Harvest: Enjoying your garden’s bounty
Hello fellow garden enthusiasts! Have you been enjoying the change of season as much as I have? The cooler temperatures, the colors, the fresh veggies?
It also marks the beginning of the preserving season. I try to keep thinking about how good it will taste all winter, and honestly, if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be willing to invest all the work that those home-grown veggies represent.
At our house it starts with green beans. I got the first “pickin” done and canned about 23 pints. I didn’t get a second batch thanks to the late appearance of GIANT grasshoppers. I know they had to be small at one time, but I didn’t see any sign of them or the damage they cause until I went out to water and found the green beans stripped. Absolutely naked! Every bit of foliage and every bean. Just gone! In their place were these grasshoppers that were so big and fat they couldn’t jump any more. If we lived in a culture where grasshoppers were a main source of protein, I could have filled my freezer. (Yuck!)
Fortunately, by then the sweet corn was ready and I had plenty of work on my hands. We had some of the best sweet corn in years. So sweet and tender! Wow. (Not a good time to be on a ketogenic diet!) We purposely plant varieties with different maturity dates, so our harvest lasts roughly four weeks. In that time, I got about 46 quart bags in the freezer, and who knows how many dozen ears we gave away and ate ourselves.
Next were pears. My tree is little, so we only had about two dozen and we ate them just like God grew them.
Tomatoes. Whew. I love them. I start dreaming of the day we can start having BLTS again. Not to mention how much better burgers and tacos (and everything else) taste. But, man, they take a lot of work. So, a few years ago, I decided that growing and preserving tomatoes was just too much work, so I only planted two plants. One so we would have enough just for the family, and one in case the first one died. Good plan, right?
My husband thought so too, until he had to listen to me gripe all winter long about how awful the store-bought tomatoes were and how all our soups, sauces and salsa were just not right. So that was the end of my “no tomatoes” garden. My husband’s ears are relieved.
I have two varieties I always start from seed because they aren’t always available as plants. The first is “Oregon Spring,” an early, salad-sized tomato. Perfectly good eating, but the reason it is on the “always plant” list is that it will produce no matter what. Late cool summer or blazing hot, bugs, diseases—it can handle them all. You might end up with an ugly plant, but you will have tomatoes.
The other is “Super Sauce.” I get it from Burpee seeds. It was touted as a large paste tomato with good flavor. Well, they weren’t kidding! This baby has been a reliable producer of huge, juicy, sweet tomatoes. I have a picture of one that was as big as the pint jar it was fixing to go into! If they were good just for canning that would be enough to grow them, but they are SO good to eat fresh. The first few years I didn’t get to can any because we ate them all. Yum. I wish I had a way of keeping them fresh for a few more weeks. No more BLTS until next year. Sad to see them go.
On the bright side I got about 40 quart bags of spaghetti sauce with meat to use throughout the winter. Lasagna anyone?
Apples are next on the agenda. Some were given to us, some came off our small tree. They are last because they keep a while. I’ll probably make apple butter mostly. It is what we use the most, and they aren’t really big enough to cut up for pie filling. Fortunately, they have very few worms, so it won’t be a battle to get them processed.
Autumn is when you hope you can slow down a bit and enjoy the bounty of your labors. But, if you have a truly bountiful garden, your work isn’t quite done with the first good frost. Now you have to figure out how you are going to make that bounty last until the next growing season!