Summer Vegetable Garden Recap

Hello blog! It's been a while.

We had a busy summer around here, with short trips, visitors, weddings to attend, and work. The new job is still going well, although I'm currently working without pay because of the government shutdown. I wish I had insight as to when this will end, but we don't know anything. We just hope that we'll get back pay since we've been deemed "essential employees" and are required to work now. Just another reason to appreciate my low-maintenance vegetable garden and the ability to have some fresh veggies without having to buy them at the store! The plan worked like a charm and has been manageable with our limited time at home.

My container garden this year consisted of tomatoes, peppers, and four tomatillo plants. We had a relatively mild summer in the DC area--plenty of rain and not too many scorching hot days. It seemed like ideal conditions for the veggies. Bugs didn't seem to be as big of a problem this year as in previous years. We didn't grow cucumbers or any summer squash, so cucumber beetles, squash bugs, and squash vine borers weren't an issue. We had aphids and spider mites, but were able to control them somewhat by spraying the underside of the leaves with the hose on the high-pressure setting. We still have spider mites on some tomato plants, but it hasn't been enough to affect the yield too much.

I haven't been great at keeping track of how many pounds of tomatoes we have harvested, but I haven't bought tomatoes in about 6 weeks. This past week has brought back summer-like temperatures in October, and I think the plants are enjoying the surprise weather. The tomatillos have just starting ripening in the past week or so. You can tell they're ripe when the husk starts drying out and clings to the fruit. I'm looking forward to all the green salsa I'll be making once I harvest enough of them.

We just pulled these beautiful yellow bell peppers yesterday.

We've harvested more jalapenos, serranos, and habaneros than we can eat, so we've given some away. All of the hot peppers have had a lot of heat, more than in other years. I wonder if the milder temperatures and plenty of rain helped?

 

Our bell pepper harvest has been amazing. We're growing red, yellow, and orange bell peppers (all are green before they turn ripe) and use them in everything from soups to sauces to soffritos. 

And the sizes have been great, too. Several of them have been big enough to fit and my hand and perfect for stuffing.

 

We harvested this bowl of bell peppers mid-September and it yielded four pounds! 

I hope you and your garden had a wonderful summer. How's your fall garden looking?

The Low Maintenance Garden

I wasn't able to start many seeds this year for my edible garden, so we bought a few transplants instead.  This year's low maintenance garden consists of only 15 plants, about half the number I usually have.

Instead of planting squash, cucumber, beans, and other vegetables, I decided to keep it simple and focus on just two items for my kitchen garden this summer: tomatoes and peppers.
We bought both sweet and hot peppers, including a jalapeno plant because we have to have some hot peppers in the garden. So far the plants and pests have been manageable. There are even a few blushing Super Fantastic tomatoes right now.

I did start a few seeds, including two habaneros and two tomatillo plants, which are also doing really well.  Between the tomatoes, tomatillos, jalapenos, and habaneros, I expect to have a nice salsa garden this year. If only I could grow cilantro...

And here's a nice surprise--two potato plants from my failed crop last year made an appearance.  Last year potato beetles decimated the potatoes I had started from seed. I was going to turn this into an onion patch, and these two potato plants surprised me by sprouting this spring.  I've left them alone just to see what happens. Wouldn't it be nice to get some potatoes this year?

How is your summer edible garden doing?

How to Oven-Dry Tomatoes

A couple of people asked about how I oven-dried my tomatoes last summer. I'm re-posting my method below. Thanks for asking!
(originally posted September 2012)

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I have never canned anything before, and I don't think I grow enough food to go through the trouble of canning. I like the idea of preserving fresh food for the winter, and we do freeze a lot of food. I have local squash, spinach, and broccoli in the freezer that I haven't got around to using yet. Peppers freeze very easily--we clean them, core and remove the seeds, and then slice or chop them up, put them in a container, and leave them in the freezer. When I'm ready to use my peppers, I often just run them under water to soften them up and then they're ready to chop and add to your dish.
I had several ripe tomatoes on hand and decided to try oven roasting them.

These are so many recipes online with varying times and oven temperatures, and after sorting through all of them, I decided to follow this one by David Lebovitz. The length of time is hard to gauge because it depends on the size and moisture level of tomatoes. I've read that Roma tomatoes are best because they have a lower water content than others. Unfortunately my pile of tomatoes was of different varieties and sizes, so I loosely followed his recipe, but mainly decided to wing it.

I had one beefsteak tomato, a few Romas, a handful of cherries, and some Pink Brandywine heirlooms from my garden. I waited until we had a cloudy, somewhat cool day so that running the oven for 3 hours wouldn't stifle us to death in the summer heat. Here's what I did:

Oven-Dried Tomatoes
- Preheat oven to 325°F
- Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally, remove the stems, and remove the seeds. I patted dry some of the juicier tomatoes with a paper towel to remove some excess moisture.
- In an 8x8 pyrex baking dish, add about 3 tbsp olive oil, one clove of garlic, 1 tbsp dried oregano, 1 tbsp dried basil (from my garden!), and salt and pepper.*
- Toss tomatoes around in dish so that all sides are coated.
- Place tomatoes cut side down in the dish.
- Bake for 2 1/2 hours or until tomato skin is wrinkly. (Some of my smaller tomatoes were ready after 2 hours).


*Feel free to add your own combination of herbs and seasonings here. I think next time I'm going to use rosemary and thyme, or maybe do one dish with oregano only.

Here's the finished product. They don't look very pretty, but let me tell you, they smelled fantastic! The whole house smelled like olive oil, oregano, and basil, like a pizzeria! I almost hyperventilated from inhaling all that yumminess. I let them cool a little and then put them in a freezer bag. I think they'll be great in soups and sauces later this Fall.

Best and Worst of my 2012 Garden

Just as I've done the last couple of years, I'm recapping the best and worst of my garden for the year. Inspired by all the year-end "best and worst" lists on TV, movies, music, fashion, etc., this list helps remind me what I did right and what went wrong over the year.

Best -- Basil! In the past I've always had small basil plants, some of which didn't make it through the summer. But this year I was able to grow 3 healthy bunches. I ate many tomato-basil-mozzarella salads, had plenty of basil to throw into sauces, and I even managed to pick enough to store some basil pesto cubes in the freezer. These basil plants were in a very deep container, planted along side this Mortgage Lifter tomato plant, which brings me to...

Best/Worst -- Tomatoes.  I tried some new varieties this year, some of which did OK, like the ground cherries, Pink Girl hybrids and pink Brandywines...

But others like Chocolate Cherries, Mortgage Lifter, Mr. Stripey, and Ace 55 hybrid didn't do well. I documented my Mortgage Lifter troubles extensively so I won't go into that again. I was talking to a couple of friends who had tomato troubles this year. One lives in the south, but another lives here in the DC area. I'm not sure why we weren't able to get good tomato harvests. For me, I think it was a combination of the heat, which can prevent tomato plants from flowering and setting fruit, and lack of pollinators. I didn't have many flowers in my garden this year to attract pollinators. I also had issues with garden pests, like aphids, spider mites, and horn worms.

Best -- Return of the pond frog! I'm actually not sure if he/she is the same one from last year or even 3 years ago. I read that frogs are a sign of a healthy pond, so I was really happy to see this little frog in my back yard this year.

Worst -- That stupid $$%@ squirrel. It was responsible for eating the few tomatoes that did grow, blueberries, corn stalks, and for digging up many of my seeds and transplants. I love sunflowers (hence the blog title picture), but I only had one grow this year because the squirrel dug up all my transplants.(Another Worst -- no sunflowers this year).  I'll have to protect them better next year. Now that the temperatures are bitterly cold, I feel sorry for the little guy (and yes, I know it's the same one. I recognize the mangy brown fur). I may or may not have felt bad enough to throw some unsalted almonds near a tree where I saw it lurking. I know he's thinking "Sucker!"

 

Best -- I had a pretty good onion harvest this year--just over 2 pounds, not bad for the second year growing them. We left a few in the ground to see if they grow bigger.

Worst - lots of garden fails this year. Beetles ate the potatoes, the two green bean varieties I planted in containers didn't really take off. Everyone seems to be able to grow squash and zucchini so well that they can't give it away, but squash bugs and cucumber beetles feasted on ours. The two little watermelons that we harvested were smelly and didn't taste well.

Although I had some disappointments, I have ideas for what to do better next year. I haven't begun serious garden planning yet, but I've been thinking about growing fewer tomato varieties, for example, and just sticking with a few that I've grown in the past and that did well in pots on my deck. I have to have sunflowers next year, I missed them a lot this past summer. I think my vegetables missed the pollinators they attract. I'll have to make sure to protect the seeds and transplants so they don't get yanked out before their time.

Source: colunistas.ig.com.br via Angela on Pinterest

Last but not least, Best -- You! I love reading about your garden plans,and especially like seeing what gardens look like in other parts of the country or world. Thank you for visiting my blog and leaving words of encouragement,  advice, or sympathy. It makes all this a lot more fun!

If you'd like to recap your own Best and Worst, please feel free to link up or leave a comment below.

Happy New Year and Best Wishes for 2013!

End of Summer Garden Recap

I realize that I'm talking about the end of Summer while we're well into Fall, but we have had quite a busy last few months. The best news--the new windows are in! They were installed a week earlier than expected, and I can already tell the difference. We have needed new windows for years. The old ones were the crappy builder quality ones. Two had broken seals and moisture had come in. Some didn't close right and you could see gaps (which meant bugs could slither their way in). The screens didn't fit in all of them, so I couldn't open windows to let fresh air in. However, that didn't matter upstairs because all the windows on the top floor were so drafty. That meant that while the temperature was perfectly comfortable downstairs, as soon as you'd walk up the stairs you could feel the cold winter air, and cranking the heat up did not make a difference. In the summer the upstairs was stuffy. Our new windows are the energy efficient kind, and I think we'll see a real difference in our heating and cooling bills over the next year. Actually, I think I can already tell the difference. It's not chilly upstairs, I don't feel the draft when I walk up the stairs, and I have screens that fit so I can actually open windows to let fresh air in without worrying about flies or stink bugs flying in. Life is good.

So, about the garden. The pepper plants are the only thing that made it through the summer with flying colors. The photo above is of habanero peppers, but our 3 bell pepper plants are doing well too. The fruit are small, but it's nice not to have to buy peppers at the store.


Things That Didn't Work

{Mortgage Lifter on August 1}

{Mortgage Lifter on September 21--dry as a bone}

The Mortgage Lifter tomatoes never did take off. If you remember I posted a Mortgage Lifter SOS back in August because the plants were not producing anything. Actually, that's not true--one plant grew one tomato and that was it. Some suggested giving them an Epsom salt spray, which I did. That, plus the slightly cooler temperatures after the heat wave broke in August, seemed to help the plant that already had a tomato, because many more flowers appeared. Unfortunately, none of those flowers resulted in a tomato. The other plant was sucked dry by a tomato horn work. I came back from Maine to find that plant brown and dry, and Friends, I touched that creepy worm while moving the plant around. I almost died. Anyway, no luck with the ML variety this year. Not sure if I'll try again next year. But, as you can see, the basil has got on smashingly!

Also, before I left for Maine, this is what the two surviving corn stalks looked like. This was the first time I tried growing corn. They were tasseling and we were looking forward to the home-grown sweet corn later in summer. Alas, we got back from Maine to find both stalks cut down and the corn completely chewed up (by the evil squirrel). Wah-wah.


A Pleasant Surprise

I want to end on a high note.Although squirrels and rabbits dug up all my sunflower seedlings and plants, one sunflower made it!  This is the only picture I managed to take, a little blurry, sorry about that. It attracted lots of bees, unfortunately a little too late in the season to help pollinate my veggies. But it was nice to have a sunny sunflower in my garden. They're my favorite flower, that's why they're on my blog header. Some of the seeds have dropped to the ground and I've seen a few new sunflower volunteers popping up. I doubt they'll make it through the freeze that's coming soon, but I was happy to see at least one sunflower pop up in my garden.

Did your garden have a good summer?

SSFC: Food Preservation

It has been a while since I've posted about the SSFC eating-locally challenge--and yes, it's still going! I'm a couple of days late with this, but last week's challenge was about food preserving and canning. I have never canned anything before, and I don't think I grow enough food to go through the trouble of canning. I like the idea of preserving fresh food for the winter, and we do freeze a lot of food. I have local squash, spinach, and broccoli in the freezer that I haven't got around to using yet. Peppers freeze very easily--we clean them, core and remove the seeds, and then slice or chop them up, put them in a container, and leave them in the freezer. When I'm ready to use my peppers, I often just run them under water to soften them up and then they're ready to chop and add to your dish.

For the food preservation challenge, I decided to try oven roasting some of my tomatoes.

These are so many recipes online with varying times and oven temperatures, and after sorting through all of them, I decided to follow this one by David Lebovitz. The length of time is hard to gauge because it depends on the size and moisture level of tomatoes. I've read that Roma tomatoes are best because they have a lower water content than others. Unfortunately my pile of tomatoes was of different varieties and sizes, so I loosely followed his recipe, but mainly decided to wing it.

I had one beefsteak tomato, a few Romas, a handful of cherries, and some Pink Brandywine heirlooms from my garden. I waited until we had a cloudy, somewhat cool day so that running the oven for 3 hours wouldn't stifle us to death in the summer heat. Here's what I did:

Oven Roasted Tomatoes
- Preheat oven to 325°F
- Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally, remove the stems, and remove the seeds. I patted dry some of the juicier tomatoes with a paper towel to remove some excess moisture.
- In an 8x8 pyrex baking dish, add about 3 tbsp olive oil, one clove of garlic, 1 tbsp dried oregano, 1 tbsp dried basil (from my garden!), and salt and pepper.*
- Toss tomatoes around in dish so that all sides are coated.
- Place tomatoes cut side down in the dish.
- Bake for 2 1/2 hours or until tomato skin is wrinkly. (Some of my smaller tomatoes were ready after 2 hours).


*Feel free to add your own combination of herbs and seasonings here. I think next time I'm going to use rosemary and thyme, or maybe do one dish with oregano only.

Here's the finished product. They don't look very pretty, but let me tell you, they smelled fantastic! The whole house smelled like olive oil, oregano, and basil, like a pizzeria! I almost hyperventilated from inhaling all that yumminess. I let them cool a little and then put them in a freezer bag. I think they'll be great in soups and sauces later this Fall.

You can read about what other Challenge participants made here. Do you can? What's your go-to method of food preservation?

What's Happening in the Garden

Whenever I'm puttering around the house or garden, I always think of something interesting I want to write on the blog. Then I get to the blank page and I forget everything. My garden posts lately seem boring--they're either rants about what's going wrong or a boring description of what I'm harvesting or growing. When I sat down to write this post last night, I forgot about all the garden happenings I wanted to write about, and all I could think about was how good the wine was that I was drinking. And how there are still two tacos from Chipotle in the fridge and I wondered if I could just scrape off the huge glob of guacamole and eat that while leaving the tacos behind.

So, I thought our squash plants were completely dead, but one of them surprised us. We harvested this one last juicy zucchini from a plant in the raised bed. It weighs 12 ounces--almost a whole pound! And that big red tomato is the one and only Mortgage Lifter. I'm anxious to taste it. I sprayed an Epsom salt and water mixture to the ML plants to see if they get a late season boost. Will keep you posted...

Other news--our 2 pound onion harvest! There are still 4 or 5 in the ground and I may leave them there just to see what happens. Hopefully they'll flower and attract some pollinators. I've only seen pictures of onion flowers, so I'd love to have some in my garden. It smells so good and onion-y in the little patch where they're growing. And garden pests have pretty much left them alone, which is very nice.

Our corn stalk seems to be doing really well. If you remember, we'd purchased 8 little sweet corn plants to make use of the raised bed after the potatoes died, but 7 of them got picked off one by one by the Evil Squirrel. The one corn stalk left seems to have produced two ears, which you can sort of see. (clicking on the pic will take you to my flickr page where I tried to tag the ears). I've never grown corn before and am just really excited to see the plant actually growing. I can't wait to harvest and taste it.

Last of all, the strawberry patch is coming back, just as it did last year. The buds aren't as big as they were in early spring, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to harvest much. (Looking at this picture, I can see that the patch really needs to be weeded!) But it's nice to see these little berries coming back for the end of summer.
That's what's happening in my garden. What's going on in yours?

I'm linking up with Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday event. Check it out to see what other gardeners are harvesting this week.

Tomato List

I wanted to provide an update on my tomato crop this year.

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Side note--This week was Tomato Week for the SSFC Eat Local Challenge. I completely forgot to prepare a tomato dish, but you can click the link to see what others did. I'll be providing an update of my tomato garden instead.
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First up, there's no change to my Mortgage Lifter situation. Unfortunately, SESE hasn't reponded to my email request for help yet, but many of you were kind enough to leave me tips and advice on my SOS post from a couple of weeks ago. Thank you all for that! I came back from 4 days in Maine to find that one ML plant was brown and dead. I think spider mites have ravaged it, much like they have some other tomato plants. There's still just the one tomato on the other ML plant. It started blushing so I plucked it to let it ripen inside. I'll let you all know if things improve with these.

Spider mites have also destroyed my Chocolate Cherry plant and the Ace55 tomatoes (top photo above). They've both pretty much stopped producing, but I did harvest few tomatoes from them early this season.

I have two Marglobe tomato plants, with seeds ordered from SESE. Now, unlike the ML, these have been good producers. They are determinate plants and have grown well in containers. The spider mites have avoided them too. The tomatoes are medium sized and have good flavor.

 

{pink girl hybrids on left; pink brandywine heirloom on right with long stem}

 We're growing two varieties of pink tomatoes this year: Pink Brandywine (heirloom) and Pink Girl hybrid (both from Burpee). We bought both of them as plants from the garden center, and I've been curious to see which variety would do better in terms of fruit production and tomato size. The heirloom plant is definitely the winner. The tomatoes are bigger and the plant is more productive. The hybrid tomatoes often have cracks but not so the Brandywine. Hooray for heirlooms! I haven't really noticed a distinct different in taste though.

We have several Sweet Snack hybrid tomatoes (also by Burpee). They're the tomatoes shown here in this recent harvest pic. These plants are amazingly productive! The tomatoes aren't sweet, but they go nicely in salads or mixed with avocado with a little salt and olive oil, or with a Caprese salad.

A few growing tips: We typically grow tomatoes in pots, although we have grown some in the ground too. Tomatoes have grown well for us in pots, even the indeterminate varieties, but the vines must be staked. Because they're in containers, the soil often dries out quickly so we do have to water every day during the extreme heat. We mulch and feed them regularly during the growing season.

Our tomatoes and peppers often suffer from blossom end rot, which happens when the plants are lacking calcium. A very easy and inexpensive way to add calcium back to the soil is to put eggshells in the soil, which we do every year. We eat eggs regularly throughout the year, and it's very easy to save and rinse out the eggshells, then crush them and put them around the base of the plant. No blossom end rot problems this year!  [Blossom end rot is a brown spot at the tip of the pepper or bottom of the tomato. If your veggies have this, it's OK to eat the fruit anyway, just chop off the brown part. Add calcium to the soil and your future veggies will come out OK.]

Finally, I want to talk about my ground cherries! (Similar to gooseberries). I've been excited about growing these since the seeds arrived this winter. I purchased these from SESE and this variety is called Cossack Pineapple. They are similar to tomatillos in that the small round fruit is covered by a husk. They drop to the ground on their own, even though they may still be green, and once they turn that orange-pineapple color, they're ready to eat. Although many have fallen off the plant, none of mine are ripe yet. I do see some of the fruit turning orange with the husk peeling away. The ones that are ripening have dried husks, though in some cases, the fruit has poked through the husk and you can see the green fruit changing color.

The first time I ate ground cherries was last winter in Iceland. I ordered a Nutella crepe in a café, and it came topped with whipped cream with a few ground cherries on top. They were a.MAZ.ing and sweet, and I knew I had to grow them myself. A lot of people make gooseberry jam, but I don't think I have enough for that. I'll probably just snack on them as they are, or put them on top of desserts (I'll have to learn to make crepes!), or maybe I can cook them into pancakes or something. It has been fun growing this new fruit in my garden!

Are you growing tomatoes this year? How is your crop doing? What's your favorite way to eat them?