Leisurely Harvest and Honey Garlic

    Harvesting has taken place at a leisurely pace, compared to past years.  Here it is, September 20th, and we still have not had an overnight frost!  When I began gardening, I found myself on more than one occasion madly running around the yard in freezing rain - sometimes at the end of August! - picking green tomatoes and boxing them to ripen in the kitchen.  Still green dry-variety bush bean plants were often pulled and hung in the house to finish drying.  

   I have been covering the tomato plants at night for weeks, not because of frost risk (which would be the norm), but to protect them from hungry deer.  There are still dry bush bean plants maturing and tomato plants outside.  The leeks and carrots (particularly the Red Chantenay) are doing well.  Most of the herbs (except dill) are still growing, the Bachelor Buttons and Cosmos are still blooming (much to the bees' delight), and the 10+ foot sunflowers have been left untouched.

   Winners (i.e., good producers/performers) in the garden this year were cabbage, zucchini, leeks, cooking peas, and dill.  Underperformers were peppers, snap beans and, surprisingly, the winter squash.  Middle-of-the-road were the carrots, lettuce, and snow peas.  Tomato production was all over the place; some varieties produced buckets and buckets of nearly perfect tomatoes while others produced two or three good tomatoes and dozens ruined by blossom end rot.

   A fairly new experience for us is having so many tomatoes either ripen on the plants or ripen quickly once indoors.  It's nicer than having to wait for weeks for green tomatoes to ripen, but it also means there is pressure to get them processed (canned, frozen, or dehydrated) in a hurry.   So far, I've dehydrated two large (liter) jars of tomatoes and have canned 17.5 L of tomato sauce.  I'll make notes about which varieties were the standouts for production this year in my "Tomato Round-Up" post.

 

   Another advantage to having so many tomatoes ripen early is that seed-saving could be wrapped up before the end of September.  At the moment, there are little saucers of tomato seeds on coffee filters stationed all over the kitchen.  They should be dry and ready to package in a week or so.

 

 

   Last year, we decided to try honey-fermented garlic.  I made a small jar, unsure of how it would turn out or whether we would like it.  It was delicious, so we made plans to buy a bucket of raw honey once the garlic bulbs were cured this year and make a larger batch.  I love how quickly the cloves turn golden yellow and how the honey thins, fizzes, and froths like pop once it starts fermenting in earnest.  In total, we have about 2 pints on the go.  Once the garlic patch has been planted and we know how much extra garlic there is to work with, we might make some more.