The Vacation Garden

As I mentioned in the previous post, we drove to Arizona recently.  And back.  With a dog.  During harvest time.  With 80 pounds of Hatch chiles.

Probably the most stressful aspect was leaving the garden during harvest.  For a non-gardener, that might seem really silly, but for a gardener, it is perfectly understandable, or so I like to think.  However, I had back-up.  Our son lives not far away, is interested in gardening, doesn't have his own yet and was kind enough to tend mine.  Fortunately also, it rained a lot and was cool, so plant stress was low and ripening slowed a bit.

There was still plenty to harvest, as evidenced by the buckets, baskets and bowls of produce covering the kitchen floor.  So now it is on to cataloging the haul and preserving the harvest.

Prickly Pear Jelly - Recipe

The Minnesota State Fair has just ended, but we didn't go this year.  Instead, we drove to Tucson to visit family!  It was a great trip, if a long one, especially considering we spent 28+ hours each way in the car with a large Golden Retriever.  But she got a bath before we left and loves to ride in the car.

We had multiple goals for this trip - visiting my mom, brothers, aunt and daughter, delivering goods to said daughter for the school year, and, lastly, getting peppers from Hatch, New Mexico.  I will have to explain the peppers in another post, but they are a really terrific accidental discovery. 

Filling jars with Prickly Pear Jelly

Combining the spirit of the state fair and Tucson, the last thing we did before we left Mom's house was pick what turned out to be 13 pounds of prickly pear fruit.  What?, you say.  And why?  To make Prickly Pear Jelly, of course!



Prickly Pear Jelly

Supplies:

• 8 pounds of ripe prickly pear fruits (also called tuna), for 8 cups of juice
• 1 cup lemon juice
• 1 cup unsweetened, unfiltered apple juice
• 2 boxes low-sugar pectin
• 4 cups sugar
• 1/3 cup honey

Tomatoes: Who Gets Voted Off?

The major harvesting seems to be over, which is kind of early, I think.  We have fruits and veggies still to harvest, but more of a small stream than a tsunami.    Regular tsunamis are bad, but tomato tsunamis are exhilarating!  Ah well.  Now is a good time start evaluating what we grew, before I forget.

Weird tomato

Tomatoes (14 plants total): It seemed like we didn't have very many tomatoes for 14 plants.  However, 2 plants were for drying (and there were lots of them!), one was a cherry, three were slicing tomatoes and only 6 were for sauce.  Of those 6, 3 got some kind of illness but still valiantly produced tomatoes.  They were also determinate, and so made only so many tomatoes, then stopped.  So all things considered, we did OK getting  5 quarts and 5 pints of crushed tomatoes and 1 quart and 5 pints of nice, thick sauce.  There will be enough for another batch of sauce, as well.

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa Recipe

The tomatillos are coming in nicely and, even after giving away a couple or three pounds, we had 8.5 pounds on hand.  Tomatillos keep well but still have to be used eventually.  Thus, we have 3 quarts of roasted tomatillo salsa cooling in the pressure canner (along with 2 quarts of diced Viva Italia paste tomatoes!) and 2 pints in the refrigerator for immediate use!

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa
makes about 4 quarts

• 8.5 pounds tomatillos, roasted
• 4 medium onions, peeled and cut into eighths
• 2 bulbs (not cloves) garlic, peeled
• 2 cups cilantro leaves, packed
• 9 red, green &/or purple jalapenos, de-stemmed and cut in half*
• 1 NuMex Big Jim pepper (Anaheim type), de-stemmed and cut in half*

Szechuan Green Bean Recipe

What to do with a zillion green beans...  I've frozen quite a few, but they are best fresh.   We have been eating a lot of green beans Szechuan-style.  These are spicy, crisp beans that are often deep-fried, but it turns out that they are just as good, if not better, dry-fried.

Szechuan Green Beans

• fresh green beans, washed with stem ends removed
• House of Tsang Szechuan Stir-fry Sauce
• OR homemade equivalent (internet has good options)
• toasted sesame seeds, optional

Heat a large frying pan on high until it is really hot.  A stainless steel or anodized pan might be best, since Teflon doesn't do well with high temps.  Add a nice handful of beans.  Toss and cook until the skins get little blisters and some black spots.  Dump in a bowl or on a plate.  Repeat with more beans.  When you have enough beans for your group,  toss them with szechuan sauce to taste.   Sprinkle with sesame seeds.  Serve warm or room temperature.  Lovely for appetizers.

Note: You can use a teaspoon or so of oil per batch, if you want.  Absolutely not necessary, though.

I know this is a little loose, without cups, ounces, times and temperatures.  But this is how I cook and it is a flexible recipe anyway!  Enjoy with good friends on the patio or deck.

Blueberries - Fresh, Frozen and Jam

This was a great year for blueberries!  I pick with a friend at Blue Ridge Growers in River Falls, WI and the crop this year was tremendous.  It was hard to stop picking, even when your back ached and you really wished you hadn't had that third cup of coffee on the way out there.  Because the picking was so good, I got about 3 gallons of berries.

Blueberries are may be the best berries for pickers.  They grow on nice thornless bushes that can be tall enough that you don't have to bend over much.  The berries sometimes grow in clusters, so in a plentiful season, you can almost pick a handful at a time!   Blueberries also don't squish on you the way raspberries and blackberries do.

Tomatillos

Tomatillo

Tomatillos have become one of my favorite things to grow!  Probably four years ago, I took the plunge and tried them without much hope of success.  These are plants of the Southwest and, by all rights, shouldn't do well this far north.  Ha!  They do great!

If you are not familiar with the tomatillo (toe-ma-tea-o) , they are related to tomatoes and are also known as husk tomatoes. 

The calm before the storm

Dinner from the garden

This is a period of waiting.  Except for the beans, everything is gathering strength for the big ripening push.  It is the calm before the storm.

More vegetables should be like the green beans.  They have been steadily producing for weeks now.  Sometimes more, sometimes a little less, but almost always enough for a meal.  We have about five pounds in the freezer and I need to freeze another big batch.  The frozen beans last year had an unpleasant problem with their skins sliding off when thawed.  They tasted OK, but it was off-putting.  This year

Next Year, Already

I've been thinking about what to do with the garden next year.  It is only August and the main harvest hasn't even really come in yet, but garden plans and new varieties are already dancing in my head.  It's not that I'm unhappy with the way the garden is growing this year, but there is always room for improvement.

Next year I would:

Seed Starting and Ear Piercing

Oh. My. Goodness. Huge piercing emergency tonight. DD needed to change the hardware in her rook piercing (an odd part of your ear that you probably never knew had a name). Last time was a terrifying disaster and this time was not really better.

The Beginning

Well, not actually the beginning.  We are well into the gardening season here. In fact, from here on out, it will be a mad dash to the finish line (aka first frost). The first few paste tomatoes are starting to ripen, but there are several hundred others right behind them!

Today I made giardiniera and canned mixed peppers and pepperoncini peppers.