Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Carrots and squash

The first harvest of carrots is in jars, nestled on dark shelves in the garage: 15 pints. The pretty purple ones are called Purple haze, the last of the 'purple' seeds from Katie (other favorites were purple basil and Purple Cherokee Tomatoes). We'll harvest the rest of the carrots as we need them, leaving some in the ground and some in cold storage for as long as possible. The canned veggies will hopefully be saved for late spring in the gap before the new gardening season begins.

A few odd squashes have appeared on our most prolific squash vines: Spagetti squash. They may be cross-breds. The acorn squash was very susceptible to the beetles and their diseases, but it looks like we may get 7 or 8 of those. There are more than a dozen spagettis, most of which are ready, and a few dozen Waltham butternut. All the cucurbits were pretty heavily hit by the cucumber beetles which carried downy mildew and a variety of other fungal diseases. The cukes and melons were especially bad so I just pulled them out as they stopped producing. Not a good year for cukes. I did put in some late plantings though, including a few melons which are getting big now, larger than grapefruits.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Eggplant

Summer Sauerkraut

Squash borer

Canning stone fruit

One of my favorite treats in the winter is pickled plums - nice firm and sour, deep ruby but with some spice from whole black peppers. I pickled six pints of these, plus an additional 8 pints of pickled peaches and 8 pints of pickled nectarines. Hopefully they are equally good. The peaches this year have been amazing and we've frozen and canned about 25 pounds.

onions

Salsa

The varieties of tomato include: brandywine, new girl, purple cherokee, persimmon, Santos, amana, purple, and green grape, among others I'm forgetting right now.
We made two gorgeous batches of salsa, mostly with our heirlooms. They give a nice color, and so much flavor. We mixed the peppers in each batch - so some Anaheims, Hungarian, Cayenne and predominantly Jalepeno.
We've also been canning the tomatoes as fast as they come on, some into jars and some into the freezer. Its pretty quick to peel and chop them as they ripen.



The recipes were each roughly:

13 cups chopped tomatoes (25 medium)
6 cups diced mixed peppers
4 medium onion (2 c)
2 heads garlic
1 cup diced cilantro
3 tsp salt
1 tsp cayenne
1/2 tablspn lime juice per cup tomato (6 tbl)

peel, chop and layer tomatoes in a colander with salt. let sit 3 hours to sweat off juice (which we canned). bring to a boil with other ingredients, boiling water bath 20 minutes (we also tried pressure canning one batch, 10 lbs for 20 minutes to match the beans). so far so good. this made 10 pints.