What I Have Been Doing - Tomato-ing

Isn't that a thing of beauty? The deep yellow are my Dr Wyche's yellow tomaotes, the green are green zebra and the pale yellow are yellow globe tomatoes. I can them without red because otherwise the red takes over.







But I love my reds, too. See this tomato? That is not a small cutting board and that is a rather large paring knife.










A sink full of red goodness.

It all equals more than 50 quarts of canned tomatoes in the cold storage room and a good start on our year's supply of salsa.

Anyways, that's where I have been instead of here.

Gardening Year in Review

Last year for one of the first times in my life, I didn't have a hard time letting go of summer. Was it because I knew I would meet up with the sun again in Mexico in November? I don't think so, I think it was because I really felt I got everything I could out of summer - lots of swimming in the lake, lots of fruit, lots of satisfying garden, a bounteous harvest and a freezer and cold storage room full of summer tastes.

This year, I had a much harder time saying good bye to summer. The evidence is in the fact that there are still about 15 tomato stakes left in my garden and that I just planted my garlic last week.... I think I didn't get all I wanted out of summer. The strawberry, raspberry, cherry and apricot crops didn't do so well and mostly I have the leftovers of the previous year's great harvest of those things in my freezer. And with the super hot and then unseasonably cold weather, the above picture represents all the sugar pumpkins I got out of my garden along with the only Queensland Blue. Its a good thing I set out to grow a year's supply of squash or I wouldn't have any!

And this picture makes me laugh. I have never successfully grown onions but that didn't stop me from deciding to grow a year's supply of them, too. I had more than 52 onions started indoors at the prescribed 10 weeks before planting outside, which I have never done before. However, the results were not much different than usual. Most of them I didn't even bother to pick. This here one that is sitting on my window sill beside a chestnut, is my biggest onion. Most of them were about a third of that size. So, this year my goal is to learn HOW to grow onions. Clearly I don't know. It is my winter reading project that will start just after Christmas.
Tomato production was down this year, too. Although I had a few more plants than the year before, I didn't get near the same amount of tomatoes. It was that weird weather. And then I get shade sooner in the fall thanks to that hedge of elms I dream of cutting down... I had to buy some local tomatoes to add to my canned stash. But I am full of tomato dreams for next year already. I grew some really great tomatoes this year despite all that. I have decided there is little point in growing any tomato that isn't huge. Ahhhhh... it is hard to write about it and remember those gorgeous tomatoes with their striated orange, yellow and red.... they were sooooo delicious....

This is what keeps me going through the winter. This is a transplanted aloe vera plant that turned out to have a bunch of calendula seeds in the soil and they popped right up! I love that!

And this is one of my pomegranate trees who lost all of its leaves by July. It is sprouting leaves and branches. (you didn't kill it after all, Mary Sue;)

Love the One You're With...

No, really, everything is fine with Dean. It's the apples. I have mostly had access to an Italian Prune plum since I lived in Sidney and was going to UVic. I have come to love their golden flesh. When I moved here, two years ago, there were 5 acres planted in plums. I picked bucket after bucket and dried them and froze them and made plum pie and plum crisp. I went into last winter with 5 gallon jars full of dried plums. And that doesn't count all the peanut butter jars full. Well, my landlady cut down most of the plum trees and put in a horse pasture! And then from the remaining plum trees, she allowed me to pick a total of 2 buckets. I have one gallon jar of dried plums, no pie, no crisp and no frozen plums for making upside down plum cake in the winter... But my landlady couldn't care less about the 14 apple trees in front of my house. Right now the ground is covered in Spartans. Normally I make a few apple crisps, a few pies, can 12 pints of applesauce and make some apple juice and some apple butter. That doesn't even use up the apples from ONE tree. So I have told myself that it is time to stop moping about the plums. I am going to have to actually buy some but it probably won't be the 300 lbs or so I am used to. This year is the year of the apple. So far I have 41 pints of applesauce. And 3 gallons of dried apples. I have made many apple crisps and I am about to make apple juice and apple butter today. And Abbie is going to send me a recipe for canned apple pie filling. And I am going to go systematically through my Betty Crocker Cookbook and make all her apple recipes. Any other suggestions?

A Mixed Up Kind of Day

It is a day of contrasts. Here my brown lover pulling our daughter in the snow. Shorts, tank tops and bathing suits drying on the drying rack inside because it is too cold outside. Far too cold to be wearing any of that stuff here... Sweaters and undershirts over my own memory of warmth. And then, as the snow flies outside, my house is full of the delicious aroma of slow roasting tomatoes as I continue to process my ripening tomatoes from my own garden while thinking that in just 2 months it will be time to plant next year's seeds on the window sill...

Apple Day

We have processed raspberries, cherries, peaches, blueberries, apricots, pears and plums - hundreds and hundreds of plums. But today was the day of the apple. Our little orchard didn't do so well this year. Several of the trees bore almost no fruit. I suspect an irrigation problem. And the apples that were there were small. I have been dithering. Picking a bucket here and there and drying them - making a couple of crisps, a couple of pies.... But not doing what I need to do - make applesauce which I use all year in my baking as a substitute for oil and sugar - especially in muffins. The thought of working so hard on all those little apples... I put it off. Hoped they would grow bigger...

It is forcasted to dip below freezing tonight for the first time. So yesterday I picked all my peppers and today I hauled the last of the tomatoes out of the garden and harvested my mint and lemon grass. But the big job was the apples. Starting in the morning, Rhiannon and I and later Kaetlyn and her friend, peeled, cored and chopped apples. (I love doing this with my girls and feeling the connection to generations of mothers and daughters before us and hopefully after us)I made 3 batches of apple sauce (one more to go), 1 batch of juice and the fruit dryer is full, there is a large blue bin in the food storage room full of red delicious and my unknown variety that is sweet and crunchy and my favourite, there are buckets full sitting in the kitchen waiting to be made into the last batch of applesauce, the last apple pies and crisps and some apple butter and the fruit drawer of the fridge is so full you can barely open it. It is the day of the apple.

And to throw in a little variety, I had to process my tomatoes that have been ripening inside to make room for those left out on the vine. I decided on a big pot of tomato sauce (which I have never made before) and canned the rest - so I added 9 more quarts to the 39 already downstairs. My ultimate goal would be to put up enough tomatoes for our entire year. That would be a lot of tomatoes! (isn't that an amazing tomato? I grew that! Fertilized it with my pee, too! [1 part pee to 5 parts water = a good nitrogen fertilizer for your plants])

So it is midnight now. I've been in the kitchen all day except for the time I took Rhiannon to her violin and piano lessons and went to the hardware store to buy an apple-corer-peeler-thingey.

Time for bed and apple dreams....

Shadows in my Kitchen

Well, I now have 21 quarts of tomatoes, 21 quarts of peaches and 19 pints of applesauce and innumerable pints of salsa and a whole bunch of jam and jelly and many bags full of dried fruit (read plums) and 36 bags of frozen fruit. I love the way my cold storage room is looking! And I have about 50 lbs of green tomatoes left to go and an apple orchard that I have hardly put a dent in... I actually had to buy more pint size jars last night.

Kaetlyn has spent a lot of time in the kitchen with me canning tomatoes, making salsa and freezing plums. I don't think she knows how much it means to me that she is there with me. There are shadows in my kitchen when she is there with me. Just as clear in my mind as this kitchen is the kitchen in Terrace where I learned to can beside my mother and my grandmother. I remember when they taught me how to blanche tomatoes and peaches to get the skins off.

Is it any wonder I see the Okanagan as some kind of mecca? Every year at the end of August, beginning of September, my dad would drive to the Okanagan and come how with loads of fruit. I can remember our garage full to over flowing with cases of peaches and tomatoes and cucumbers. I would eat and eat peaches. Like an addict. And my mom would can and can and can. A years supply of fruit and vegetables. My paltry 21 quarts is nothing to what she used to do - she measured hers in the 100's... And we worked together, my grandmother, my mother and I. The pressure canner going constantly all day with one load or another. I can remember we used the deep fryer full of water to blanche the vegetables (I use my pasta pot).

And I love the sense of continuity as Kaetlyn and I work together and I teach her how to blanche peaches and tomatoes and how we taste and season the salsa together. I can blissfully caught in the line of women I am decended from with my daughter in line after me....

A Successful Day

Well, I filled my fruit dryer with sliced up plums, made 16 pints of salsa and 6 1/2 pints of red plum jelly and had soup simmering in the slow cooker all day. And then I went out to watch Redfish play at Monashee's last night and managed to stay all 3 sets (although my ears were plugged for most of the last 2 sets - I do feel a bit conspicuous, sitting there with my ears plugged...hehe. I danced with my friend Monique. An almost perfect day.

But the red plum jelly didn't set so I am about to open all those bottles and pour them back into the pot and add some pectin (the recipe said that plums have enough of their own pectin... not these ones, I guess). This is my first attempt at making jelly... ever. And then I will move on to the peaches and apples. I have secured a promise from Dean to help me make applesauce today...