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

Time to Think About Putting Up

Yvonne and I attended a class Friday on the Basics of Home Canning. It was in Monroe, NC, just down the road a ways. Sally McNeil of the NC Cooperative Extension Service (thank you, NC State University!!!) led the class. It was really fantastic. We learned LOTS and both feel like we can preserve foods using both the water bath and pressure canning methods. Below, I'm putting up carrots, a low-acid food requiring pressure canning. Sally said if we could put up carrots, we could can anything. Cool!

As part of the class we each got the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. It's got everything you need to know in there. The most important thing? Never skip steps. The teacher also recommended that we buy a new book every 4 or 5 years since knowledge of food science changes. But other than that it's a piece of cake.

Since Y and I were a couple, we agreed to donate one of our Blue Books back to the class. Sally gave us some extra goodies in exchange, including some liquid pectin and some half-pint jars and lids from Ball. We also got a funnel, a magnetic lid wand, two jars of jelly we canned during class, and a previous class's carrots.

And most certainly, here is proof of our new-found canning knowledge. I think this makes us Certified Canners or something.

I've started some more plants from seeds: another squash plants, as the squash bugs have pretty much killed what was in the boxes; 6 cucumber plants; and 3 Blue Lake bush plants, since those are really struggling this summer. Hopefully all will do better with mulch in boxes 1 and 2 now, and since we're using Dipel for the bugs. Yvonne has some basil growing in pots to send home with Rebecca at the end of the summer so she can start growing some in Florida.

A view of some of our tomatoes in our teepee-style bamboo stakes, and some of our beautiful okra plants (yippeee, I'm gonna have me some OKRA, horray!!!).

An okra blossom. Beautiful, ain't it?

The blossom with an okra next to it.

And yeah, baby, some Clemson spineless coming up and ready to be eaten, OR canned and put on the cupboard shelf for the winter.

~T