Produce Progress

One reason I haven't been writing much lately, is because of my garden.  It has been one fantastic garden year, which has kept me busy almost every day for at least since the beginning of August, slicing and blanching and freezing and pickling, harvesting and cooking and weeding.  

I've never gotten so many vegetables in my life, and it's been a real education for me in being steadfast and showing up every day to do the work whether I feel like it or not.  It has been so rewarding in so many ways, and I'm so glad I've been able to put up so much good food for the winter.  However, I'm so glad it's coming to a close!

My garden was hit by a bad storm about a week ago (that's a future post!), and so many plants are finally done producing.  What's left won't requite so much work to put up.  Cabbage and carrots and rutabagas will happily sit in the fridge for months, staying fresh and delicious.  Ground cherries just need to be picked and frozen, pretty much.  Kale will sit happily in the garden waiting to be picked until next spring. So maybe I can take a little break and look back at the year so far. 

Let's take a look at some of  the nice things that came out of my garden.  Here's one of the first tomatoes that ripened.  The first ones are usually the biggest.

One slice was big enough for a large sandwich! 

And one tomato may have been big enough to fill a quart jar, but I ended up freezing most of my tomatoes because it's much easier to do.  Plus, if I feel like it in the winter, I can thaw them and make sauce to can.  

Cucumbers were the biggest demand this summer.  They just kept coming and coming, with no end in sight.  Every day I would get pounds of cucumbers.  

I ended up making seven batches of pickles, so around 50 pint jars.  That's more than we can eat in a year, so I will probably only grow a few cucumber plants next year just for fresh eating. 

Next came the potatoes.  If you've never eaten a garden fresh potato, it's hard to describe how good they are.  There's a richness to them, almost creamy, maybe a touch sweet.  Store bought potatoes are cheap, but we always grow at least some potatoes every year because you can't beat them for flavor.

We grew Kennebec potatoes, which are pretty famous for growing huge tubers.  Lots of my tators ended up being about a pound each!

Garlic was actually one of the first things I harvested in the garden, and unfortunately we lost a good percentage of the heads to rot.  It was a very cold, wet spring, I probably pulled them too early, and I am certain I didn't dry them properly.  Still, we salvaged about 60 heads, which is quite a bit for us.  And on the plus side, I learned a better method to dry them out at our new property, so next year will have better results.

For the onions, I had learned my lesson from the garlic.  We have a dehumidifier in the basement, and a large fan that's set up to run when the dehumidifier runs to make sure the air is evenly dry.  So I ended up setting the onions in front of the fan's stream to help with air flow.  Still, after about a month, I ended up cutting the tops off and moving them to the attic to finish drying.  I think the heat helped finish up the drying process.  We only lost a couple of onions to rot, so that's a huge improvement over the garlic.

We ended up getting an overflowing milk crate of onions!  That's a little less than a bushel, I'd say.  Here's a large cat for comparison.

 

 The onions were pretty good sized too!

 

 

Another good producer was green beans, bush beans specifically. I think I picked about 12 gallons of green beans.  There's still more out on the vine, but I'm done picking.  I have put about 45 meal sized bags of green beans into our freezer, and that's enough for us.  I'm going to till the plants in probably sometime next week, which will really add a lot of good organic matter to the soil.

 

 

And now that the garden is slowing down, the apples are picking up! 

 

It's been a fun experience for us, going around and taste testing all of the different apples on our property.  So far, our favorite apple trees are the tee by the well, the tree on the curve of the road, and the trees down by the cabin.  The trees along the edge of the woods are mostly no good for eating or cider, but would probably be great if you were making hard cider, which we don't plan on doing this year.

 

I've been freezing apples to make into cider later in the season.  Freezing is a cheap and easy way to process your apples before pressing.  We didn't want to invest in a lot of equipment for cider making before we knew if we liked doing it.  What isn't being used for cider is either going to be made into apple butter, or has already been made into apple pie filling!  

So far we have picked 3.5 bushels of apples, and there are still lots on the trees.  Whether we pick them is a question though.  The big storm had pounding hail, and the apples still on the trees may be too bruised.  

 

So that's  the produce progress here on our farm.  My 7 cubic foot freezer is almost full of frozen goodies, my pantry is full of pickles and dehydrated veggies, and soon we'll be making cider and either freezing it or canning it in quart jars.  

 

Oh I almost forgot, we also have a half bushel of black fluff:

 

 And a huge gray watermelon: