Green Tomatoes

Living in Wisconsin with our wonderfully unpredictable weather patterns has made gardening interesting this year. First, we had a very late spring, with killing frosts followed by an unseasonably hot summer resulting in a severe drought. We are so thankful that we used the Back to Eden garden method this year! And now, we are anticipating near freezing temperatures at night. Due to our concerns about the temperatures, we decided this past Saturday to pull all of our tomato plants and harvest all the green tomatoes. The final result? More than 26 gallons worth. These have all been bagged in brown paper grocery store bags to ripen over the course of the next week or two.

We are also anticipating a rather large crop of watermelons and so we have been experimenting with some new recipes (new to us) for watermelon syrup and hopefully, watermelon jam. My first batch did not work as anticipated, hence, the seven pints of watermelon syrup. It tasted really good - it just didn't jell the way we hoped it would.

We also have several peppers and some new flowers on our pepper plants. I am anticipating picking the last of the peppers as my bags of tomatoes turn red. All of our peppers have been incorporated into our spaghetti sauce and soup this year. Out of everything that we planted, we hit the balance just right with our green peppers!

Our wonderful neighbor next door has shared some of her Concord grapes with us, too. So, I will be making a small batch of grape jam here shortly.

Finally, we have been inundated with fruit flies ever since we processed our pears. Nothing we did seemed to get rid of them! Until now....

We took a budding meats container and punched holes into the top using a Pampered Chef vegetable holder. We then put some fresh fruit inside (in this picture, there are grapes and watermelon). And then we just let it sit. Man, do those annoying fruit flies love it! Even better, once they are in there, they are not able to get out. After a few days, we stick the container in the freezer to kill off the flies and dispose of them and reset the container. It has worked awesome! Prior to this, we tried different things involving apple cider vinegar, and a variety of containers, covers, etc. None of them worked except for this! Just thought we would share!