Oh hail, no!

The eighth (!) big hail storm of the year rolled through this afternoon for about 30 minutes and made a heck of a mess. You can see the accumulation under the tree while the water overloaded the gutters and just rolled across the ground.

The hail did a lot of damage. The autumn lettuce (in the container on the deck) is a complete write off.

More troubling was the beating the tomatoes took. They were literally pounded off their trellis. I'll go out tomorrow and pull off the damage tomatoes. Between the hail and slugs, it is a tough year! The butternut squash plant in the foreground (below) was shredded and likely won't make it,

There was some flooding in the neighbourhood. You can see an intersection that is axle-deep in water in the background (click to get a larger picture).

Lots of other plants were just destroyed. Below was a large swiss chard, which is now just goo.

Other stuff will likely bounce back (root vegetables seemed okay, just a bit flattened). I also got a nice crop of kale off this morning and made chips while the rain came down.

In better news, I canned 16 jars of carrots today using the pressure canner. Wow, that was a snap. I plan to do some salsa on Monday.

Tomatoes, potatoes and pumpkins

The past few days have seen lots of stuff come out of the garden and into the house. The paste tomatoes are ripening and I plan to can a batch of salsa this week.

We've been eating the first of the early potatoes (delicious) but the late potatoes continue to bloom (which is a nice late-season flower to have around).

After claiming I've never had any luck with pumpkins, I wander out of the yard and found our vine has at least three growing. This one is bigger than a softball (the wooden offcut is 5.5 inches to give you a sense of scale). I'm excited to have our own pumpkins for once!

We're also seeing some real late summer growth. The sunflowers above the clothes line are more than eight feet tall. The top of the metal trellis is five feet to add some scale.

On the back deck, the autumn lettuce patch is coming up nicely, although the runner beans keep trying to over run it.

I've also harvested a box of carrots from the alley (marauders were picking 3-4 a night and making a mess of the the rest of the foliage). I'm in the process of pressure canning these--should be about 16 500ml jars when I get done. We're also going to try preserving a bunch in moist sand.

First potatoes and reordering the beds

I've started the potato harvest this week. Some of the early potatoes (blue caribe) are starting to die back and the taste if fresh potatoes is too alluring to wait any longer. I pulled three plants today (in the shady part of the bed and got a modest haul of these purple-skinned, white-fleshed potatoes. No scab so far! The late-season Russian blue are still flowering so I expect we'll have a decent staging of this harvest (rather than a glut).

As crops have been coming out, I've started re-ordering the beds for next year. After a couple of years of using areas, I've decided to move to rows. I'm just getting too old and inflexible to contort myself weeding in order to get a few extra feet of productive space!

That end, I've trimmed back the lilac and replanted some other flowers to open up the south end of the garage bed. I then harvested the south-most potatoes and started pushing soil into north-south rows (you can see this in front of the lilac--north is to the left). I think I can likely get three rows and two walkways in the narrow part of this bed, adding rows as we move north and the garden widens out. As I harvest more (e.g., the onion bed to the right of the bird bath), I will extend the rows northward. The good news so far is that the soil is amazing to work with--soft and loamy.

Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton appears set to gear up in time for the apple season. This is very exciting as apple sauce, pie, butter and rings (not to mention cider) are in the offing. I successfully wired the garburetor so I have an apple crusher to go with my press.

Evans Cherries

It is sour cherry season and a friend hooked me up with his neighbour who had far more Evans cherries than she wanted. Jess and I went over on Thursday and picked the bush clean.

The cherries were lovely and ripe and we managed to get about 20 litres in 45 minutes. I wonder if I can graft some Evans branches onto my ornamental cherry in the back?

The obvious end product for sour cherries is pie filing. Most of the filling recipes online require Cleargel (basically modified cornstarch) which I couldn't lay hands on locally (although my search was not exhaustive). The few recipes without Cleargel are a real mishmash of volumetric and weight measures (sometimes mixing imperial and metric) with oddball input and output quantities.

After some experimentation (five batches!), here is a rough and ready recipe using cup measures (250ml) and quantities your average home canner will have and can process at one time. Start with 16 cups (basically a 4-litre ice cream pail). Fill the pail about half full of water and add in a squirt of lemon juice. Pit the cherries and drop the flesh in the pail (lemon juice will prevent browning). Refrigerate until ready to can but use within a few days.

Drain three cups of the liquid from the pall and combine with 1/3 cup of lemon juice and 5 cups of sugar. Heat this combination (in a pan able to accommodate 16 cups of liquid) until the sugar/juice/water begins to thicken after boiling (maybe 15 minutes). While heating, drain the cherries.

When the liquid has thickened, add the cherries and boil between 60 and 90 minutes (stirring occasionally--now is a good time for a glass of wine or to pit the next batch of cherries). The cherry mixture will eventually turn dark and start to gel (although it will never gel quite as nicely as jam). When ready, can and waterbath for about 30 minutes (we're at 2300 feet, adjust to your own elevation). This recipe makes 8 cups of pie filling.

The filling is a bit tart but has good body. If things are too liquid, then add cornstarch or tapioca pearls prior to baking (425 for 15 minutes then 350 for 25-30 minutes).

Pickled beets

After a lovely morning bike ride, the skies darkened so I decided to can some more. The beets needed thinning and I didn't make any pickled beets last year so out I went into the yard and started yanking.

This year I planted a mixture of heirloom beets (golden, red and variegated) and I pulled those that were up out of the ground. Great colours! I also thinned out the sugar beets (the white ones). They taste just like beets, but sweeter.

A quick boil and peel and were were ready to pack. I found one of the variegated beets but cut it the wrong way to get the rings, but the colours are still interesting.. I planted a bunch more of these for a fall picking.

The result was a very lively set of beets (five jars) that are pickling in the cupboard. I'm also excited to see how much the sugar beets have grown (and, now that they are thinned, have more space to grow).

Then the weather completely turned around again and we went for a hike in the valley. It was fun to listen to Jess identify berries and pick wild Saskatoons for me. We also ran into a porcupine!

On the way back we passed by one of our neighbors who turned his front yard into a garden. This is quite impressive (the 10 boxes are about 6x3 feet), although I'm not sure pressure-treated wood was the best choice.

Tonight I'll start in the custard layer for Jessica's birthday cake. I'm going to give this lemon cake another whirl now that I have (I think) figured out the trick to folding in beaten egg whites. I'm also hopeful to get the pressure canner up and running and put away some carrots for the winter. I also see that the shell peas are putting out a second set of blossoms (which is encouraging!).

More jam and some tomatoes

It has been busy leading up to the long weekend. On Friday we made some raspberry-saskatoon jam and then I tried cranberry-raspberry. Below you can see the cooked cranberries (I picked some up after Xmas and froze them) and lemon; raspberries get added in the next step.

The result was a bit runny (maybe should have cooked it longer) but has a fabulous colour and very tart taste (about the same as stewed rhubarb). I've managed to fill one of the top shelves in the kitchen in the past few weeks (36 jars) and have spilled over into another. If I see a some peaches at the farmer's market I might do some more but we're approaching applesauce season, which tends to crowd out the jamming.

Our hedge is an alpine currant. Over the years I have seen a few (seedy) berries but never anything to be bothered with. Oddly, this year one bit has a bunch of currants. These are pretty small and likely best left for the birds. How I wish this hedge was actually saskatoons!

The tomato plants are starting to show some promise. I planted mostly Roma in the back for canning and the plants are heavy with fruit. They get some shelter from the house and deck so the hail (six good storms so far this summer) hasn't damaged them too much.

Around front the Early Girl plants have a few tomatoes about ready to harvest. The cherry tomato bushes have grown really well but have virtually now tomatoes. I wonder if the soil is inhibiting fruiting.

On the other hand, the sunflowers are doing very well in the soil. This one is about seven feet tall and maybe 12 inches across (measuring from tip of petals). If you to get a larger image, you can see a bee diligently pollinating this one for me. The larger Himalayan Giant sunflowers out back are over seven feet and no sign of a flower head yet. The packaged hinted at 12-14 feet.

Around back, the Mexican bush beans we dried and saved have sprouted, grown and are starting to form pods. These are delicious in soups--akin to small kidney beans.

The shell peas we left to dry on the vine for seed are starting to come in. Must find an envelope to help me keep these all together and straight. Some of the beets are also looking like they might be ready to pickling.

Raspberry season begins

The raspberries are now ripe and we spent the day picking and jamming. While we have a small patch (and growing) here, we usually go out to Roy's Raspberries on the west side of town to get a big haul for the winter.

We had a lovely morning for it. It started a bit cool and then the sun really came up.

Jess went from a light jacket on her arms to a jacket on her head to keep the sun off over the course of about 90 minutes. We managed about 12 litres before we decided to call it (and ran out of pails!).

The berries were enormous. And, while resting my back and knees, it struck me that the view was also wonderful. Below we're looking west from the east fields. We were by no means all the way to the eastern boundary and the field extends a long way to the south (left in the photo). There are also southern fields and western fields (those were still in bloom after a beating last year in a hail storm).

We then came home and made 14 jars of raspberry jam (happy to be sitting down now!). Below you can see the first batch done and the second batch in the water bath. There are still plenty of berries so I'll try some raspberry-saskatoon jam tomorrow and perhaps a small batch of cranberry-raspberry jam from a Christmas cookbook I was reading last week (should be tart!). Tonight is raspberries and ice cream.

The rest of the garden is coming right along. We made a vat of zucchini salsa early in the week (very tasty) as well as soup. The carrots are doing very well and I wish I had planted more.