Hurricane Irene Canning Session!

Gail & I ended up picking the perfect weekend for a massive canning session! While Irene inched up the coast and made landfall we were canning like mad. Here is the final haul after a weekends worth of hard work:

Let me just say: that is A LOT of canning for one weekend - 12 quarts, 8 pints, & 30 half pints!!! A mix of tomato sauce, beet relish, corn relish, and garlic pineapple salsa!!

The tomato sauce is chock full of tomato seconds & onions from our friends at Kimball Fruit Farm, as well as tomatoes, peppers, garlic, basil, and oregano from our garden! We have a simple hand-crank tomato mill to juice the 25lb boxes of tomato seconds we pick up from the market. Once we've gathered a few gallons of juice we cook it down and add onions, diced tomato chunks, garlic, and spices to our preference. When we feel the sauce is the right consistency we jar it and process it! We made 12 quarts and 3 pints of sauce this batch to go with the 11 quarts we've previously made.

The Corn Relish recipe is easy and can be found in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and the always wonderful Beet Relish recipe is the same one from last summer because there is no sense is messing with a perfect thing!

Finally, the salsa. I had scanned cookbooks and the internet and went over hundreds of Salsa recipes. Not finding one that was just right I decided to make my own, and the results were great! This is a delicious Pineapple Garlic salsa with oven roasted tomatoes.

Garlic Pineapple Salsa

12-15 big tomatoes, diced

3 onions, diced

15 cloves of garlic, finely diced

6 jalapeno's seeded, diced

6-8 hot peppers seeded, diced

3 cups diced pineapple

1/4 cup fresh cilantro

1 tablespoon salt

3/4 teaspoon chili flakes (more if you like it spicier)

3/4 cup cider vinegar

Wash & train tomatoes, Peel, seed, and dice into 1/4 in pieces.

Remove seeds from hot peppers, place in a small bowl. Pour boiling water over hot peppers just to cover, allowing peppers to steep for 10-12 minutes. Drain half the water. Puree hot pepeprs and remaining water in a food processor for 1 minute.

Combine all ingredients in a large sauce pot and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes or until mixture thickens.

Ladle hot salsa into sterilized jars leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Process for 15 minutes in water bath canner.

Like I said the salsa turned out great!! So great that the picture of all the cans on our table is missing a pint jar of salsa because we managed to eat it all in about a day!

With the canning, herb preservation, frozen breads, and other stuff we are ending up with a nice little stock of home preserved foods. Once schedules here calm down a little bit I will have to conduct a tour and tally of all the stuff we are storing!

What's growing for the fall?

As planting spaces open up throughout the plot we are slowly transitioning/planting fall crops. Here's what we have in the ground as of Sunday:
Kale - We were gifted 5 seedlings from fellow community gardener Marie (who provided our leeks at the start of the season). 4 of the 5 are doing really well!
Bush Beans - We planted a row of organic Fresh Pick bush beans. These are a Jade type green bean.
Butterhead lettuce - The Romaine was incredibly successful at the start of the season. Hopefully the Red Cross butterhead we planted will produce as well. Red Cross produces a mix of crimson and green heads.
Mesclun/Baby Greens - A mixed bed of Johnny's Selected Seeds Elegance Greens Mix, additional Ruby Streaks mustard greens, and Surrey (Arugula/Rocket with a 'wild arugula' look)
Onions- Egyptian/Walking Onions of course!
Beets - more Detroit Dark Red Beets! They were slow to mature and undersized in the spring because we planted late, hopefully this crop will yield larger end results.
Radish- A few interspersed plantings of Champion Radish
Spinach- A 2nd attempt at Bloomsdale Longstanding Spinach. Our spring/early planting suffered from our lack of experience and weed identification skills. Trying again in the hopes of better results.

As more space opens up I'll fill it with more greens/fall type crops.
What's to come in your fall garden?

Harvest Monday July 19th 2010

We harvested ALOT of Herbs this week:

What's that in the bottom right corner of the above photo? PEPPERS! Here's a better look at the first 2 Hungarian Wax Peppers we harvested yesterday: Each pepper measured about 6 inches long. We roasted them up last night and enjoyed them with our dinner of beans and rice. The peppers were not burning hot but left a slight tingle on the tongue. I'll be letting a few of the remaining peppers mature as long as possibly and picking the rest as they reach appropriate size.
Another pepper note: These Hungarian peppers far outpreformed our bell peppers! We don't have any bell peppers of noticeable size and there are at least 4 sizeable wax peppers with 2 or 3 smaller ones closing up the ranks.
Harvest Totals:
2 oz Beets (not pictured)
10.5 oz Genovese Basil
1.1 oz Chives
1.25 oz Dill
1.5 oz Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper
3 oz Parsley
3.9 oz Red Rubin Basil
3.55 oz Spearmint
Weekly Total: 1.675 lbs/26.8 oz/759.77 g
Season Total: 4.55 lbs/2.065 kg

Tomato Watch: As of 7/18/10: 140 Tomatoes have set fruit.

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of Harvest Monday.

Dill Pickles & Beet Relish

With an abundance of pickling cucumbers and beets showing up at our local farms/markets Gail and I decided to take advantage. On Saturday afternoon we made 8 quarts of Dill pickles and 2.5 pints of Beet relish.

For the sake of variety we made 3 quarts of whole pickles, 3 quarts of pickle spears, and 2 quarts of pickle 'chips'
Dill Pickles
8 pounds 3-4 in long pickling cucumbers
4 cups white vinegar
12 cups water
2/3 cup pickling salt
16 cloves garlic, peeled and halved
8 sprigs fresh dill
8 heads fresh dill
Preparation:
1. Wash cucumbers and place in receptacle with cold water and lots of ice. Soak in ice water bath for at least 2 hours but no more then 8 hours. Add more ice as necessary. While soaking cucumbers sterilize 8 quart size canning jars and lids.
2. In a large pot over medium-high heat, combine the vinegar, water, and pickling salt. Bring the bring to a rapid boil.
3. In each jar, place 2 half cloves of garlic, one head of dill, and enough cucumbers to fill the jar. Then add 2 more half cloves of garlic and a sprig of dill to the top of each jar. Fill the jars with hot brine and seal the jars.
4. I found many conflicting ways to process the sealed jars in a hot water bath to make sure the seal. I processed them upside down in a sauce pan so that only the lids were covered with boiling water for 10 minutes. 6 of 8 jars sealed this way.
5. If jars have sealed store pickles for 8 weeks in a cool dry place before eating. Refrigerate after opening. Any jars that have not sealed can be kept in the refrigerator. Pickles will keep for up to 2 years if stored in a cool dry place.
We added mustard seed and/or red pepper flakes to some of the jars. We used Dill from our garden, while the cucumbers came from Keown Orchards and the garlic is from Red Fire Farm both by way of our local farmers market.
The real difficulty is having to wait 8 weeks to eat them! We decided we couldn't wait so last night we opened one of the jars of spears just to give them a taste. After a few days the pickles were crisp and tasted good, but certainly needed more time.



Some of the extra Beet relish was eaten the next day in a sandwich.
Beet Relish
3 lbs raw beets
1 tsp superfine sugar
1 lb shallots, finely chopped
2 cups cider or white wine vinegar (I used cider vinegar)
1 tbsp pickling spices, place in a cheesecloth or spice bag
2 1/4 cups granulated sugar
Preparation:
1. Place the beets in a large saucepan. Pour over enough water to cover them, and add the superfine sugar (I used plain granulated sugar as it would be dissolving so to me it doesn't matter). Bring to a boil and simmer for 1 hour or until the beets are soft and cooked. Drain and leave to cool. When cool enough to handle peel and dice the beets into small, even pieces.
2. Put the shallots and vinegar in a pan and cook for 10 minutes over low heat. Add the chopped beets and the bag of pickling spices. Stir the mixture, add the granulated sugar, and cook gently until the sugar has all dissolved. Bring to a boil and cook at a rolling boil for 5 minutes, then reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for about 40 minutes or until the mixture thickens.
3. Remove the spice bag, then ladle into sterilized mason jars, leaving 1/4in (5 mm) head space and making sure there are no air gaps. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. Remove jars and let cool. Store in a cool, dark place. Allow the flavors to mature for 1 month and refrigerate after opening.
Relish should keep for up to 9 months.
We were expecting 4 jars of relish but ended up with 5 so we decided to set 4 aside to mature for a month as the recipe calls for and enjoy one right away. Gail enjoyed some on a veggie burger and I've had it with chicken salad in a sandwich. We used 5 of our own golf ball sized beets, the rest of the beets as well as all the shallots came from Allandale Farm.


Pickle recipe can be found at AllRecipes.com & the Beet Relish recipe is from Preserve It! which is a very visual excellent introductory cookbook to food preservation full of great tips and recipes for novice canners and preservers covering everything from fruits and vegetables to herbs, fish, and meats.

Harvest Monday - July 12th 2010

We pulled the last of the Romaine this week and some golf ball sized Beets:

There were some more beets pulled but they didn't make it on camera. I also ended up pulling and throwing out the last 2 massive heads of romaine because they had bolted and were very bitter.

Totals for the week:

Beets 5.55 oz/157.34 g

Romaine 8.9 oz/252.31 g

Weekly Total: 14.45 oz/409.65 g

Season Total: 2.88 lbs/1.305 kg

Tomato Watch: As of 7/9/10: 87 Tomatoes have set fruit.

Harvest Total and Tomato Watch widgets in the right-hand column have been updated.

One of my Sunflowers opened up on Friday as well:

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday - July 5th 2010

We harvested more greens and herbs on Thursday:

(Top: Basil, Mint. Bottom: Romaine, Dill, Mesclun)

I was off to Cape Cod for the long weekend so did not get much gardening work done. We came back late Monday afternoon and made a quick stop at the plot so we could water everything after 3 days of 90F and higher temperatures they needed it. We were finally able to harvest some non-greens as well! We pulled the 2 surviving carrots from the poorly germinated first seeding as well as a test beet to see how things were looking:

(2 Baby Carrots & 1 Baby Beet)

Totals for the week:

Dill - 2 oz/56.70 g

Mint - .5o oz/14.17 g

Basil - .90 oz/25.51 g

Mesclun - 2.75 oz/77.96 g

Romaine - 5 oz/141.75 g

Beets - .70 oz/19.84 g

Carrots .95 oz/26.93 g

Weekly Total: 12.80 oz / 362.86 g

Season Total: 1.975 lbs/31.60 oz/895.84 g

Tomato Watch: As of 7/5/10 62 tomatoes have set fruit

Harvest Total and Tomato Watch widgets in the right-hand column have been updated!

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of Harvest Monday.

31 Days of Gardening

I've been gardening at the Fenway Victory Gardens for 4 weeks now. Here is what the plot looked like the day we picked it out:

(April 25th-Day 1)

Here is the drastically improved look 4 weeks later:

(May 22nd-Day 28)

After this weekend I really felt that the garden was coming together and starting to show some real signs of life and future vegetables! Here's a peek at what is springing to life in plot Z-1:

-Broccoli-

-Leeks-

-Greens-

-Beets-

-Peppers-

-Tomatoes-

-Herbs-

Missing form the photo's: Cabbage, Onion, Carrots, Spinach, Potato, Kentucky Wonder pole bean, Ottawa Cranberry pole bean, Garlic Chives, & Sage.

For the Beans, Potato, Garlic Chives & Sage seedlings have not sprouted yet or are just beginning to sprout. (A trellis and a pair of makeshift trellis' have been installed for the beans and await their arrival)

The Cabbage, Onion, and Carrots have developed very slowly so there isn't even enough to take pictures of.

The Spinach is another story. Some piece in the row are starting to look like spinach, others have clearly been bothered by the encroaching bindweed which we are doing our best to keep up with.

I suspect some of the seedlings which are slowly to develop were either planted late or are the victims of soil which developed a crust after a few rough rain storms. It's still early and there is plenty to grow so stay tuned!!

We have liftoff (and bindweed)!

Gail and I headed to the plot Friday afternoon. When I arrived I found Gail happily weeding with a large pile serving as proof that we will be fighting an uphill battle against Bindweed (Calystegia sepium). Lots of serious hand weeding is ahead of us!

Besides the Bindweed springing up everywhere it can we saw signs of a garden coming to life.

I am extremely ecstatic to report numerous Beet and Mesclun mix seedlings emerging from the ground a mere 6 days after planting! I looked very carefully in the rows next to the Mesclun for Spinach and Romaine seedlings and believe I saw a few, however the Mesclun mix and Beet seedlings were easily visible in abundance so I will only confirm those for now. No visible seedlings from the Onions, Carrots or Cabbage yet but I will be back Sunday afternoon and hope to find more signs of life.

To celebrate our growth we began planting our herb bed. Garlic Chives, Dill, Sage and Chive seeds were planted in short rows before we left on account of darkness.