Garden Report 2021 - Part 4 - August - weeks 2 and 3
We may be on vacation but the garden keeps on chugging along.
We've been picking and eating and pickling and freezing all kinds of goodies.
Like today.
We needed to clean up the tomatoes and prune all the branches that didn't have tomatoes on them. We're in mid-August and most of the tomatoes have not ripened yet, so we need the plants to send energy to the fruit, not slacker branches. We also cleaned up the spaghetti squashes. Two of these we picked deliberately; the last guy decided he was ready and his stem came off when we moved the vine.
In the last 10 days, we've picked:
5 kg/ 11 lbs of field cucumbers
2.5 kg/ 5 lbs of pickling cucumbers
1 bunch celery
22 cobs of corn
10 cups of purple beans (about 1.5 kg)
7.3 kg/ 16 lbs of spaghetti squash (the three in the picture)
2.5 kg/ 5 lbs of beets
2kg / 4.5lb of onions
2.5 kg/ 5 lbs of potatoes
5 kg/ 10 lbs of tomatoes
8 hot peppers
10 cups rhubarb
We aren't canning all this - a lot of it we are eating fresh. Because we did the work and now we're enjoying the reward.
To be honest, though, the garden is winding down for the year for the most part.
The corn left on the stalks is drying out. I'll try to salvage some for freezing, but it's not good for eating off the cob anymore. The cucumbers have one good picking left. We might try to make another batch of sweet pickles because it will only be 2-3 pints, I think. Most of the onions have been fulled. The beans are almost done. We've processed beets till we can process no more and still have some left.
We still need to pull all the carrots. It's going to rain for the next few days, so we'll do it after that when it's drier. We have one more bunch of onions to pull but we'll give those another week or two. The peppers are starting to come in, and we're going to try to make a batch of pepper jelly this weekend. Ross's second batch of potatoes are growing well, and those will stay in the ground until Thanksgiving. And the tomatoes are just starting to turn red. It's interesting that the giant staking tomatoes are a pink-red while the other varieties are the regular orange-red. I wonder what colour the tomato sauce will be after it goes through the canning process.
Our trip to the farmer's market on Wednesday was a bust; nobody had apples, so we have not been able to make the jelly yet.
Our canning is also coming to an end. We only have apple jelly, pepper jelly (small batch), salsa, and tomato sauce to go. Of course, with all the tomatoes we can see, I think we'll have a dozen jars of sauce at least. That'll be a whole day, for sure.
Running canning total:
June
4 half-pint jars of stewed rhubarb
spice bottle of dried chive blossoms
July
6 half-pints + 2 - 125ml jars of strawberry rhubarb jam
11 half-pint and 4 - 125ml jars of strawberry jam
6 half-pint + 2 - 125ml jars of raspberry jam
3 quarts Pops’ Dills (overprocessed, we’ll have to see if they’re still edible)
3 quarts Pops’ Dills
3 quarts + 1 pint Joyce’s Dills
2 quarts + 1 pint Christine’s Dills
12 cups frozen strawberries
6 cups frozen spinach
2 cups frozen celery
550 g potatoes
Dried herbs
August (to Aug 20)
10 servings of borscht (frozen)
Dehydrated peppers (they all fit in a 125 mL jar so far.)
12 cups frozen beans
4 quarts Dilly Cukes (another dill pickle recipe we are testing)
1 quart Bread and Butter Pickles
2.2 kg potatoes
2 kg onions
7 pints pickled beets
7 spaghetti squashes totalling 36 lbs (gave away 2 squashes/ 10 lbs)
10 cups frozen rhubarb
12 cups of shredded zucchini
Dehydrated zucchini (enough to fill a half-pint jar.)
(My sister's neighbour gave her two huge zucchinis and she gave one to me. It was 7.2 kg.)