preserving the harvest

First try with the Crespo squash!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

It has taken us four years to get to this point!

Four years of trying to grow Crespo squash before finally getting a real harvest out of it.

There were four harvestable squash out of the three vines, though the first one to develop sort of stagnated early on, stayed dark green and never got very big. In the photo above, you can see it in the front row, third from the left.

The largest squash with the damage visible is the big Crespo squash we wanted to make sure to cook first. However, with losing our hot water and having to constantly heat water for washing anything, we didn’t get to it until now.

It was remarkably easy to cut into! I expected to have a harder time of it.

The colour is not only quite a deep orangey-yellow, it actually stained my hands a bit, by the time I finished scooping out the insides and removing the seeds. Which suggests to me that this squash has quite a bit of beta carotene in it.

I cut it into quarters, then cut out the stem, which you can see in the next image, before putting it in the oven. Aside from adding a bit of water to the bottom of the pan, nothing else was done to it. I want to be able to give it a taste without any seasonings, first.

In the last image, you can see the seeds, washed and draining. There were very few seeds that got rejected. I supposed we could roast some for eating, but I don’t actually have any interest in doing that. Later, these seeds will be laid out on a parchment paper lined tray to dry out.

I set the oven for 350F for about an hour before stabbing the pieces with a fork, then adding another 45 minutes. As I write this, they are soft and appear to be cooked through. I’ve shut off the oven and left them in there, just in case there were some undercooked parts I couldn’t reach.

Today, I was actually planning to get some stuff done outside but, while it is warmer than yesterday, it has turned out to be a rainy day.

Sort of.

It’s been raining off and on since last night. It’s supposed to start raining for real at about 7pm and continue raining through to about 10am tomorrow morning. Since some of what I hoped to get done today involved power tools, I decided to postpone it!

There is a bit of concern about the winter sown garden beds. When the seeds were sown, the beds were completely dry and did not get any watering. It’s cool enough that it’s unlikely they will germinate, but if they get wet and don’t germinate, the seeds may rot. If they get wet and do germinate, they may freeze. The heavy leaf mulch, however, should protect them from both possibilities.

I hope.

So today I’m focusing on indoor stuff, but still garden related. We had a box of San Marzano tomatoes in the living room that were fully ripe. Those are now soaking in vinegar water. Later on, I’ll remove the tops and tails, and get them in the crock pot for the night to make tomato sauce. There might be room enough to use some of the whole tomatoes we have in the freezer right now.

Once the oven is free, we have lots of peppers that have ripened and are starting to dehydrate in the living room. Those will get set onto trays to dehydrate fully and faster in the oven. Except, maybe, the hot peppers. There are so many of them. We might instead string them up and hang them above a heat vent, instead.

There was also a large colander in the old kitchen, full of tomatoes that were further along in ripening. Every now and then, I go through the bins and pull out the ones that are blushing and set them in the colander until it’s full. I went through those, setting more San Marzano, and a few mystery compost tomatoes, into a bin for the living room to continue ripening. The cherry tomatoes went into a small colander for general use and snacking in the kitchen. These are the Chocolate and Black Cherry tomatoes in there, a lot of which still need more time to ripen, plus a couple of little red tomatoes from the mystery plant that self seeded among the Red Thumb potatoes. When we harvested the tomatoes before our first frost, that plant had many small tomatoes on it, all still very green. I’m glad to see that they are actually ripening now. Judging from the colour and the size, I am guessing it is from the Mosaic Medley mix we grew in that bed a few years ago. That was a mix of cherry and grape tomatoes. These are so small, though, and with how the clusters were formed, I’m tempted to think they might be Spoon tomatoes. They’re big for Spoon tomatoes, but as something that has self seeded, it’s possible they reached a size they might not reach when grown as transplants.

Well, whatever they are, they are a tomato, and my family likes tomatoes, whatever the variety!

Aside from all of this, I hope to take advantage of today being an indoor day and start editing a couple of videos, including the October garden tour video using footage I recorded on Nov. 1. 😄

But first, lunch – and maybe a taste of that Crespo squash!

The Re-Farmer

Little by little, it’s getting done

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

It is turning out to be a lovely day today! We’re at 19C/66F right now, which is our predicted high of the day, with almost no wind at all. Which means I’ve been able to get some stuff done in the garden! Finally!

The first thing to get done was take down the last of the nets and support stakes on the future trellis bed and around the strawberries. I was surprised to find more strawberry plants have been eaten, though! As near as I can figure, a deer managed to get its heat under the netting on one side.

*sigh*

I had some chicken wire around the side where a hole had been made in the netting. Once everything was cleared, I put the chicken wire over the bed for now. The strawberries – what’s left of them – will be heavily mulched for the winter, but at this point I’m thinking we may need to transplant them closer to the house, where we can more easily keep the deer away. I’ll decide that later.

With all the hardware collected and set aside, I started cleaning up the high raised bed – mostly because it’s easier on the body!

I was expecting to find shallots that I missed harvesting, once I started cleaning up the dead pepper plants, and I was right. I found quite a few, actually, considering how small the bed is.

I’ve decided I will find a place to transplant these and mulch them over the winter, so that next year, we will have shallot seeds.

I removed the grass clipping mulch on the high raised bed and got about half way through digging out weeds and their roots, when I got a message from my brother. He’s on his way over with another load. He plans to cut away some tree branches while he is here, as they have a storage trailer they will be bringing out tomorrow, and they are in the way.

I’m more than happy to get those branches cleared away!

So I paused in the garden to come in and have lunch before he gets here, as I plan to help my brother as much as possible once he gets here.

While I was waiting for my food to heat up, I tended to the dehydrated peppers.

This is three trays of peppers, combined into one. They’re back in the oven for now, while it cools down (we used the “warm” setting at 150F to dehydrate the peppers). Later on, we might pop them into a jar for storage, or perhaps powder them. I’m not the pepper eater, so I will let the family decide which they would prefer.

Time to head back into the main garden area until my brother gets here. Now that all the stakes and netting are down, it should go faster. My goal right now is to prepare as many beds as I can to direct sow into, then cover with leaves for the winter. Hopefully, we will get a head start on the garden next year by doing this, but if it doesn’t work, the beds will still be ready for planting in, in the spring.

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Processing

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Well, we may not have had many yellow peppers in the garden, but now that they are ripening in the living room, we have a LOT of yellow peppers!

I neglected to take any photos, though, so here is a WordPress AI generated version…

I specifically told the AI generator “long slices”, but it gave me rounds, instead. 😄

There are two types of yellow peppers in the short season collection we got. Yellow and orangey-yellow. Once I had them under the kitchen like while washing them, I could finally tell the difference!

I prepped and sliced enough yellow peppers, plus I think one or two orangey-yellow ones, to fill a gallon size freezer bag.

The remaining orangey-yellow ones were starting to dehydrate all on their own, so I sliced those ones super thin and set them to dehydrate in the oven. That got me three 9×13 baking pans, which required a bit of creativity to fit on the two oven racks. I’ve got a tray meant to cook vegetables on the BBQ, so the bottom is perforated, to use as a spacer between two pans on top of each other.

There were other purple and Sweet Chocolate peppers that could have been processed, but I left those for later and got almost all the tomatoes that are in the living room. A few ended up in the compost, as they were over ripe. The rest got washed, then topped and tailed. I was able to fill one gallon size freezer bag with San Marzano, plus some Roma VF (I assume) compost pile tomatoes. Another gallon bag got a mix of the Forme de Coure and what are probably all Black Cherry tomatoes. There might be some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes mixed in there. Once off the vines, I can’t tell them apart.

The bags all went into the small freezer for now. The chest freezer has bins and boxes of ripening tomatoes covering it right now. I go through them regularly and pull out the ones that are ripening the fastest, and move them into my harvesting colander. Once that’s full, they get transferred to the living room to continue ripening.

Eventually, we will be able to combine the contents of bins so that there’s fewer of them, and have easier access to the chest freezer. Moving a bin or two is not an issue. Moving five bins, a box and a colander to get into the freezer it something else entirely!

All in all, that’s a pretty good haul to quickly process, considering these are all things that were harvested early, before they got hit with frost. There are many more tomatoes ripening, including the ones from the compost pile that look like Indigo Blue Chocolate, though I suppose some might be Black Beauties, from last year’s garden. The basin of unripe hot peppers in the living room is looking more and more red. There are still a lot of green sweet peppers, some of which I can tell are the purple Dragonfly peppers, with a very few Purple Beauty left, and others are the brown Sweet Chocolate peppers. The remaining ones, I expect to turn yellow or orangey-yellow.

So we will have plenty more vegetables to process for the winter over the next while.

Tomorrow we are supposed to reach a high of 19C/66F and, more importantly, we are NOT expected to have high winds again. Since there is nothing more we can do in the bathroom until the sealant has finished curing, that means I should be able to finally get outside and clean up in the garden, and prepare beds for fall planting. It’s time to get garlic planted – we will be using our own garlic from this year’s harvest – and I want to try fall sowing seeds that will hopefully survive our winter and give us an early start in next year’s garden. At this point, looking at the monthly forecast, it seems we will be in for a relatively mild winter. I certainly hope so. We’re supposed to have a La Nińa winter this year which, for our region, usually results in bitterly cold temperatures.

I could really do without that.

While I can no longer tolerate heat like I used to, I find I am absolutely dreading the cold of winter more and more, every year. Especially this year, as we have not been able to slowly stock up quite as much as we have in the past, on the assumption that we will get snowed in or whatever, for weeks or even months again. Everything is so much more expensive now, it’s getting harder and harder to get any extras at all.

So the more we can process from our garden and put up for the winter, the better!

The Re-Farmer

Dehydrated Onions

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

When the last of our Red of Florence onions got processed, I set up three 9×13 baking sheets in the oven to dehydrate some. When those were done, I took the one bag of onions I kept out of the freezer, because it had a pinhole in it somewhere, and filled another baking sheet to dehydrate.

This is what those 4 trays of onions got us.

When level on the counter, the top is almost exactly between the 350ml and 450ml marks on the containers. This is after I crunched them up quite a bit, too.

This represents about 7 or 8 of the largest onions.

I’m considering processing them into a powder to use as is, or make onion salt. I figure I might get about a quarter cup if I put it through our spice grinder. I haven’t decided, yet.

What do you think?

The Re-Farmer

Red of Florence onions, finally processed!

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Yes, all this time, the Red of Florence onions we harvested awhile back have been sitting on a screen in the old kitchen. With how cold it gets in there, they’ve been fine, and we’ve been using them as needed, but it’s starting to get too cold. Today, I was finally able to finish processing the last of them.

You should be able to go through the slide show of images above.

The first step was to cut away the shriveling green parts and the roots. When I was done, the bulbs filled my giant colander in a heap!

While I was working, the cats in the sun room were going nuts, trying to see what I was doing, so I opened the door and let them in with me. Quite a few came in to explore! One of the males is aggressively friendly. I was using the top of the chest freezer as a table. He jumped up onto it and was eager for pets. Thankfully, he was okay with head boops and arm rubs, because my hands were busy. If, however, I reached for the kitchen shears beside him instead of petting him, he would attack my arm! He even started biting, so I had to take him off the freezer repeatedly before he finally stopped.

Once the screen was clear, I had to figure out what to do with it. We made this as a barrier for the old basement door, so we could keep it open and allow cool air to circulate, while also keeping the cats out. It’s made with 1 inch wire mesh. I took it into the sun room and figured out a way to use it for the cats. It is now resting on one level of the shelf in front of the window on one side, and the cat cage on the other – though it did need propping up on the cat cage to make it level. Hopefully, it’ll stay. I then took a spare sheet of rigid insulation and cut it slightly longer than the screen. With how the frame and centre support is, I was able to fit the insulation under the screen, in between the long sides. The sheet was just narrow enough for that. Without support, of course, it started to sag, but this sheet had been used for something else and already had some holes in it. I was able to use one near the side and zip tie it to the screen, then made a couple more holes as far as I could reach on the other side and added another zip tie. Not that the cats’ weight would be on it, as the screen would hold them. It was just to keep it from sagging. The cats can walk on the wire, but there was another chunk of the insulation that I put on top, so it would be more comfortable. They’re probably scratch the heck out of it. They just love scratching at that insulation!

Before I set that up, though, I put the remains of another sheet against the window that’s missing the inner pane. It doesn’t fill it – we tried cutting pieces to fit before, but the insulation kept wanting to fall away, no matter how we tried to secure it – but it’s enough to reduce the chill from that window where it counts.

So now the cats have a sort of “cave” against that wall, covering the space we set up for them. It gives them another level to climb on that is under the shop lights. I have those set to turn on with the motion sensors, after dusk, and the insulation under the screen will help keep some of their own body heat in, underneath. Also, they won’t get blinded every time one of them moves. Yes, I have the lights set at their lowest level of brightness, but when it’s night, it still seems really bright!

Hopefully, the racoons won’t knock it off or something.

Once that was done, it was back to the onions.

The first batch of onions I cleaned up was for dehydrating in the oven. I have four baking sheets, but they are too big to fit side by side in my oven. This oven does not have an element on the bottom, though, so I was able to put a baking dish on the bottom for elevation, and that allowed me to fit three trays in.

For the first tray, I tried slicing the onions long ways and laying them out on a cooling rack in the baking tray. I could only fit about 1 1/2 larger onions on the tray that way. For the second one, I tried cutting them on the round and laying them out on another cooling rack, but they just fell through the openings. I ended up putting parchment paper down instead, the laid out the slices. The rings didn’t want to separate, so I cut the rest in half lengthwise, first, then sliced them. They still needed to be broken apart aggressively before the pieces could be spread out evenly. Still, I was able to fit about 3 larger onions on, that way. For the third tray (I didn’t bother taking a picture of that one), I just chopped the onions and spread them out. That was another 3 or 4 larger onions.

Those will take a while to dry, so the rest of the onions got chopped up for freezing. I would have wanted to dehydrate more, but chopping and freezing is a lot faster!

For that part, I tried out a trick I think I saw on Pinterest. Loading into freezer bags is a real pain. I’ve tried several different ways to support the bag, but the best I could come up with was to put it in a large measuring cup. It would still be floppy, but not as much.

This time, I got out our canning jar lifter. The slide lock part of the bags gets turned inside out, as I usually do to keep the locking parts clean. This lip then fits over the curved jar lifting end, while the flat handles act as a stand. The lifter can be opened as wide as the folded over part of the bag allows, and holds it tight. After filling the bag with the chopped onions – I fit 2 1/2 cups per size medium bag – the lifter can be squeezed together to free the top. After the flipped over part is flipped back again, the lifter can be opened wide, allowing plenty of room for the filled bag to be removed.

My goodness, I wish I’d known about this trick long ago! This was the easiest, fastest filling of freezer bags I’ve ever done!

I had to stop chopping part way through, as my back was starting to give out (yes, I even used a stool to raised one leg while I worked), which was a good time to have the supper my daughter made for me. Then it was back at it.

In the end, there were 14 freezer bags filled. All but one of them went into the big freezer. Before sealing the bags, I would close it most of the way, then stick in the short end of an elbow straw in the last gap and suck out the air to vacuum seal it. One of the bags lost its vacuum. I couldn’t see a hole, but there had to be one, somewhere. So that bag went into the fridge to use right away.

I’m quite happy with our onion haul this year. Even though one variety failed completely for some reason, we still have plenty of cured and braided onions, both yellow and red, to use throughout the winter, as well as some shallots, and now we have 13 bags of chopped onions in the freezer, 1 in the fridge, plus more dehydrating in the oven. It should be interesting to see how long this supply lasts us through the winter.

One thing about these Red of Florence onions; their shape makes them SO much easier to cut up! Plus, they taste good, so win-win!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: going through the harvest

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

The sun room is starting to get too cold and night to leave our harvests in it anymore. This morning, I went through them and binned them up.

All of the carrots, both types, filled one bin enough that the lid can’t quite close. Those will need to be taken care of quickly. The Black Nebula carrots are already getting wimpy!

All the gourds will go someplace warm and dry to finish curing.

The Tropeana Lunga onions are growing rather than curing, so they will go to the kitchen for fresh eating and dehydrating.

The hulless seed pumpkins that have ripened the most will be moved inside to ripen some more, while the remaining ones were shifted around on their shelf to get more sunlight. We should be able to get away with leaving those there for a while longer.

The tomatoes that are ripening were laid out in a single layer on the bottom of a bin to go inside for further ripening. The green ones that have shown no signs of turning colour by now are not going to, so they all went into one small bin. I picked through them in the process of sorting through, and the more wizened ones went into compost. The rest will go to the kitchen as we decide what to do with them. The problem is, I’m not the tomato person in this household, so I’m not exactly inspired over them!

Now that these are clear of the sun room, we’ll be able to continue cleaning out and partially reorganizing the sun room for the winter.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: dehydrating tomatoes

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Yes, we still have tomatoes!

A lot of the tomatoes we set up in the sun room are slowly ripening. There isn’t enough to bother cooking them into a sauce or whatever, but more than we can conveniently eat, so I’ve started dehydrating them in the oven.

It’s mostly Yellow Pear tomatoes that we have, and they are so small, I am dehydrating them on parchment paper. I had two baking sheets full, but when they were mostly dry and quite shrunken, I combined them into one.

That jar is all of them!

Once I’d combined the Yellow Pear tomatoes, I set up a cooling rack and started dehydrating some Cup of Moldova tomatoes. Once the Yellow Pear tomatoes were done, I filled the baking sheet again with more of them. That finished off what I’d picked earlier, but this morning I gathered more ripe tomatoes!

I am considering powdering the yellow tomatoes, and doing some of the red ones in olive oil. Or just powdering the whole lot of them. They’ll take up less space that way. It’ll be a while before they’re all dehydrated, so I have time to decide.

As I’m writing this, I am hearing the wind pick up outside, and the trees are starting to get whipped about. While today’s high is supposed to be 17C/63F, tomorrow is supposed to have a high of only 3C/37F. Tonight’s low is supposed to be 1C/34F, but tomorrow night we’re supposed to drop to -3C/27F.

And yet, we’re still getting fresh tomatoes! 😁

The Re-Farmer

Making and canning crab apple sauce

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

This morning, I canned up the crab apple sauce I started on last night.

It took about 2 hours to go through and cut up the crab apples in one bin – and that’s the one that had apples taken from it for the large batch crab apple cider vinegar, and a small bucket set aside for my mother.

Who has told me she doesn’t want any more apples. She had been appled out. So we still have another bin, plus the bucket!, to process.

The cut up apple pieces filled my giant stock pot to about 2/3 full.

A few cups of water was added to start the cooking process, and it was then boiled until mushy. Which took remarkably little time.

It stained my new giant wooden spoon pink! 😂

All the instructions I read said to peel and core the apples – which was not going to happen with such small apples! – unless you had a food mill to remove the skins and seeds later.

I don’t have a food mill.

I did recently acquire this…

I picked this up at a dollar store for a completely different purpose. I needed something finer than our colanders, but strong than our big sieve. This turned out to be perfect to use as a substitute food mill. I put in a couple of ladles of cooked pulp at a time, then used a silicon spoon/spatula to push it through, before scraping up the leavings and putting it into a bucket for the compost and moving on to the next batch.

I used our taller, normal sized stock pot for this, which conveniently has measurements marked on the inside.

The strained sauce was just shy of 6 quarts.

It was also very runny.

For the next step, the girls took over, in the early hours of the morning. They tasted it to see if it needed sugar, then cooked it down to thicken it a bit. I forgot to ask if they added sugar, but after tasting in myself, I don’t think they did. These crab apples are very sweet-tart on their own.

They cooked down the sauce by a couple of inches to make it thicker. That done, it was my turn again. I sterilized a dozen 500 ml (pint) jars, then canned up the sauce – a job that seemed to go much faster than I expected!

I could hear the lids popping on some of them, even as I removed them from the water bath!

When done, there was 10 jars of sauce, plus one that was about 3/4 full to go to the fridge, for eating right away. These just need to sit until tomorrow, then they’ll go back into the jar case and be ready for storage for the winter. 😊

I’m quite happy with how these turned out. Love that colour, too!

Now… what to do with the rest of the apples? This is more than enough apple sauce to last us; it’s not something we eat often.

I suppose I could just trim and freeze them for later.

On another note, with the season changing, I’ve asked the girls to switch back to “day shift”. There are things we need to do before winter that require an extra person. Which will mostly be my younger daughter, since my older daughter will have commissions to work on, but she will also be coming out to help as much as she can.

I expected to do more canning this year, but the garden just wasn’t productive enough for it – but more on that in my next post!

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties, small harvest, preserving – and another change in plans

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

I had plans for today.

Honest. I did.

But first, the cuteness.

My plans for yard work would have had to change, anyway, as we are now getting a steady rainfall right now, but there was plenty to work on indoors instead.

The kitties were getting pretty wet, so I left the sun room doors propped open. I’ve discovered why I’ve been finding things knocked out of the top shelf of the shelf shelter. Despite the two bottom shelves being set aside for the cats, some of the little kittens have been climbing up into the top shelf, where all sorts of miscellaneous stuff are kept, and sleeping on some pieces of rigid insulation in one corner! So I am leaving the sun room available for them to shelter in, more comfortably.

Because I’m a suck, when it comes to the kitties! 😁

Yesterday, I had a chance to talk to my brother on the phone, in between his attempts to call my mother. He started trying early enough to catch her before she went to church, but she wasn’t answering. It turned out she was watching her religious programming on TV and wasn’t answering the phone. Then she went to church, and stayed out for hours after.

*sigh*

I got a message from him after he finally got through to her, well into the afternoon. My mother’s apartment was going to be sprayed for bed bugs again.

Today.

She was wondering about staying in a hotel again, since she has to stay away for 12 hours.

*sigh*

So I called her, but her Polish program was on. It was almost 4, so when she said she would call me back when it was done to talk about the bed bug spraying, I said fine.

An hour later, I finally called her myself. I could hear the TV still going, and there was another Polish mass about to start. She wouldn’t have called me back until ALL her Polish shows were done! Meanwhile, I’d delayed working on supper so I could answer the phone without being in the middle of cooking – and I’d already skipped lunch (I lost track of time and forgot to eat).

*sigh*

My mother has zero respect for other people’s time, but expects everyone else to respect hers.

Ah, well.

We talked about her apartment being sprayed again. She did not want to stay at a hotel again, because it’s so expensive (it was actually very cheap, but she doesn’t know what hotel stays usually cost these days). So, she asks me… What was I going to do with her for the day?

Seriously?

What we finally worked out is that I will wait until I get a call from her, letting me know the exterminators have arrived – which I am doing right now, as I write this. They can show up any time between 9am and 4pm. I will then go pick her up, and we will run an errand for her in the city near my sister’s place, and then she wanted to visit my sister.

Who works a 5pm to 1am shift today.

I told her to call my sister first, to make sure stopping by was okay.

Then we’ll have to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. Even then, she’ll end up having to hang out in the lobby or something before she can go back into her apartment. Unlike her neighbours, who can go back after 6 hours, because they don’t have respiratory conditions.

But she won’t stay at a hotel again.

*sigh*

I also had a talk to her about letting me know right away, if her apartment is going to be sprayed again. She got the letter last week, and just didn’t bother telling anyone. I have no idea what she planned to do, had my brother not gotten through to her and then told me.

So my day today is completely gone. I can’t even start anything, unless I can drop it as soon as she calls.

One of the things I wanted to do was get crab apple cider vinegar going. I ended up having to ask my daughters to do it overnight which, of course, changed their plans, too.

They were sweethearts about it, though, and we now have three 1 gallon jars in the big aquarium, safe from cats, fermenting. This time, not only did we stick with just cheesecloth to cover the jars, but the apples are weighted down with slide lock bags filled with water to keep them submerged.

They didn’t use up even half of the apples I picked yesterday!

If I had more jars like this, we’d be making more. As it is, I did have a fourth jar, but after talking to my mother about what we were planning to do with the apples, she asked for a gallon jar so she could make sauerkraut. She wanted one of her old jars in the basement, but those have been sitting for more than a decade. I’ve actually gone through and washed the dozens of jars I found down there, and those particular jars are only being kept because we will used them to make bottle bricks for the walls of the cordwood shed we will be building. I would not consider them food safe anymore. So I’m bringing her one of our newer jars, instead.

So the apples will be used to make hard crab apple cider, instead – though that won’t be started on until probably tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I still did my morning rounds, which included a small harvest.

I had not yet washed these. They are wet from the rain.

There were some summer squash I could have picked, but I decided to leave them to get a bit bigger. I was able to hand pollinate some other squash, though. Which is interesting, when the flowers have puddles of rainwater in them!

According to the long range forecast, we’ve got at least a couple of weeks of hot, mostly dry weather. After that, the overnight lows are expected to be just a few degrees above freezing. I’m hoping that changes. If we have the month of September with no frost, there’s still a chance for some things to mature.

We have more red tomatoes that I should pick later today, or tomorrow morning. The paste tomatoes will go straight into the freezer with the others, until there is enough to start making tomato paste. The others will likely be dehydrated.

Our first attempt at dehydrating them worked, but took a long time. We kept needing the oven for other things. Though my daughter did not slice them super thin, they shrank so much, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them off the rack they were on. They came off surprisingly well, though.

It was just one tray of tomatoes, so it’s not a lot, but I definitely think it is worth doing again.

Along with the red tomatoes, the Yellow Pear tomatoes have something to pick almost every day.

I did break down and taste on of them. After all, I’d been able to eat the tiny Spoon tomatoes without gagging. Maybe I could eat these ones, too?

*shudder*

Nope.

The Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, meanwhile, are finally starting to turn colour, but it will still be a while before we can harvest any of them.

We most definitely need a mild September. Hopefully, a mild October, too!

Ah, well. Whatever happens, happens. We’ll deal with it.

Hmm. I really should be making myself something to eat before going to my mother’s, but… Murphy’s Law. The moment I start something, the phone is sure to ring! 😂

This is going to be a very long day.

The Re-Farmer

We have pickles!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today, I made my first pickled cucumbers, using a mix of our own cucumbers, and those given to us by my sister.

She gave us so many, they over filled my mother’s massive bowl that was left here. When I was a kid, I remember she used this bowl for making pickles, too!

My canning cookbook is still missing, so I found a recipe online – it was surprisingly hard to find a simple, basic recipe that didn’t require ingredients that we didn’t have, either because we don’t like them, or because they aren’t available locally. Or they required ridiculously long preparation – one recipe I found took nine days of preparation before the final canning and, after reading the instructions, I can’t for the life of me figure out how the cucumbers weren’t complete mush long before then! Or, they were for fermented pickles, and I wanted to water bath can these.

I just wanted to make basic pickles.

Who’d have though that would be so difficult? 😄

But I found one, and got to work. I had only 1 case of quart size jars, and I am very glad they were wide mouth jars! They are so much easier to fill than the regular mouth jars.

I filled the dozen quarts, and there was still lots of cucumbers left over!

There we have it! My first canning of cucumbers into pickles. I even got a 100% ping rate – all the lids sealed properly! Once they’re fully cool, I’ll remove the rings, put the jars in the case they came in, and we’ll need to find somewhere to store them. There’s the root cellar, of course, but that’s quite the oubliette right now. Things that go in there, get forgotten! At least it won’t matter as much with canned goods, and if we are able to harvest enough produce from the garden to store in there, that will help us remember we actually have food in there, and not just the Christmas trees and decorations. 😁 I’ll have to get the girls to take things down there, though. With my knees, trying to navigate the stairs while carrying glass jars is just not a good idea. 😉

I’m glad it’s done, though I left quite a bit for the girls to clean up tonight. At times like this, they get the raw end of the deal! They are sweethearts about it, though. 💕

The Re-Farmer