Garden Update: Wrap Up
After a first semester of grad school, one in which statistics absorbed most of my time outside work, I have some catching up to do with this blog. I thought I’d begin with the garden, which is now most definitely done, although I’m still in green tomatoes that continue to ripen indoors and have canned, frozen, and dried garden vegetables for the winter.
My last update was July, and it had been hot and very dry. August came along and we were inundated with rain. Powdery mildew became an issue with my tomatoes and zucchini. I use a milk spray to control that: 2 ounces dry milk to one gallon of water. I mix it up in one of those sprayers you can pick up at hardware and garden centers. It does need to be done on sunny days; the thinking is that the chemical reaction of milk in sunlight is what kills the spores. It needs to be reapplied weekly or after rain. Because August was so wet, it was a challenge to find sunny hours when I was home to keep it at bay. I did my best but the plants and produce noticeably suffered.
My cucumbers loved the rain and I had loads of those through the end of the summer before those plants succumbed to mosaic virus. It turns out that cucumber beetles, my nemesis, also can infect vines with the mosaic virus as well as the wilt that has wiped out my cukes in previous summers. I did get a lot of them before they pooped out and made pickles, both refrigerator for immediate enjoyment and canned for the winter. (See my post Cucumber-palooza for recipes and more on that).
My garden always continues to produce pretty well until the first frosts, which didn’t come until October 30 this year. I pulled in lots of green tomatoes after work that day, and they continue to ripen in my unheated back hall. The kale, Swiss chard (although less yield than last year), parsley, and raspberries kept going after that, and I pulled in the last of the greens before a forecast overnight low in the mid-20s on November 13; those got blanched and into the freezer, along with the chard stems. I like to use those in soups. I also brought in a lot of herbs to dry, which I’ll leave for another post.
My first tomatoes didn’t ripen until the end of August. I plant plum tomatoes for canning, one cherry tomato plant, and several different varieties of slicing tomatoes. I often oven-dry the cherry tomatoes for the winter: just slice them in half and put them on a parchment-lined baking sheet (tomatoes can react with aluminum foil), sprinkle with some salt, and leave them to dry in the lowest setting you have on your oven. It can take some hours but the result is tomato with some moisture still in them, avoiding the tomato leather that some sun-dried or dehydrator tomatoes can take on. The drying makes for an intensely flavored little nugget. I keep them in the freezer and use in place of sun-dried tomatoes in recipes.
I also got some stewed tomatoes canned. Because Putting Food By, the reference book I use for most food preservation, scares the crap out of me with what can go wrong if you don’t take every precaution, I chose to pressure can them to make sure I wasn’t going to kill myself or others with botulism. My pressure canner is a behemoth. By the end of September/beginning of October, I had put up 17 pints. I use a lot of stewed tomatoes over the winter, mixing them with greens like kale or Swiss chard and topping an egg for my breakfast; that extra bit really holds me through the morning.
So my growing season wrapped up in mid-November. I consider it a reasonable success: more tomatoes than last year, fewer greens in the freezer this year than last, an abundance of raspberries (the first real season I’ve grown them) and cucumbers, very few eggplant and Hungarian wax peppers, lots more lavender. I still have tomatoes in the back hall, and the first 2019 seed catalogues have already begun arriving. We’ll take a few months off before starting seeds for next summer’s garden. Stay tuned!
October 21, 2018
