It is crabapple season! It has been a good year for crabapples. After several hot, dry summers, this summer was mild and wet. It made everything from harvesting the crabapples (they pulled off easily and the air was free of the gnats that typically plague us in the second half of August) to removing the stems easier and faster this year. The crabapples were plump, a beautiful rosy red, and were produced in abundance. What a difference a bit of rain makes.
Taken August 12th...
We picked one large bucket and a small grocery bag's worth on August 15th. There are still plenty of them left on the tree (why are the biggest, rosiest ones always wayyy at the top, out of reach?), but we figured this harvest would be enough for us.
Washed and de-stemmed.
First batch in the steam juicer.
Ta-daa! Crabapple juice and the first batch of jelly. Yesterday's modest harvest of crabapples yielded 9 L of juice. Some will be made into jelly, some saved to drink, and some shared with friends. Any crabapples that aren't harvested from the tree will end up in our garden plots and/or given to R's brother's goats as a treat.
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.
Welcome, September! This will be a quick update with pictures taken on the fly during the last few days.
I decided to make a second batch of Green Tomato Chow Chow, this time using apple cider vinegar in place of white wine vinegar and adding a bit more brown sugar, to boot! Not the clearest picture, but voilà. The batch that included white wine vinegar will be shared with family and friends, mostly on the other side of the country. (Canada Post must love people like me at this time of year...)
The garlic has finished curing and has been trimmed up and organized. The kind pictured is Red Russian, a tried-and-true, hardy, and dependable variety.
The sunflowers are in their glory, loaded with pollen and buzzing with bees.
Dahlias
More sunflowers...love the little blooms on this one.
The first carrot of the season (Red Chantenay). They are juicy and flavourful.
Galeux D'Eysines winter squash
Flagg dry pole beans
Gold Harvest cooking peas, dried down and ready to store.
Fisher's Earliest Paste. I am looking forward to saving seeds from this variety!
Indigo Pear Drops - still dark purple, they haven't begun developing the gold blush they have on the bottom once ripe.
Lower Salmon River winter squash
Russian Mammoth sunflowers. These are supposed to be large, single heads atop single stems, but early in the season, deer chomped off the developing head. It stalled for a while, then recovered and shot up four new heads.
Swiss Giant pansies
The south garden
Another Russian Mammoth sunflower, this one in the east garden.
It is a mild (17 degrees C), rainy afternoon here today. The garlic is on week two of curing in the shed. I'm keen to get the bulbs trimmed up, labeled, and bagged, but there is plenty in the garden to occupy my attention until the garlic is ready to be processed.
After a few less-than-stellar years for our crabapple tree, this year it produced fruit tightly bunched along the branches, like grapes. I made two batches of crabapple jelly this week. The colour is so pretty!
In addition to the jelly, I was also able to can batches of Zesty Zucchini relish, Sweet Zucchini relish, Dixie relish, Dill relish, and Green Tomato Chow Chow. I have memories of the delicious chow my grandmother used to make and have wanted to try making it myself for years. The good news is that the recipe made a lot (10.5 half-pints) and it tastes great. The unfortunate news is that the recipe called for white wine vinegar which, it turns out, I am sensitive to (are sulphites the culprit?). I would love to make a second batch using another recipe. We'll see how many green tomatoes there are to work with come harvest time.
Here is a very similar recipe for green tomato chow chow to the one linked above:
A walk around the garden...
Bellestar - While the tomatoes aren't as large as I expected, the plants are very productive and are early (unlike some varieties, which are described as being early but aren't...I'm looking at you, Dwarf Arctic Rose!). Very compact plants, too. We are already picking Bellestars as they ripen to enjoy in salads, stews, and on sandwiches. The tomatoes are quite meaty. I think they'll be great for dehydrating, sauces, and canning.
Dwarf Audrey's Love - I am so glad I gave these a second chance! The plants are more productive than I expected and many of the tomatoes are larger than I expected. Almost no BER at all. The plants are compact, too, and seem to be doing well in containers.
Taxi - an early, productive determinate tomato variety. Round, bright yellow when ripe. Mild flavour, but it looks pretty in salads or on a vegetable tray.
Fiesta beans - a large variety of dry bush bean with runners. The plants and runners are larger/taller than I expected, about 2.5 feet in height.
Galeux D'Eysines - I don't know what happened this year with my tried, true, and (usually) reliable Galeux D'Eysines. We will only get 2 or 3 from the plants this year, and it seems like they are slow to develop. Typically, we get around 8! Funny how you come to just assume certain things will always do well. Hopefully, the Burpee's Butterbush (planted in various spots around the garden) and Lower Salmon River (that I planted as an afterthought in a partially shady section of the south garden) pull through and make up for the lack of Galeux D'Eysines.
Giant Musselburgh leeks - so glad I finally mulched these. They love it! A small patch of leeks for our personal use, this year. I learned the hard way, after planting loads of them in previous years, that they are somewhat labour-intensive to process for storage. Also, the majority of people I offered to share them with declined because they'd never cooked with leeks before and were reluctant to try to 'figure it out'. My city-dwelling friends and family were baffled when they heard this. At $7-9 per bunch of 3 at their grocery stores, they would have gladly scooped up the extra leeks!
Morning Glories
Peach Melba nasturtiums. The largest and healthiest of the nasturtium varieties in the garden this year.
Bathtub pansies
Leek patch pansies
Sage
Teddy Bear sunflowers
I'm not sure what variety this sunflower is, but it looks like a lady with short, windswept blonde hair in this picture.
