Visitors and pickled eggs

With my vacation over, things have been quite in the garden. Mostly we have been doing autumn tasks: digging potatoes, harvesting tomatoes and lettuce, amending beds for next year, and bemoaning plantings that didn't turn out (I'm talking to you, cauliflower).

We've been seeing more bird activity lately with this colourful bird (a Tennessee Warbler?) dropping on the weekend. I've been cutting and freezing carrots in the evenings. I also pickled some eggs a few weeks back to see how that worked--pretty simple and tasty even so soon.

Up next: We have a fair amount of bed preparation to do this weekend. I'd also like to harvest the rest of the potatoes (plants have died back). I'm inclined to make some applesauce if we can find some local apples for the taking. Or perhaps some more soup stock to use the rest of the celery.

Salsa, Stock, Corn and Tomatoes

We've been busy as summer comes to a close! We had a friend over for a corn roast which was delicious. I'm not sure I would grow corn again next year (a lot of space for not a huge yield) but it was fun to try.

We've also been eating these Peter Pan squash that I interplanted among the corn.

We made a couple litres of salsa this week which has proven delicious.

The garden is also beginning to yield larger tomatoes. I expect we'll be making more salsa as these ripen.

I made six litres of soup stock (now frozen) from various odds and ends in the garden (the skin from the salsa tomatoes, for example). That proved to be a snap and we'll likely make more as we have lots of celery. I must grow some leeks next year.

We could also stand to harvest and freeze a bunch of carrots, but I need a bit of a break this weekend. One of the carrots has started to go to seed so I'm going to let it alone and see what happens (despite what everyone says about F2 plants).

Now back to digging potatoes and trying to improve the soil a bit for next year!

Relish, applesauce and oven roasted tomatoes

We had a busy weekend of cycling, a trip to the 104th street market and putting up some food for winter.

Our friends Lara and Ryan offered us some apples from their tree so we brought home two bags. Jennifer pitched in to peel, core and quarter 36 cups of apples (my hero!) while I sauced them.

We got just over four litres of apples sauce and the remainder was delicious on oatmeal in the morning. While the prep was a bear, this was perhaps the easiest of the fruits to can and I would do applesauce again in a minute.

I also wanted to make relish with some peppers and cucumbers we picked up at the market. I ran out of celery and ended up out in the garden in my boxer shorts hacking down one of the four celery plants Jess and I grew this year.

I've never grown celery (or even seen it fresh from the garden) so this was an adventure. The knife in the photo is 12 inches long and I've glad I had it to severe the huge tap root that the plant had. I'd definitely grow this again next year.

The fresh celery was quite a lot more flavourful than the store bought (which might be blanched a bit?). After two hours of prep cutting (again by Jenn) she went out and I sweated it out in the kitchen (it was 32C outside).

We made six 500ml lars of relish and it tastes really quite good. Jenn, who is not a relish fan, was even impressed! We also made 48 oven-roasted tomatoes this weekend--half we're eating and half I froze. We had some on a bagette (with basil and asiago) for lunch today on a hike and it was fantastic.

Up next: As my vacation comes to a close, I'm checking off the things I wanted to preserve and try quite quickly. If I get ambitious today, I will make soup stock while the bread is rising. Tomorrow we're having a corn roast with potatoes and perhaps the little pan fryer squash I've been growing in corn patch. Maybe I make some salsa on the weekend. We'll also need to dig some potatoes as the plants are dying back.

Flowers and preserving

We've hit the high point of the garden this year and we're now starting to harvest, preserve and prep a bit for next year. I've spent some time composting the empty spots left by the potatoes we've eaten. In a couple of spots, I then planted the onion bulbs that didn't really grow much this summer (due to bad placement) for an early start next year.

This weekend we'll be making applesauce with fruit from a neighbour's tree. We'll also be making some sundried tomatoes (some to eat and some to freeze) again. And I frozen some basil in oil last night for winter stews and sauces.

I also put away a bunch of dried chives for breads. If the market has enough cucumbers this weekend we'll also be making some relish. I'm keen to put some of my larger jars back to work now that I have a stock pot big enough to hot-water bath them.

At some point, I will continue digging the new potato bed in the backyard. That said, I saw an amazing video on line of a fellow who grew potatoes in a pot and had great results. I may try that next year.

Potatoes!

We ended up staggering the planting of potatoes, with a few late plants to fill in holes where there was a failure of one plant or another. So we have some potatoes just blooming out back while other plants are starting to die back in the front.

We went out the other day and pulled up the most withered of the russet and shepody plants to see what we ended up with. The soil out front is fairly nasty so there was a harvest but it was modest (about 6 potatoes per plant, one big and five smaller).

The russet are delicious, both cooked on the BBQ in tinfoil and baked as fries. The shepody seem to be more of a baking potato (drier) so I will give them a try that way before I declare a winner. I have been amending the soil where we have pulled out plants, managing to get the composter dug down to the bottom. This will allow us to start again with a slightly less wet pile.

Up next: Jess is keen to try pickles and I'd like to make relish so we're hopeful to find some cucumbers at market this weekend. I also bought a stock pot deep enough to bath some of the larger jars that I have so we should be able to press some older jars back into service once I pick up some new lids. I also recall promising to make pickled eggs so we'll see how that goes.

Oven-roasted tomatoes

The tomatoes plants have produced a huge crop of tomatoes and now the question is whether they will ripen before the frost or not. The small tomatoes are doing just fine and providing great fodder for salads.

The larger tomatoes (the big one below is the size of a softball) are still quite green and I'm going to bite the bullet and top some of the plants today.

The question will be what to do with the tomatoes once they ripen. I sauced some last year and that was a lot of work for not much outcome; salsa was a much better use of the tomatoes, I thought.

I picked up a bunch of large roma tomatoes at the farmer's market to try oven roasting. This took a lot longer than I expected (about 8 hours) due to the size of the tomatoes. But the results are amazing.

My favourite sandwich is an oven-roasted tomato sandwich on a baguette with asiago and some basil that Col. Mustard's prepares. I managed to duplicate the taste yesterday and it was all I could do not to eat two or three sandwiches!

Up next: I have some basic gardening maintenance to do over the next few days. And then perhaps we'll make relish this weekend.

Chokecherry jelly

My first foray into local food was about 12 years ago when I found a bunch of chokecherries ripe in the valley and added vodka for a very purple berry shooter. On Friday, Jess was keen to pick berries and I recalled seeing a bunch of chokecherries growing in some bush we passed on a bike ride.

Off we went for a walk with bucket in hand. We managed to get about 2 litres of chokecherries and also stumbled upon a large patch of wild saskatoon berries that we'll remember for next year. We got some funny looks from folks in passing cars but no one called the cops so I'm going to call it a success.

Back at the ranch, I opened up the jelly section of my canning book and cooked down the berries. We could have used another litre of berries and I ended up adding a bit of unsweetened apple juice to get enough juice. This morning I made jelly for the first time and found it a lot less work than jam.

What little I know of jelly is that one needs not to press the berries to extract juice as that adds particles that make the jelly cloudy. I avoided pressing and got jelly that looks about as clear as most of the darker jellies I've purchased over the years.

I wasn't sure it was going to set up well. But then it started setting while I frantically ladled it into jars. After some cooking, I'd say we've pass the gel test!

The taste was passable--not as delicate as crab apple but good enough to eat. It might be good on a cracker with cream cheese or maybe on meat (pork, would be my guess as a vegetarian of nearly 20 years).

Up next: We're making some oven-roasted tomatoes. And I've been slowly improve the soil in places where we've pulled out some potato plants. Jess is also keen to try to gather rose hips. I need to look into that a bit as I recall an ill-fated jelly-making session (i.e., there was a lot of swearing) at the family cabin where the seeds caused some issues.