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!

Getting Buried In Produce - A Back to Eden Garden Update

Our Back to Eden garden is definitely keeping me busy, especially now that the tomatoes are coming in, literally, by the brown bag full. I know that seeing is believing and so I thought I would show a small timeline of photographs for you.

This first picture was taken on August 27th, about a week before Labor Day weekend. My husband's parents had come to visit us, so we had intentionally skipped a day of picking so that we could share the joy of harvesting with them. And what a harvest it was - the largest that we had picked to date. We picked cabbage, carrots, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, and two bowls of tomatoes.

 

 We continued to harvest throughout the following week, mostly cucumbers and tomatoes. By labor day, we needed to pick even more - butternut squash and sweet corn - in addition to the usual cucumbers and tomatoes. Two days later, the abundant harvest continued.

 

This past Wednesday, in addition to tomatoes and cucumbers, we picked carrots, green beans, and our first red and ripe watermelon. Oh, what a sweet and juicy treat the watermelon was! And, the harvest still continues. Each day, we pick at least one brown bag full of tomatoes, which I am now processing in two stock pots at least twice a week in an effort to keep up! For those on the fence regarding this type of gardening, I highly recommend it! As you can see, we have been truly blessed by God's provisions.

Back to Eden Garden Update

I thought that I would take a few minutes this wet and rainy Thursday to update everyone on how are garden is doing. We are very pleased with our results of using the Back to Eden gardening approach. Other than the initial watering that we did when we initially planted our seeds and plants, we have not had to water our garden - and we are in one of the worst droughts in the history of our area! We are so thankful to God for His provisions!

On the Food Preservation page (see menu on left), I am keeping track of everything that we are preserving. But this page does not really tell the whole story. We have definitely learned a few things along the way, as this has been our first garden. When selecting our seeds and laying out the garden, it was challenging for me to be able to visualize how much produce we would have from a particular plant. Case in point, all the tomato plants! Along the way, though, we have been truly amazed by so many aspects of our garden.

To date, we have finished the European Mesclun Salad. For some reason, our Iceberg Lettuce and Giant Noble Spinach did not really produce this year. Fortunately, we had some seeds given to us for a green leaf lettuce and that did okay. I am not sure what we are going to plant for salad greens next year.

The Catskill Brussel Sprouts seem to be growing good. At least, the plants are getting really big. We just don't seem to have any sprouts yet, but then again, I am not even really sure what to look for!

Next to the sprouts, we had planted our Emerald Giant Green Peppers - none of which survived my initial indoor seed start. Hopefully, we will have better results next year. Thankfully, I had purchased some Big Bertha Green Peppers from the local Amish greenhouse and these have been producing in abundance. While the peppers have been on the smaller side and long and skinny (as opposed to the big round ones at the grocery store), they have been plentiful. We pick an average of 2 to 3 peppers every couple of days. Thus far, I have almost one gallon frozen and have used closed to a dozen of them in homemade spaghetti sauces, salsa and tomato soups.

As mentioned in a previous post, we finished up our broccoli some time ago, but I think we may have stopped a little prematurely. Once I decided to let it all go to seed, we started to see a whole bunch of broccoli heads all over the plants! I probably could have frozen a few gallons worth had I not let it go to seed. Something new learned for next year! We have one plant that we are watching carefully becasue we do not know what it is! It looks kind of like the broccoli, but a little different. We are hoping that it is the Giant of Naples Cauliflower that we planted. Only time will tell.

None of the onions that I planted really grew. I am not sure what we did wrong, but fortunately the local hardware store had given us a bag with 100 onion sets. I planted them with little expectation. I am pleased to announce that these onions are growing very well. The bulbs are still on the smaller side, but the potency is strong! I have been slowly pulling a few out of the garden when I have a lot of tomatoes to process. These green onions - tops and all - are being used with the green peppers to season our spaghetti sauces, salsa and tomato soup. Mmmm good!

Our zucchini plant has been a slow, but steady producer. We have already been blessed with two zucchinis and can see two more slowly growing. The plant itself seems to be getting taller and much wider - taking over some of the tomato and cabbage plants on one side and the broccoli on the other. It is so wide, that we can barely walk around it without risking damaging other produce.

The carrots are also slowly getting bigger and fatter. At least once a week we pull one or two "just to check". We planted quite a few, but they are much slower growing than I had anticipated. The Stonehedge Cabbage is also growing very well. We harvested our first one and attempted to cook it and then serve it with a basic white sauce. The smell of the cabbage was enough to forgo more than just a little bite, but my husband seemed to enjoy it - he ate almost the entire head himself!

And now for the the funny things that are garden has taught us thus far....squash like to spread and are able to bypass the garden fence! We have three or four squash growing outside of the garden in addition to the nearly 30 feet of vines growing inside the garden!

We have also learned that our corn plants get tall - really tall. I remember corn plants from my childhood and they had seemed tall to my little girl height, but I don't remember them being taller than a simple garden shed!

We also learned that a few seeds can go a long way - especially when it comes to watermelons. We planted 25 seeds and we now have over 20 watermelons growing behind our shed, with new ones appearing almost weekly!

We had one watermelon that we thought might be ready and so, anxious to try one, we went ahead and picked it. It sounded hollow, the skin was dull and it looked so good...until we opened it!

Needless to say, we were all very dissapointed. But all is not lost - I found a recipe online for pickled watermelon rind and we were able to can one quart of the rinds. The most challenging part of the whole thing was getting rid of the seeds - there were so many I seemed to get a scoop full every time I attempted to make a melon ball!

Finally, we have learned why it is so important to cage your tomato plants. If this step is not done, you will end up with a tomato jungle!

We have hundreds of green tomatoes with a few red ones every couple of days. Unfortunately, it can be a real challenge to get the ripe tomatoes out! The branches of the tomato plants are so intertwined that we risk breaking off the branches while moving them in an attempt to get to the tomatoes underneath. So far, we have only lost one complete branch - with about 20 green tomatoes on it! I diced them up along with the red ones and made some salsa. It has also been a race with the chipmunks to get the ripe tomatoes out of the garden before they take a bite

We are also getting a fairly good amount of cucumbers. I have been pickling one to two quarts almost daily - some dill and some bread and butter. My family is counting down until they can open the first jar!

Well, that's about it for now. Got to get back to the canner!