching" sound when we harvested the three of these guys too. You can hear that sound very faintly when you walk by this new batch.

We began working our succession planting method and pulled out the last of the swiss chard and beets and planted fall carrot seeds.

We also thinned out the marigolds and put big bunches of them in pots for our front porch.

The okra is... well... lets just say this: They are producing, Tom is a happy camper, we've eaten a good bit, we've frozen a good bit, and there seems to be no end in sight. The plants are just about over our heads and will soon be at the point where we won't be able to reach the tops. We have seven plants in one bed and about six in another.  After a bit of "lively discussion" I convinced Tom to take out one of the plants that was starting to look more like a tree. In addition to choking out the rosemary, it was blocking the path between the beds. He pulled it out, but was none to happy about the thought of reducing the okra production. Can you believe we grew this tree-trunk of a plant from seed?

He looks pretty grouchy, doesn't he? I think he's gotten over it now and realizes it was a good thing.

We finally had a few cucumbers come in and we also had some fellow gardeners give us some of their bounty.  I found this cute recipe for something else to do with cucumbers in the Observer. Cut them into 3/4" rounds, scoop out the middle, make tuna salad with curry and a little sour cream, green onions, and peppers, load the tuna mixture into the scooped out part of the cucumber, top with a half an olive and cracked pepper. Yummy and fun! We had them for lunch yesterday.

 ~Y

Sorry for the delay in writing. We've been busy eating.

It's been two weeks since our last update. Aside from being busy bees in our daily lives, we've been busy working in TYsVeggiePatch.  Just about every other day we perform one or all of the following tasks: weed, water, transplant, killing bugs, or harvest.

We had a few workmen in our house doing some work and one of them noticed our garden.  At the time, I pointed out that we had LOTS of tomatoes, but they were still green.  He said his were coming in like crazy and he couldn't keep up with them.  The next day when he came to finish the work, he brought us four huge tomatoes from his garden.  He said, in a heavy North Carolina accent, "These two I picked fresh. These others I picked yesterday."  I thought, man us gardens sure can be particular.  The fact that the tomatoes he picked yesterday he did not considered "fresh" made me laugh. And yet... I completely understand.  :)

At long last, we have red tomatoes!!  I believe this was our very first vine-ripened tomato and okra. 

Over the last two weeks, these next few pictures are good representations of what our kitchen has looked like.

We ended up with three medium sized cantaloupes from our mystery plants.  And boy were they yummy!

~Y

A Beautiful Sight

Our first eggplant has appeared.  It's SO pretty!  And there are a bunch more coming right behind it.

I couldn't wait for the peppers to come out.  Now that they've arrived, I'm not sure I can do too much with them.  These are called Mariachi peppers and holy cow are the hot!  Yesterday we roasted them on the grill with our corn and salmon.  I peeled off the blackened outsides, took out the seeds and as many ribs as possible, put some cream cheese on them and our mouths were still on fire.  We may pickle some and we can use them sparingly in salsa.  Now I really can't wait for the other two types of peppers to come up so we can actually eat them.

A few of the tomatoes, tucked way inside the vines have FINALLY started to ripen.

 

There is no doubt, we are gonna have a slew of tomatoes.  Look at the bunches...

So that we are all set when the tomatoes are ready to harvest, Saturday we visited a super neat old general store in Mathews called Renfrow Hardware.  They have everything we will ever need for canning, plus I think the literally have everything (including chickens for purchase).  We bought some new jars and lids, and the big purchase, a 16-quart pressure canner. We spent all day Sunday doing dry runs with the new equipment.  Our teacher from canning class suggested you always perform a dry run with nothing in the jars (except hot water) at the beginning of each canning season to make sure everything is in working order.  So that's what we did. We started with a test run using the water bath method, and it was successful. Then we ran a test using pressure canner method.  The first test failed - water was coming out in places it shouldn't and pressure never built up.  Once it completely cooled down, we took the lid off, tightened up a few things and tried again.  SUCCESS!  We now have the confidence to successfully can water!  :)

Cantaloupes are doing well.  They may be ready to harvest soon.

The pumpkin patch is growing like crazy and it's even flowering...

but the flowers don't have anything behind them so it appears they aren't getting pollinated.  I learned from the Almanac Gardener on PBS that flowers with no fruit behind them are males.  If they don't get pollinated, they fall off and no pumpkin is produced. Guess that means the males are useless and don't produce anything but waste. What? I didn't mean anything by that... I was purely talking about pumpkins.  :o

And yet, here is proof that pollination should be happening.  ?  Maybe the female flowers will show up soon, who knows.

Update on the apple tree: Apples are certainly being produced, but they are pretty gnarled up and the tree itself just isn't in the best of health.  We had Nate The Tree Guy come out and give us an estimate on pruning all the trees in our yard, including this apple tree.  He said the best time to work on the apple tree is in Jan. or Feb. after all the fruit has dropped off.  So we'll just leave it for now and start nursing it back to a health then, hopefully having a "fruitful" and productive tree.

The pecan tree that is actually a peach tree is in a similar condition to the apple tree.  In the pictures here, they look nice, but when you see them up close, they all have worm holes in them and the leaves on the tree have been eaten up pretty bad.  So we'll wait until winter for Nate The Tree Guy to do some work on it, then we'll try to get it healthy from there.

~Y