Are your tomato plants limping along like demented zombies, cranking out tomato after tomato despite clear evidence of fall? Have you eaten all the salsa, gazpacho, and other acidic treats you can handle? If you're still stuck with a pile of tomatoes, oven dry them! Depending on how long you leave them in a low oven you can enjoy anything from a soft raisiny texture to a crispy chip-like treat that is amazingly sweet to eat.
It was a very sinister weekend though it started out quite innocently! Mrs. Picket Fence knew the grapes were sitting on the vines in the yard, just ripe for the picking and figured a little fresh juice might be had with not so much effort. Who knew what would become of that fateful day:
Crime Scene Timeline
10:00 am - Mr. and Mrs. Picket Fence went out in their yard wielding paring knives
10:30 am - The suspects returned with 5 gallons of Concord grapes (gee that was fast!) after picking about 20 linear feet of mature vines. Annie D. Dog can be seen below wondering what all the fuss is about.
11:30 AM - Internet consulted and this useful document was identified! (altered to use a stick blender).
12:00 PM - 8 PM Scramble Scramble, Juice Juice, One suspect was quoted as saying "We should have sheeted the room in plastic like Dexter does!". Clorox Wipe Count: 20.
The kitchen may someday be the same...But not the tshirts. The taste is amazing. Like purple cubed. Sorbet this weekend....?
We visited some family in Germany that live in a beautiful village in Bavaria called Kallmünz. Their climate is similar to Seattle with moderate summers (though colder winters) and a good deal of rain.
Here's a picture we took of their storybook village.
One clever idea we saw was small the use of semi-permanent covers for the tomato plants. This seems to have the dual benefit of warming them up and keeping the rain off the plants. Here are two good examples we admired.
Phew - sorry for the lack of posts, we were wandering through Bavaria and Greece for a couple of weeks, hence the crazy late night jetlag post here at 4 am. We did snap a few garden shots on our trip and will post those soon.
Before we left, there was a flurry of activity to harvest the last of the squash, cucumbers, onions, summer herbs, and what we thought were the last of the tomatoes. Luckily, it turned out there was unseasonably warm weather for the two weeks we were gone so our garden/dog/housesitter extraordinaire (thanks mom!!) tells us that when we wake up tomorrow there will still be tomatoes in the garden.
Look at the gorgeous cukes! If you do nothing else, plant yourself a little mound of cucumbers or squash next year. They require so little care and yield such tangible results. In Italy we saw lots of vines wandering lazily amongst grassy areas so they may not be that picky about that either!
The winter garden was started with starts from the nursery since our handy new garden books said we were starting a bit late for seed (foiled again!). We planted Broccoli (green) and Cabbage (purple) the packages asked for huge (24"!) spacing and due to limited room we had to fudge a bit. Don't tell the plants. The starts are a bit skinny as shown here, hard to imagine them growing up to be much! Wonder how they look now...hmmm...where's the flashlight.
Somehow canning is something that is always on our list to "learn next year". With a bumper crop of tomatoes and an impending vacation to Germany and Greece (tomorrow!) this will again have to wait til next year! However, we couldn't stand to waste the tomatoes and Mr. Picket fence had eaten all the raw tomatoes his stomach could handle! The little cherry tomatoes we froze whole since the skins are quite thin and we can roast them this winter, no harm no foul.
However the bigger Early Girl Tomatoes needed a little attention before freezing for later addition to stews, chilis, or maybe soups! Here's how we froze them:
Step 1. (top to bottom on left). Cut X's in the bottom with a sharp knife.
Step 2. Drop the tomatoes into a pot of briskly bowling water.
Step 3. After a minute or so the skins will be visibly falling off the fruit. Remove.
Step 4. Drop into a bowl of cold water.
Step 5. (Not pictured) Peel the skin, cut out the stem, pop in a freezer bag
Step 6. (Not pictured) Throw into a dish in the dark depths of winter. Remember what summer tasted like.
By the way we'll be taking a camera and looking for little bits of garden in Europe. Will share whatever we find!
In the Maritime Northwest where we are lucky enough to live, the Pacific Ocean, the Puget Sound (which for those of you from elsewhere is a huge body of inland water on the top left corner of the consecutive US), and the Rocky Mountains conspire to create an odd little microclimate with relatively little freeze, 9 months of almost straight rain, and 3 months of almost no rain. Interesting place for gardening! As kids, Mr. and Mrs. Picket Fence lived in much warmer climes where length of the summer season wasn't the constraining factor for gardening.
Nonetheless, we cheerfully planted a garden this year. Our only concession to the shorter season was to be sure to pick "early" variety of tomatoes to ensure they had enough time to ripen. And frankly, we were darn lucky. It was a relatively hot year here and while the east coast struggled with late blight, Seattle was having a fantasy tomato and pepper year. Call it global warming or just a giant global fubar, but frankly we have so many soggy summers we've sorta earned it. The only thing we planted that was a total disappointment was the tomatillos (and we still hold a candle frankly!). They grew a big bushy plant that was just covered with flowers and the requisite bees. Not a lot of fruit though. In retrospect, maybe some flower reduction might have been in order.
Since we are now official garden-dabblers and we heard that you can even grow a few plants in the damp deep dark depths of our winter, we thought we should maybe read a bit and went about finding some books on the topic. We posted a thread over at Gardenweb to ask about books on the topic. The knowledgeable inhabitants of the forum were really sweet and got right back with a very helpful answer and we eagerly snapped up the recommended books (thanks gardengal!)
The first book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening was indeed very complete. Had a lot of useful information about particular amendments needed by our waterlogged soil, suggested good sources for seed, and talked about common pests and other growing issues in the area. It is very detailed and texty so if you really like to read prose, this is the book for you.
The next book, Seattle Tilth's Maritime Northwest Garden Guide was full of useful information in a tabular format that makes it a great reference guide. When do i plant X? How can I preserve Y? It's in there! If you love tables and light reading (with a lot of really great info too), you'll like this one.
Frankly, considering the long dark winter ahead, you should probably just get both.
These waning golden days of August are a fun time in the garden. The most taxing chore is keeping up with the endless supply of squash and tomatoes practically tumbling off of the plants. The Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes in particular continue to supply about a pint every time we go to pick! All of our friends and family seem to really love these, oohing and ahing about how sweet they are to pop straight into their mouths. Sometimes they are so ripe they literally burst with vigor. If you are planning a garden,we would wholeheartedly recommend that variety as easy to grow, though they are a bit wild (see post on killer tomatoes)!
The Early Girls are also producing nicely, and starting to ripen up. This is also an indeterminate (read - crazy sprawling grower) tomato that will fill you with a sense of satisfaction as it rambles about your garden. It is a nice short season grower that is said to be quite reliable even in our iffy Pacific Northwest summers.
Even though the garden has gotten a bit more predictable, Mrs. Picket Fence sometimes wakes up full of excitement to see what is out in the garden (oh hey another 3 squash, how is that possible!) The cats love these visits, particularly Ellie Mae who gets so excited, you'd think we were off to hunt mice.
We had a tough year for fruit. The apple trees hardly produced at all, which is usually related to the weather when they blossomed. The Italian plum, however, produced a bumper crop of rather skinny plums.
We were ignoring them and hoping they might fatten up a bit when Mom came up the hill with a bundle of them cradled in her tshirt. The oven was on and we thought hmmm....roasted Plums! And hey - there's chevre in the fridge! Hmmm...Black Pepper Chevre. Well, we thought, pepper and plums should work! Pepper is fruity...
Directions: slice each plum in half, pit them, and fill each little hole with a spoonful of the cheese. Bake at 350F for 30 minutes. Drizzle with honey.
It is hard to describe how bright and tasty these plums were after roasting. Somewhat like apple pie with more intensity. While eating them it was difficult not to think about having them with a big bowl of vanilla ice cream.
No, we're not slipping into the realm of squash overload/desperation (yet), but let's just say we don't have to buy any produce at the store these days. We're keeping up with it so far, but whenever we peek into the belly of the beast, it is a lil scary! Some care is required while gathering the bounty as the bees are so covered in pollen they just pass out there amongst the leaves...
This morning we roasted some cubed squash and onions, then transferred them into a nonstick pan and added some scrambled eggs, topped the whole thing off with a bit of cheese and finished it in the oven (still warm from roasting the veggies). Everything except for the cheese was grown within 2 blocks of our house (grampa provides the eggs, his chickens make the most delicious super-orange eggs). The nutty sweetness of the veggies complimented the eggs nicely - even if you aren't working your way through your garden squash we'd recommend giving it a try.
While the bright hues of the first roses are always fun, also delightful is the pale beauty of the late roses of summer.
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