First Leeks

 

 

 

 

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.

Beautiful Savages

Okay, savages is too strong a word.  But munchers isn't strong enough.

Opportunists, perhaps?

   We have been having deer come by daily now, sometimes several times a day.  The days are getting shorter and the nights are cooler.  Maybe they sense autumn is coming and they are trying to bulk up now.  Earlier this week, we had a mamma deer, three adolescents, and two very young ones all here in one visit.  They were adorable, though I was still glad I had the tomato plants and bush beans covered with sheets.  They have left little of the sunflowers, nasturtiums, kale, asters, and pansies.  They also managed to eat a few tomatoes and part of a large tomato plant that wasn't covered.

   Midway through the summer, I potted a little volunteer tomato plant that I couldn't bring myself to compost.  The garden was loaded with volunteer tomato plants, volunteer asters, and volunteer sunflowers.  The little tomato plant settled in nicely, developing flowers and, eventually, two tomatoes.   

 

 

   To my great disappointment, I went outside a few mornings ago to find that a deer had stripped it bare during the night.  Arhg!  It looks even more pathetic than Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.

 

   To add insult to injury, one of the French pumpkins had also been chewed.  Deer had never touched our squash or pumpkins before!  I covered the pumpkins with several layers of floating row cover and harvested them at the end of the week.

 

 

   On the upside, the deer haven't yet discovered this cheerful little "peek-a-boo" sunflower nestled among the tomatoes.  :)  

 

 

Little Galeux D'Eysines

   We'll only have a few this year, and they will be smaller than usual, but we're grateful for the ones that we do get.  Here is the first little Galeux D'Eysine of the harvest.  It seems like the perfect picture to post on a full-moon day.

 

 

Sunny September and A Batch For Me

 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.

 

 

Herbs (L-R: Flat-leaf parsley, pineapple mint, oregano, pineapple sage)

 

Oregano, up close

  

Dwarf Speckled Heart tomato plants

Dwarf Speckled Heart

 

 

Cosmos ('Sensation Mix')

Taxi tomatoes

 

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.

 

Dahlias