Our freezer got a little too full, and we were a little too burnt-out last Summer/Fall to harvest and process our leeks. I also (conveniently!) remembered that leeks can overwinter well with a little straw or leaf mulch. We finally got most of the garden in by Mother's Day, minus our 12 square foot, would-be onion patch, which was still occupied by last Spring's leeks.
So, Bill pulled them, I weighed and processed them. The weight before processing was 24#! I trimmed, cleaned and chopped up 2/3 of that, and threw them in the freezer. The remaining 8# were donated to our local Food Is Free table here in Olympia.
Our take, after trimming them up.
Our next major harvest is likely to be rhubarb, as we have six plants that are HUGE right now. We are so happy to share our abundance with our neighbors, that we have decided to add another tab to our Garden Yield spreadsheet that keeps track of how much produce we have/will have donated to individuals and Food Is Free tables over the coming year.
....or onions, however you prefer to say it. This year, we've got 'em.
We had to harvest our onions and shallots earlier than planned this year, primarily because we have some very hungry bunnies who have infiltrated our garden and have completely destroyed the carrots, peas, beets and beans, nibbled the potatoes down to a nub and might have claimed our precious onions next. Sure, people say that they won't eat alliums (garlic, onions, chives, etc.), but let me just tell you, these bunnies will! In fact, they slayed my first planting of garlic chives (and my hostas, pineapple sage, parsley) before I replanted them in a very tall pot that they cannot access. I am being undone by 4-ounce fluff balls, and that is annoying.
So today I started processing some of our onions and shallots. Whoa, Nelly! My house smells.... pungent.
Half of the onions are getting chopped and frozen, just under half are being dehydrated for seasoning and soup bases, likewise the shallots. The funk coming out of my dehydrator right now is eye-watering.
Up next, Padron peppers! I don't especially look forward to the resultant air quality that their processing will produce either, but there are bigger issues here - the "spicy hands". If you've ever prepared hot peppers at home, I know you know what I'm talking about. The capsaicin gets on your hands and anything you touch with your hands - eyeballs, nose - not mention when you visit the bathroom. IT IS BAD NEWS.
Gloves are an absolute must to avoid the spicy hands because no amount of soap & water, baking soda, milk, yogurt, vinegar or anything else will completely remove the oils. My hands were so fiery last time I processed Anaheim peppers (which aren't even that dang spicy) that I literally couldn't sleep.
So, learn from my fail and proceed with caution, fellow kitchen garden geeks! Happy harvest!
The poppy seed harvest (such as it is) is now in, and the results are underwhelming, to say the least.
The borage took over the pollinator/botanical beds this year and squeezed out all but 4 poppy plants. I should have knocked the borage back a peg - or five - but just didn't have the heart to do it since our honeybees LOVE the stuff.
Our pollinator bed - borage, poppies, calendula and bachelor buttons.
It's a trade off, I guess.
Sorry, Ukrainian Grammies. I wanted to attempt makivynkthis Christmas with all homegrown poppy seeds, but it was not to be. While the recipe calls for a staggering three cups(!) of poppy seeds, I managed to grow just a scant half cup this year.
I *might* be able to eek a lemon poppy seed loaf or two out of this, with a dash leftover to throw in a batch of soap (poppy seeds are the best exfoliants ever), but the makivynk - she will have to wait a while longer.
On the plus side, other Ukrainian favorites grew well this year - beets, cabbage, tomatillos... ok, well pretty much just beets and cabbage. Borshch and holubtsi for everyone!
Billy grew a watermelon! Actually, he grew a few, which is no small feat in Western Washington. The one pictured here is a 4-pound Sugar Baby. We also planted some Yellow Dolls, but have yet to harvest one. Our thrown-together hoop house seems to be the thing that has made the difference. Summers normally just aren't long enough or hot enough around here for watermelon, and we'd all but given up on ever being able to grow them, when... booyah, the hoop house delivered.
NOM!
Or maybe this was just a good year for cucurbits in general? Our cukes have never really produced a meaningful harvest, but this year.... whoa nelly! I've gone off the deep end a little with my pickling this year, most but not all of which has been cucumber pickles. So far I have 2+ gallons done and cooling their heels in the fridge, and just started 1 1/2 more gallons of sour dills fermenting today. The house of Jackson shall have a tangy miasma about it this Winter! ;)
Garlicky sour pickles in progress Day 1
I also processed another 50ish pounds of apples into juice/cider/critter food this week. My cranky shoulder is in a bad way right now from all the chopping, grating and schlepping around of produce, but, you know, I wouldn't have it any other way. Farm Wife 4 Life, yo!
We were very late to pick our apples this year, and so haven't got nearly as much to show for our efforts as we have in years past, but we can chalk up at least one small victory - homemade hard cider.
Nothing warms a homebrew nerd's heart quite like the steady bloop-blooping of the airlock on a carboy of fresh-juiced cider. Some of this is destined to become apple cider vinegar, but at least a few pints will be enjoyed in it's hard form.
I also just harvested some of my breadseed poppies for use in baked goods and as an added exfoliant to our homemade goats milk soaps. This year I grew Elka White Seeded Poppies from Adaptive Seeds in Sweet Home, Oregon. Provided that I'd managed my garden better and not left it to it's own devices this Spring & Summer, I have no doubt that I'd have had a much bigger harvest. Even still, homegrown poppy seeds in any amount is pretty rad in my book.
I still have a lot of a lot of other things to harvest and sock away by one means or another. I've been a lactofermenting fiend this Summer! I already have sour pickles, dilly beans, sauerkraut and fermented ginger carrots done and in the fridge, but the cukes keep rolling in and the 'maters and tomatillos... I've yet to deal with those at all so far.
Harvest Time parts 2, 3, 705, etc., will follow in due course. We're raising half a dozen Muscovy ducks for the freezer this year, with a tentative harvest date of October 1st. Apparently slaughtering ducks is a whole different ballgame from harvesting chickens and turkeys, so I have a lot of research and prep to do before ducky d-day. We also may be harvesting one of this past Spring's wethers for the freezer. It depends, in part on whether or not they sell when the doelings move on.
There is certainly no shortage of things to do in the coming weeks and months, and having been otherwise occupied during the Spring and Summer, I look forward to doing (most of) them.
Today seemed like as good a day as any to start the mammoth task that is processing our pumpkins. And so my knife and I got to work, bright and early..ish.
A very small representative sample of the punkins-in-waiting.
This year we grew 4 types of pumpkins - the good ol' standard Jack o' Lantern, a pumpkin which is really only good for decoration, Sugar Pie, which is a proper cooking pumpkin, Cinderella, which is pretty and tasty, and Williams Naked Seeded, which is a pepita/oil seed variety.
To my credit, I got through nine pumpkins today. I have two roasted and pureed Sugar Pies in the freezer, a pound of the naked seeds brining overnight before roasting them tomorrow, and a few pounds of the non-naked (dressed?) seeds in the dehydrator for future chicken snackage. Go, me!
On the other hand, nine pumpkins down doesn't amount to much in the long run here. Bill brought in another 125 pounds of pumpkins from the garden today. I'm gonna be busy.
My punkin' helper, Scarlet, calling dibs on the 26-pound Williams for her jack-o-lantern.
One of my Williams Naked Seededs that was sampled by a mouse/vole/varmint of some sort. Luckily these suckers are THICK walled and the little raider was foiled.
My Scarletti-spaghetti helping me sort seeds and guts.
In the space of a week we've gone from humidity, thunderstorms and 80 degree temps to falling leaves and pea soup fog in the mornings. Fall has arrived in Boggy Hollow, and with it, as ever, a nearly-endless list of stuff that needs doing, yesterday.
As a bit of strategery, I am posting my to-do list here in the hope that the threat of an on-the-record public shaming will serve as motivation for me to get my crap together and not, say, take a nap with my puppy.
Hope springs eternal.
Chelle's end of Summer/Fall To-Do list:
*Make - At least 2 more batches of soap - one with goat milk and one vegan, re-batch soap trimmings, knit at least 2 dozen more dishcloths and 6 pair of bike helmet earmuffs
*Set up/Organize - The new pantry/storage room shelving - oy. This will probably involve a trip to IKEA, better known in our family as the Yuppie Modular Cattle Chute from Hell. Uff da.
As if that weren't enough, in addition to my regular Mom duties, a friend and I are in the process of starting a new business that entails real estate deals, meetings with bankers, tons of market research, paperwork and spreadsheets out the wazoo and a big, fat, healthy dose of sheer panic. Good times!
So, there you have it. My next 12 weeks, chock-full of farm housewifferey (did I just invent that word?), lava-hot mason jars and self-imposed stress and deadlines. Hold my feet to the fire to get this stuff done, guys and gals, because that nap is looking better with each passing minute.
...after the last wheelbarrow full of tomatoes is canned, the last of our three-roosters-too-many are culled and sent to the stock pot, and I've had a day or two to straight-up veg out on the couch, I'll be posting a long overdue giveaway!
Because I'm still presently freaking out all a-tither over getting a ton of produce picked and put up, I don't yet have my lineup of goodies selected, but don't be surprised to see some jam, salsa, sauce and maybe a knit or two in there. More details and the pics of the goods are forthcoming... soon (I hope.)
This represents a wee sampling of what I'm working on these days. Mercy!
Our trio of piglets, Baykin, Proscuitto and Porkchop (aka Chopz), are rapidly approaching their date with the abattoir. I find myself eager, relieved and a little sad too, but mostly, relieved.
Back when they were still cuteish.
These three little piggies joined the Boggy Hollow crew back in mid-March, just eight weeks old and weighing in at about 30 pounds each. Ever since that moment, it seems to have been their primary mission in life to eat us out of house and home. We have no real way of knowing what they weigh now until the deed is done and their hanging weight is pronounced, but if they're not at least 200-pounds each, I'm a monkey's uncle. Specifically, asad, angry, idiot-who-spent-her-last-dime-on-pig-food, variety of monkey's uncle.
The ideal weight and age for harvesting a hog is 225-270 pounds, more or less, and at around 6 months of age. These three are nearly 8 months old, and hopefully 225 or better each, so the time has most definitely arrived for them to move on.
Even if they're short on weight, there are others issues in play that make this the right time to harvest. At the top of our list is that Winter is coming.
Can I get a what-what for my Game of Thrones peeps?
More specifically, mud season is on it's way back, and slogging 40+ pounds of feed per day through shin-deep liquid clay mud has limited appeal.
Secondly, the pigs are eating an outrageous amount of food these days. Their rations have been increased to one 40# bag of rolled barley per day, all of our (and our friends') windfall apples (5ish pounds more or less per day?) and anything coming out of the garden that is past it's prime/less than perfect, such as blimp-sized zucchini, mouse-nibbled cantaloupe, corn stovers and aphid-ravaged kale, plus their daily ration of our fresh, raw, goats milk. In the past, we've supplemented their rations with bakery outlet bread products, but the failure of many grain crops this year and last has made laying hands on previously unwanted leftovers nearly impossible most months.
I'm competing with cattle ranchers, chicken farmers and food banks for the day-old and otherwise not-fit-for-sale (often utterly perfect), increasingly scarce calories, and so, with "terminal" stock that is near harvest anyway, I gladly bow out of the fray.
Lastly - flavorful, clean, humanely raised pork (and all meat for that matter) is expensive. Our family of four eats about one pound of meat/protein per evening meal, at an average cost of $8 per pound. That figure factors in that we've been eating a fair amount of grass-finished ground beef (at around 5.99/lb) and occasionally a nicer cut of beef, lamb or pork (up to 10.99/lb or so) with our own wild-caught seafood (salmon, crab) sprinkled in the mix to spread things out. Conservatively, that puts our monthly meat budget at around $240 per month, for just a single 4-ounce serving per person, per day. The pigs are presently eating one $13 bag of barley per day. Alas, the time to pay the piper has arrived.
At 7 1/2 months old, they still look kinda cute, right? After you nearly lose a few fingers to their eager maws, maybe not so much. Their charm fades pretty quickly after that...
The bottom line is, it's time for us to stop feeding the pigs, and time for them to start feeding us.
With any luck, our 1 piggy (the other 2 are going to our Mamas) will yield us enough pork to put beautiful, high quality meat on our table until this time next year. Whether or not we'll find ourselves raising and harvesting our own pigs at this time next year depends completely on how this pork tastes, and how the numbers shake out when all is said and done.
I do offer my thanks to these odd little (huge) critters for the nutrition and sustenance that they will provide for my family, and for the experience that we've had with them this Spring and Summer. Our critters help us grow as farmers and as people. They teach us so much.
Many thanks, mis puercos. Update 9/21/13 - The butcher shop called, the piggies' hanging weights were 170, 170 & 207 pounds. Using my marginal math skills, at a total cost of about $1300 (initial purchase price, feed, kill fee), divided by the estimated final "wrapped" weight (70% of hanging weight - 547 x .7= 383lbs) equals roughly 3.39/pound. Not a huge win, financially, but when compared to the average cost of the cheapest cut per pound of organic/non-CAFO pork that is commercially available, (which is usually the ground, unseasoned pork), we'll enjoy a savings of about $3.40 per pound. On the "nicer" cuts, the savings go up.
Speaking strictly financially, this was a worthwhile endeavor for us. We'll be keeping just one of the pigs for ourselves, the 207-pounder. The other two are destined for the freezers of our parental units.
So, based upon my voodoo math - 207lbs x .7 = 144.9 (the "wrapped weight"), times our cost of $3.39/lb = $491.21. Our year's supply of pork will have cost us $491 instead of $983 - a $492 savings. :)
It's been just over a month since we got the very first few starts and seeds in our garden - radishes, kale, lettuces and peas - most of which started off on such rocky footing that I wondered if we'd started too late, chosen the wrong varieties, or otherwise blown it again this year.
In spite of my concerns, we kept plugging still more seeds and starts into the garden beds and watering everything each evening just before heading in for the night. It's a really nice "chore" when compared to some of our other glorious options, like feeding the pigs. In the garden, you get to calmly walk amongst little green things and flowers, doing a mental inventory of any changes that have occurred in the past 24 hours, or any that will need to be made in the next 24. All the while, swallows and robins swoop and dart overhead, catching mosquitoes and gnats. It's extremely peaceful.
Even being that connected with a place, you don't always really notice the very small daily changes. It's sort of like raising kids - you take your eye off of them for a minute, and suddenly they're huge. Our garden pulled just this sort of presto-change-o on me this weekend. We left town for just 3 nights, only to come back to our very own greenery jungle.
Everything grew appreciably in just those few days. The beet tops have grown by inches and they're starting to put on some root as well. The lettuces and kale need a good, heavy-handed trim, lest they go to seed, and the peas, finally recovered from the trauma of transplantation, have started blooming like crazy and setting pods. But the runaway success, the beast in my garden are the radishes. Behold -
A 2-ounce Cherry Belle and a 3-ounce French Breakfast radish.
These beauties were planted from seed just 35 days ago. Gotta love that fast turnaround! We still have several dozen in the ground that urgently need picking, so it looks like our little pipe dream of a small, roadside farm stand could be just a day or two away from becoming a reality. We won't have much variety - just the radishes, kale, lettuces, oregano, lavender and some eggs - but boy, what a long time in coming this little project has been! Farmer Chelle is one happy little camper right now. :)
Over the course of the past week or so, it has become increasingly clear to us that the apples and pears were ready to come down. In fact, Scarlet and I would go and gather the windfalls each evening to add to our goats' rations, and were noticing a definite increase in the amount of apples committing hara-kiri each day. Picking time was nigh.
But picking apples from our non-dwarf, very old apples trees is not a task to be undertaken lightly. This is no picturesque, Pinterest-photo op. This is a bark-chunks-to-the-eye, ladder-teetering, crinked-neck, farmer versus tree, battle royale.
Apple to the cheekbone - coming up!
Our tallest apple tree is in excess of 15 feet high. And in the torturous way of many fruit trees, seems to grow it's biggest, most perfects fruits in the unreachable branches located 15 feet up, dead center. Basically, they're completely inaccessible, which isn't to say that we ever learn to just leave those apples alone. Nope, our cider-greed blinds us to the futility of our pursuit.
This year, we judiciously decided to throw in the towel (for now) after managing to pick and knock down 140+ pounds of cider and sauce-worthy apples, leaving another frustratingly impossible to reach 30-50 pounds still in the trees.
We also managed to collect another 13 pounds of smooshed, bug chomped or otherwise "imperfect" apples to share with our goats.
The goaties' share of the goods.
Our share! :)
As if our epic apple haul weren't enough, we also finally had a pear crop. Granted, at just 20 pounds, it wasn't huge, but when measured against our previous best-ever crop of one lonely little pear, we counted ourselves exceedingly lucky to end up so flush with fruit.
Aren't they purty?!?
With the picking being done, we now enter phase two of the fruit-a-palooza; washing, peeling and juicing. Hooboy!
With 160+ pounds of apples and pears that will need dealing with, I predict a busy week, filled with intense paring knife, apple peeler and steam juicer usage. I'll have to keep my eye on the prize - that first pint of ice cold homemade cider.
Like last weekend's jam-o-rama, this fruit-a-palooza may require a little external motivation to get through. Cue the motivational montage!
Our apples are a little early this year, but at the rate that they're falling and changing color, if I don't get my stuff in gear and pick them soon, the deer will end up getting more of them than we will.
Not that I mind sharing a few with the deer. Especially after the apples have begun to ferment a little. Last year Bill saw an apple-intoxicated buck doing a twirly, fancy-dance in the neighbor's field. Here in the Hollow, we take our yuks where we can find them. ;)
Scarlet and I made a weensy dent in the apple onslaught today. We picked 10 1/2 pounds for us, and gathered probably 3 or 4 pounds of windfalls for the goaties.
Today's haul :)
Our four apple trees and our single pear tree seem to be going slightly bonkers this year. We're planning on taking full advantage of that fact, and making a good deal of applesauce and hard cider (and eventually, apple cider vinegar) from our lone crop.
Since our pear tree has never given us more than one or two pears in a season, I'm totally inexperienced with regard to when exactly I should pick them, and how soon after picking they need to be used. Does anyone have any experience with growing and harvesting pears that they'd care to share? As of today, they still feel rock hard, so I don't think they're ready yet, but, I honestly don't know.
The apples, though, they need picking sooner rather than later. I guesstimate that the 10+ pounds that we got today might be an eighth of our crop, maybe less. Naturally, the biggest and most gorgeous fruits are those that are way the heck out of reach, a good 15 feet or so up. D'oh!
If we can't get them, eventually the wind will knock them down, but by then they'll be deer/goat food. As long as somebody gets to enjoy these beauties, it's all good to me.
We're doing our traditional end-of-Summer freezer clean out. Right about this time, when all of the garden goodies, berries, and -when we're lucky- fish and shellfish, are rolling in, I try to make room by using up the dregs of last year's bounty.
In addition to the Summer boom of veggies and fish, we're getting half a pig from husband's Aunt & Uncle. This is the second time we've bought their home raised pork and it is AMAZING. However, that means that I need to make even more room in the freezer. So, this is a no-holds-barred round of UioLi. Here we go!
What I need to use-
*5 pounds ham (from last year's pig)
*1 - 6 pound rooster
*Untold amounts of frozen berries - blueberries, blackberries, huckleberries, Oregon Grapes, Salal, etc.
Magically transformed into-
*Sliced ham for lunchmeat
*Ham bone broth
*Roast chicken - I learned the hard way that a cranky old rooster makes for incredibly tough meat, no matter how hard you try to cook him up right. :(
*Chicken Stock
*Blueberry and Marionberry Buttermilk Waffles
*Goat Cookies (uses berries)
*Fruit Leather
The ham has been baked and sliced, and the remaining odd bits - the bone, skin, fat, etc., have been set to simmer with celery, carrots, onions & fresh thyme. I also added a dash of homemade apple cider vinegar to help de-mineralize the bones, releasing the nutrients into the broth. I'm then freezing the broth in silicone freezer trays, then bagging up the broth blocks for use later in soups and sauces.
The leftover roasted rooster bits are also simmering with a shallot and some celery, and turning into a nice, rich broth. If I can scare up the ingredients, I might have to make some pho soup with this guy. :)
Literally seconds after this pic was snapped, Mr. Meanie came at Livy with spurs up. True to his moniker, he was a butthead to the last.
After:
Moments away from becoming soupy goodness.
Thank you, Mr. Meanie, for being mean, and therefore easing my conscience in deciding to turn you into dinner. You may have been a grumpy little pain in the butt when you were alive, but you sure made a lovely pot of soup, and gave the girls a surprising amount of educational fun time vis-Ã -vis: your innards. May your days in birdy Heaven be filled with torn up hot dog buns and good lookin' hennies beyond number. ;)
My apples are ripe! My apples are ripe! At least as far as I can tell, they are.
Besides hardness, how does one determine the ripeness of an apple? I figure that since they are essentially leaping off of one of my trees, that at least that tree must be ready to go. And so I picked a few today, 5 pounds worth, which didn't even make a dent in that side of that tree. I'm excited for this harvest. This quantity of apples is a wonderful gift for many reasons. They will become applesauce, fruit leather, snacks for the bunnies, and more. But I have to admit that the one apple incarnation that stands head and shoulders above the rest is Bill's hard cider. Some have described Bill's cider as strong. Some have gone so far as to call it hallucinogenic. It packs a punch.
So as soon as we acquire either a steam juicer or a fruit press, we'll have ourselves a little harvest-fest and crank through some apples. And a few months after that - hopefully by Christmas - we'll be knocking back some Boggy Hollow cider. :)
I planted beets this year as a small experiment. I only planted about 1/4 of one raised bed's worth, but in their little corner of earth, they grew like mad.
So, while I wouldn't call this a bumper crop by anyone's definition, we ended up with more beets that I know what to do with at the moment, but not really enough to justify canning them. I think that I'm going to try root cellaring.
Our soon-to-be new old house was built in 1925, and has a HUGE dug-out basement. The basement stays fairly cool and (for better or worse) a bit damp; ideal conditions for a root cellar. Based upon my obsessive research on the subject, I've come to learn that the best way to store an uncooked beet is to trim off the greens (leave 1 inch of stem to prevent "bleeding"), and bury the beets in a crate filled with clean, slightly damp sand. Making sure that they stay cool @ 32-40 degrees, and lightly misting the sand regularly, the beets should last for at least 4-5 months.
As for the trimmed greens, what doesn't get fed immediately to the bunnies and chickens gets chopped and dried in my food dehydrator for supplemental green fodder for the critters come wintertime, when green things become scarce. The greens are actually more nutritionally dense than the roots, containing vitamins A, B1, B2, B6 & C, and even more iron than spinach.
April is here and my yard and garden are starting to show it. My cherry tree's blossoms are just starting to pop open, and my rhododendrons are going crazy. I was also able to harvest my first "crop" of the year, rhubarb.
I pulled just 4 stalks today, just shy of a pound's worth, and will pull a few more once or twice a week, washing, chopping and freezing it as I go, stockpiling it for future desserts and wine making. Rhubarb wine was the very first wine that I ever attempted, and it turned out (if I may say so, myself) mighty fine. Just ask Jeremiah, he'll tell you.
We had ourselves a mighty bit of wind and rain here in Western Washington last night. So much so, that I could barely sleep for fear that the next wicked gust would topple my sad and dying ash trees, and send them straight through my bedroom window. I probably needn't have worried overly much about that, since the trees in question are so thouroughly rotted that in the event that they did fall and strike something on the way down, they would probably just explode in a shower of spongy bark chunks. But I digress from the point of this post.
The result of last evening's mighty wind was to remove the last of the leaves from my trees, leaving my yard suddenly, startling bare. In such a state of nakedness - the yard, not me - I found a few hidden treasures. I was scrounging up some old bricks that we salvaged from our very old chimney to shore up one of my hothouses that has lately been under daily assault by the chickens. In collecting the bricks I happened to look up and see some completely unexpected kiwis. Amazing!
The plants leaves, which are at this time of the year about the same color as the fruit, had been removed to reveal our little surprise fruit. We found seven in total, which is pretty awesome, considering that our male kiwi plant, has yet again died. I don't know if "he" managed to fertilize our enormous female kiwi before biting the dust or if, as has happened in the past, a bee has made it's way from my neighbor's yard to mine with a bit of kiwi pollen on board. We also found a little four inch delicata squash near the kiwi plant. I hadn't noticed that a vine had wandered over there, but it obviously must have.
I love little surprises like that! Alas, my joy will be short lived, since now that the leaves are all down, I have no more excuses to delay raking them up.
By the way - kiwi pics by Olivia - copyright 2009. :)
Bill & I finally cleaned out the tomato and squash beds today, and in so doing, grabbed up the last of the tomatoes, ripe or not, and tomatillos. We also discovered our first chili pepper and one scraggling onion. I figured that I might as well just chop it all up and cook it down, since I didn't have the quantity or inclination to try and make a proper salsa out of it, and so I did just that. Viola! Total Laziness Sauce (aka End of the Garden Sauce).
I basically just roughly chopped everything, threw it in the pot and seasoned the bejeezus out of it - cumin, red pepper flakes, sea salt, chipotle, etc. After it cooked down, I took the ol' immersion blender to the whole mess, then poured the sauce through a mesh sieve and that was that. It came out very much like an enchilada sauce, but Bill has visions of dressing some pulled pork with it. Whatever - I'm just glad that we were able to eek one last batch of tomatoey goodness out of the garden before putting it to sleep, and with a minimum of effort on my part.
Since most everything in the garden has lately (or very nearly) given up the ghost, I’ve decided to go ahead and tally up my harvest totals for the spring and summer seasons. My numbers are very approximate being that I am far from perfect in the recordkeeping department, and taking into account kid and chicken pilferage…my totals are of the more or less variety.
Anyhoo, here we go-
Rhubarb – 5 lbs, 2 oz Cilantro – 6 cups Mints – 3 cups Strawberries – 6 pints +/- (These have also just begun fruiting again, but these latest berries will be included on my Fall/Winter totals) Shelling Peas – 3 cups +/- Lettuce/Arugula – 7 cups +/- (Most went to seed very soon after planting.) Kale – unrecorded – but still producing Wild, foraged cherries – 7 lbs, 5 oz Basil – 3 cups +/- Baby Yukon Gold Potatoes – 2 lbs, 11 oz Wild Foraged Berries (Huckleberries, Salmonberries, Trailing Blackberries) – 1 lb, 4 oz Zucchini – 24 lbs, 10oz Blueberries – 1 lb, 10 oz Raspberries – 3 oz (this was a really bad year for my raspberries) Delicata Squash – 11 lbs, 8 oz Vidalia Onions – 8 oz (This is my second year of utterly pathetic onions. I think I’m done with them.) Hazelnuts – 1 lb, 2 oz Wild Himalayan Blackberries – 4 lbs, 8 oz Concord Grapes – 51+ lbs!!! Cantaloupe – 12 oz (This was our first try. They were tiny, but SO good!) Tomatoes by type- Slicing – 32 lbs, 9 oz Cooking – 30 lbs, 14 oz Tomatillos – 9 lbs, 8 oz
For a grand total of – 172+ lbs grown and 13+ lbs foraged. These totals don’t include our very modest seafood take for this year, two pink salmon, five red rock crab, plus the odd trout. This being my first year or recordkeeping in detail, I don’t really have anything to compare these numbers to. However, I am certain that this is the single best year that I’ve had for both tomatoes and grapes, both of which went bonkers. Besides being the first year that we have kept detailed records of our garden’s yield, this year’s garden was also a learning experience in that we tried quite a few new crops, used primarily our own compost as soil/fertilizer, and began chicken keeping. We’ve learned at least as much about what doesn’t work in our garden as we’ve learned what does. For instance, tomatoes and squash are obvious shoo-ins for next year’s garden, whereas onions and brussel sprouts will not be returning, due to their disappointing yields.
As a continuation of this year’s experiments, I have, for the first time, planted a few late summer crops for a Fall/Winter harvest, including carrots, arugula, cilantro and snap peas. So, God and weather willing, we will have some fresh veggies and greens to brighten out days in the depths of winter.
I will continue to keep records of my slowly trickling-in fruits and veggies, because my inner Geek compels me to do so, but for all intents and purposes, I consider the garden wrapped up for the year, and not a moment too soon – I’m whooped. ;-)
