Stored Foods

I finally was able to take the time to evaluate what all has been preserved in our freezer and what we have canned.

In our freezer:
Strawberry Freezer Jam - 11 half pints
Apples - 11.5 lbs.

Berry Freezer Jam - 17 half pints
Potato Leek Soup - 5 quarts (I improvise a bit with this by making half of the water be chicken broth and we always add some cheese and diced ham)
Diced Tomatoes - 15 quarts

Applesauce - 7 quarts
Corn - 15 pints
Blueberries - 12 cups
Rhubarb - 9 cups

Zucchini - 9.5 cups

Bell Peppers - 5 quarts
Tomato Sauce - 5 quarts
Borlotti Beans - 2.5 quarts
Lima Beans - 2.5 quarts
Sugar Snap Peas - 5.25 quarts

Peas - 6 cups
Poblano Peppers - 1 quart
Jalapeno Peppers - 1 pint

Banana Peppers - 1 cup
Medium Peppers - 1 pint
Cayenne Peppers - 1 cup

Red Hot Peppers - 1/2 cup
Black Hungarian Hot Peppers - 1/2 cup
In our pantry:
Peaches - 11 quarts
Green Beans - 31 pints (plus 2 we have already eaten)
Salsa - 8 half pints (this turned out to be a sweet and spicy recipe, so next year, we need to cut back a bit on the sugar)
Hot Salsa - 2 pints
Peach Melba Jam - 7 half pints
Apple Butter - 2 1/2 pints (We tried a crockpot apple butter recipe that really did not go well!)

New Residents and Fall

We were sad to say goodbye to the hopping Worthington farmers' market a few weeks ago and now we are getting down to freezing temperatures. A few days ago, we pulled the last of the unripe tomatoes and the peppers to save them. We will be wrapping the tomatoes in newspaper to help them ripen, which will give us fresh tomatoes for some time to come. In addition, we had to drain the rain barrel, which was a complex issue with our little comet goldfishes inside. We drained it to about the halfway point and then tipped the barrel over and caught the fish as they shot out. If you recall, we started the season with 8 fish (7 Erics and a Bob) and we knew we had one fatality early on. Other than that, we were unsure of what was inside the barrel. We ended up with (drumroll please.....) three fish! It is not shocking because of the fluctuating environment of the barrel, but it was funny that there were no bodies. Out of all of them, we had a white one, a white and orange one, and an orange one. As you can see, they have now taken up residence in the house. I am notorious for killing fish (not on purpose of course), and it looks like these three hardy ones will still struggle inside. The cats have taken a keen interest in the fish bowls despite our best attempts to protect them. We also have already had to learn the important lesson that one bowl does not offer enough space and oxygen for three fish, so we had to divide them into two bowls. We thought about getting a big tank with fancy filters, but in the end, budgets are tight and there is only so much money we are willing to put into 3 fish that cost 30 cents a piece. So for now, they will have to be split up... They have also earned individual names since they survived this long. Orange is Bill, orange and white is Eric, and white is Sookie (can you tell we are True Blood fans?).

Plant Summaries

I wanted to write up summaries that showed the performance of the crops we grew this summer.  Below highlights what we noticed…

Black Diamond Yellow Flesh Watermelon – BIG healthy plants that produced multiple melons. The melons themselves were juicy and beautiful but not very sweet. Part of the problem probably came from us not watering frequently enough. We harvested one full size melon and will be getting about 3 additional small melons by the end of the season.

Crenshaw Melons – The plants began very big and healthy but were killed by the Cucumber Beetle and bacterial wilt, so we never got any melons.

Amish Paste Tomato – Very large, beautiful plants with lots of tomatoes that look like big Roma tomatoes. The fruits were easy to peel and meaty. We love these for sauces and salsas!!!

Ernie’s Plump Tomatoes – These plants were not as lush with leaves and produced significantly less tomatoes. These tomatoes tended to be much harder to peel (even when blanched) and we ended up with a lot more of these rotting because they seemed to be more susceptible to bugs.

Chadwick Cherry Tomatoes – We did one of these just for the heck of it in a pot and it developed into a big plant with lots of large cherry tomatoes. These are bigger than the average cherry tomato, but they were very tasty.

Hungarian Yellow Wax Hot Peppers – These were our most productive hot peppers. The plants were kind of small but there were always one or two peppers developing whenever we checked the plants.

Jalapeno Peppers – These plants struggled and we really didn’t get anything off of them. Many of them died so we supplemented our hot peppers with other varieties which seemed to struggle as well.

California Wonder Pepper – We had one plant pull through the season and now that we are about to get our first frost, we are about to get our first pepper. Funny and sad, but next year we will definitely go for a different variety because based on feedback from other gardeners, this variety is notoriously unproductive.

Black Seeded Simpson – These were fairly dedicated germinators but they went to seed before we were able to harvest much of anything off of them.

Snowball Cauliflower – The plants germinated well and grew into huge, healthy plants but they never developed any crowns!

Iceburg Lettuce – We had to buy seedlings of these because our home-germinated plants all died. The plants began to grow nicely but they bolted before developing heads.

Caribe Potatoes – These all germinated fairly well, grew into beautiful plants and gave us as many potatoes as they could. Unfortunately, we needed to give them more room, because six-inch deep soil just doesn’t give much room for potatoes to grow.

Appaloosa Beans – These plants all struggled. We got a few successful grown up plants, but out of all of them, we ended up getting ¼ cup of dry beans in the end. We tried to supplement with another variety of white dry bean, but that was not productive either.

Henderson Bush Lima Bean – These plants germinated very well and grew into healthy plants, but we had some sort of pest that liked chewing up the leaves. We missed out on the first round of harvest for these beans and we only got a handful of beans in the end.

Kentucky Wonder Bush Bean – These plants germinate fairly well but again they suffered from a bug that liked to munch the leaves. The plants ended up providing us with tasty beans for a few meals but nothing really significant.

Danvers Half Long Carrots – These seeds germinated very well and grew into the biggest carrots they could be. Unfortunately, that meant they only got to be about 4-6 inches long because of the limited bed space.

Homemade Pickles – These plants germinated very well and grew into big healthy plants that produced more cucumbers than we knew what to do with for a while. Sadly, after about a month of producing we got Cucumber Beetles and bacterial wilt that killed all of them very quickly.

Thomas Laxton Garden Peas – These peas germinated the best of the 3 varieties and grew into the biggest plants with lots of pods, but the pods were all fairly small. We probably got a cup of shelled peas out of these plants.

Oregon Giant Snow Peas – These were the second best germinators and were by far the most productive. We always had some snow pods to munch on while the plants were growing and they were very tasty.

Sugar Snap Peas – These did not germinate well at all and did not produce very much. We got a few handfuls of pea pods off of all the plants we grew which was very disappointing.

Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach – These germinated very well and were tasty based on the few leaves we got to eat. Unfortunately, they bolted very quickly, so we hardly had any harvest time.

Zucchini – We grew 3 gorgeous plants from seed, which germinated very well. We got one big zucchini off of one plant and that was it for the harvest. The plants ended up being the last to succumb to the Cucumber Beetles and bacterial wilt.

Onions – We planted onion sets and the limited space of the beds resulted in the onions we harvested being little bigger than ping pong balls (those were the big ones), so that didn’t work out so well.

Strawberry Freezer Jam and Green Beans

Another weekend of canning and definitely many more to come.  A week or so ago, we canned 7 pints of green beans and this last weekend, we purchased around 4 pounds more and got 12 pints out of that.  We followed the guidelines from PickYourOwn.com for canning green beans and got all 19 jars to seal successfully.  We put salt in our beans since the last time we canned these we quickly realized that we love salty canned green beans!  This many cans means we can have a pint every 2 weeks, hopefully that will be enough (we both are quite fond of canned green beans).  Our green bean liquid did seem to decrease quite significantly in the canning process, which concerns me a little, but since they all sealed, fingers crossed the beans will be okay. 

We lucked out and got 4 quarts of strawberries at market.  One quart I froze whole after cutting off the tops so we can make at least one batch of strawberry breakfast bread.  The rest went into the strawberry freezer jam.  We tried the recipe from CDKitchen, which like the raspberry freezer jam doesn’t call for pectin.  After eating this jam, I would definitely try adding the pectin because it behaves more like a sauce than a jam and I would probably cut back on the sugar a little because it is VERY sweet.  With our 3 quarts, we ended up getting 14 half pints of jam, so we are doing quite well on our jam stock.

Peaches and Blueberries

On August 8, Jacob and I tried canning peaches for the first time with relative success.  We purchased a half bushel of peaches and after sacrificing a few to mold and a few to stomachs, we ended up getting 11 quarts of peaches out of the batch.  It probably should have been less than that, because once we filled and sealed them, the peaches floated and since we used a light syrup, we are thinking it was because we didn’t pack them densely enough.  We followed the instructions from PickYourOwn.org for canning and making the syrup (we did the ‘very low calorie’ option).  We had an entertaining time peeling the peaches – some needed to boil a little longer so they were hard to peel – but it’s always really satisfying when you get a peach that the skin just falls off of.  Cutting the peaches into slices was a very juicy mess (we had some lemon juice left in the fridge that we sprinkled on the peaches to keep them from turning brown) and we had some issues with our syrup because a lot of it had evaporated by the time we were ready to boil the peaches AND we had too many peaches for the darn pot!  That was quite tricky and I’m not sure if they all got enough boiling in…We packed the peaches and sealed them in the water bath canner – all sealed successfully!  Hurrah!  We will have a can of peaches per month! 

We also got 5 pounds of blueberries (again some of them went to stomachs before they could be frozen).  We washed them and put them in freezer bags.  We got 12 cups of berries out of that batch, which is enough to make three blueberry pies or some other concoctions. 

We also picked our first watermelon and tomatoes this weekend.  Unfortunately, the watermelon was not ripe…a sad waste that goes to the compost bin.  The tomatoes are beautiful heirlooms that look like big Romas which I am very excited to try!

Watermelons and Green Beans

After ripping out the diseased plants, we put in seeds for plants that should not be affected by wilt (basically  no squash, melons, tomatoes, or peppers).  We stuck in some leeks, lima beans, green beans, and lettuce.  We still have one cucumber plant (on the right) hanging on and producing – we got 3 cucumbers yesterday.  We also have one crenshaw melon plant (on the left) that is trying to produce something, so fingers crossed it can pull through.  The peppers are struggling.  We have only had a few hot peppers and no sweet peppers.  The plants just seem to be burning or just failing to thrive, I’m not sure which.  We have also had something going on with a few of the strawberry plants where they seem to get burnt and dry up even though we give them water.  Thankfully it hasn’t been many – mainly confined to one bed, but it’s still disturbing. 

The second seeding of peas is poking up, which is exciting.  We are currently harvesting cucumbers, green beans, carrots, onions, and raspberries.  We are about to harvest watermelon!  I was watering last night – admiring my stylish pantyhose slings that are supporting the vertical melons as you can see on the right – when I was startled to find a  bowling ball sized melon hiding underneath the vines on the garden bed floor!  I love how the garden can surprise you like that!  Of course,  I’m afraid of picking it too early now.  I know they say to pick it when it sounds hollow, but they always sound hollow to me, so I’ll give it a little more time.  We have lima bean pods filling up and the dry beans have been producing a lot of pods.  However, the garden still only produces enough to supplement what we eat instead of being a main portion, which is a little disappointing considering how much we planted.  The potato plants are dying off which means they will be ready for harvest soon.  The cauliflower (left) doesn’t seem to want to produce.  We got these plants to grow big and beautiful but no head!  Not sure why…  We decided to harvest some carrots and the onions from the raised beds and felt like we had entered a miniature world.  The carrots were all about as fat around as an adult thumb and probably just about that  length!  Then, the onions were about the size of ping pong balls.  I had been skeptical about these two plants since the space is so limited in the beds and I really am not sure what the Square Foot Gardening author was thinking when he said we could grow these.  Lesson learned!  From now on, root veggies will not be grown in the beds (we’ll see what the potatoes did).  The tomatoes are starting to turn red and the plants are taller than me!  As you can see in the photo below which shows the main tomato and lima bean bed, the garden is starting to feel more like a jungle each day, but I can’t say that I mind – better a jungle than a desert!      

A Sad Day for Our Garden

Yesterday was a very destructive day for the garden.  We were on vacation for a week and in that time we lost a battle with cucumber beetles and bacterial wilt that we didn’t even know we were fighting.  Before we left, we had noted that the cucumbers were struggling, so we sprayed them with an organic insecticide, but it was too little too late.  Apparently, the cucumber beetle is a carrier for bacterial wilt.  When they munch on a leaf, the wilt is transmitted and once a plant is infected, there is nothing that can stop it.  The entire plant dies.  Unfortunately, the cucumber beetle is not a picky eater.  They will go for pretty much anything with a yellow flower – zucchini, muskmelons, tomatoes, squash, etc.  When we returned from vacation, all of the cucumbers AND the crenshaw melons had bacterial wilt.  Yesterday, I removed the infected plants (I left one cucumber and two crenshaws that looked like they still had a little strength in them but it’s only a matter of time before they bite the dust).  After that, I realized that at least one of the zucchini plants was swarming with beetles so they were doused with the organic insecticide.  I am anxiously watching over the other two zucchinis and our tomato plants (which are officially taller than me and I am very protective of them).  I am afraid that I am going to have to turn to more conventional insecticides just for this year for this battle simply because we have lost so much already and apparently you need to do the integrated pest management against cucumber beetles from the start of each plant, so it’s too late for a more natural approach.  We were happy that we got so many cucumbers already, but the melons are such a disappointment because we had picked the crenshaw, which are not typically found in farmers’ markets.  No crenshaws for us this year….