Attack of the greenhouse tomatoes.

Most of the year we don’t eat tomatoes, because we know what they should taste like. Oh, we’ll buy a few Roma tomatoes to cut up into salads, but they just plain don’t taste like much.

I once described the flavor and texture as “ketchup-tinged oatmeal,” and I stand by that description today.

At this time of the year, though, we can have all the tomatoes we want. In fact, we have trouble keeping up.

Even eating them up to three times a day does nothing more than keep us from losing love apples to rot. The horror.

Which is why I’m thinking of it as an attack, a la “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small affiliate commission on items purchased through my links.)

My niece and great-niece came over for a lunch of Black Prince and Cherokee Purple tomatoes on DF’s fresh rustic bread with mayonnaise, some of our Red Sails lettuce and crisp bacon, plus fresh cucumber slices on the side. (More on those in a minute.)

This has been a year for some weirdly shaped tomatoes. That one in the illustration was uglier than sin, and twice as satisfying. Some of them look normal, but we’ve had quite a few gnarled behemoths that are hard to slice, but completely worth the effort. The flavor just knocks us out.

It’s hard to describe the taste of these heirloom varieties: sweet as sugar but with an underlying tomato tang. There’s a reason they charge $10 a pound for them at the farmers market here in Anchorage.

And there’s a reason we refuse to buy them. In part it’s because we don’t want to pay $10 a pound for meat, let alone tomatoes. It’s also because we can grow these beauties ourselves, and for a few short weeks we can gorge ourselves. More than a few short weeks, actually, because when the weather gets too chilly we’ll bring in all the greenies and let them ripen. Usually we finish them all by the beginning of December, at which point we start to dream tomato dreams once more. 

 

 

Tomatoes mean summer’s almost gone

I’d expected to do garden updates regularly this year, since garden stories seem to interest a lot of readers. However, the last one was on Aug. 2, and the one before that was on June 25.

Time has become a slippery concept since the pandemic began. I will plan to stay in regular contact with people, or begin a new project, or take a walk every day. The next thing I know it’s been weeks since I wrote to my siblings. The project is still sitting where it’s been sitting for months. And “every day” turns out to mean “a few times a week, maybe.”

A day starts early enough, with me out of bed before 8 a.m. (That’s early for me. Please don’t write and tell me how you get up at 5 a.m. to do deep-knee bends and write in a journal.) I wander out into the yard to pick a few berries and a tomato for breakfast, and before I know it I’ve spent 40 minutes enjoying the progress of various garden beds.

I force myself over to the computer, and while researching inflation or holiday shopping patterns  over the last decade I allow myself to get pulled down some rabbit-hole or another. Next thing I know it’s 1 p.m. and I haven’t even finished writing the article pitch, let alone working on any current assignment.

A week flies by without notice. How on earth is it THURSDAY already? Wasn’t it Saturday only a few minutes ago? And a summer gets away from me.

Sorry about that. Belatedly, here’s a look at some of the bounty.

This cucumber is a bit of a showoff, I know. The Altoids tin is for reference in case you don’t believe me that this bad boy reached 20 inches in length. We have been eating sliced cukes with every meal, and we’ve given some away, but we still can’t keep up.

This year DF put eggshells into the soil to guard against a calcium deficiency that results in tomato blossom end rot, which is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds. The cucumbers produced far beyond what they did last year and now, this late in the season (it was 45 degrees this morning), we still have young cukes forming. A bit of research showed that cucumbers indeed like a spot of calcium in their diet, so we will do this again next year.

The variety is called Chelsea Prize, ordered from Renee’s Garden Seeds. I would highly recommend it, both for its insane size and its melon-like sweetness and crispness. (As a Renee’s Garden Seeds affiliate, I may receive a small affiliate fee for items bought through my link.)

That Red Sails lettuce mentioned earlier has also run amok. It’s been great on sandwiches, and also spread with egg salad and eaten rolled up (shades of the Atkins diet). My favorite way thus far has been on soft tacos made with ground turkey and a dressing made of sour cream and salsa stirred together. I discovered a lovely taco-seasoning recipe I found online, and it’s paired beautifully with a bunch of manager’s-special ground turkey that I lucked into at 99 cents a pound.

I’d planned to use a photo of the packed-with-red lettuce bed. Instead, I shot the very edge because that volunteer viola charmed me utterly.

This pretzel-shaped green thing is a garlic scape – a stalk with a bud on the end. It and its brethren have been harvested way ahead of the garlic itself. Those bulbs won’t be dug up until fall arrives.

We chopped up the scapes, which have a super-garlicky aroma, and froze them for soups and stews later on. One of the plants sent out a second scape, which was unusual. Gardens frequently surprise you.

Putting foods by

Lettuce, tomatoes and cukes are ephemeral. Some of our produce will feed us later on, though.

Our raspberry patch has gone berserk. We’ve frozen 26 quarts and set aside another gallon-sized Ziploc bag to use for jam. Hope to do that later today, unless there’s another time slippage. I’ve also been using them for smoothies, since I’ve been plagued with a sore throat for the past week. (Don’t worry: After a few days I tested negative for COVID. Just a plain old virus, not the virus.)

We freeze them solidly on cookie sheets and then put them into the quart bags; that way, we can take out only as many as we need at a time. The waxed paper-y thing is a cereal box liner, cut open and spread out.  

We picked another couple of quarts this morning; my niece and her daughter joined us at the end and helped pick into our buckets while we chatted. Did I say the end? It isn’t the end. We got only halfway through the patch before realizing that BLTs were waiting for us in the house. DF and I will go back out later.

We have two beds of spuds, both varieties that we’ve never tried. Waited a bit too long to get the varieties we did want. Thus we wound up with Yellow Finn, which allegedly has “a buttery, sweet flavor,” and California White, an oblong white tuber that is good for baking and stores well.

About that last: It won’t need to store well, because fresh potatoes are so good that we’ll eat them pretty quickly. I don’t know if you’ve ever been able to eat potatoes so new that you’re still brushing off the dirt while a pot of water boils impatiently. But they are a treat. We can’t wait to dig them up and see how they did. It’s like a really dirty Easter egg hunt. 

The day after I bought those two varieties of spuds, someone posted “seed potatoes, can’t use them all, come get them” on the neighborhood Buy Nothing Facebook page. Timing never was my strong suit.

The photo above is of pea vines and carrot tops, in the pleasantest possible tangle. When I prospect for peapods, the carrot tops feel cool and feathery to my fingers. We’ve frozen two fat quarts (i.e., it’s almost hard to close the bag) thus far and are hoping for many more. Certainly there are lots of pods left to be harvested.

Lots of blossoms, too. Peas don’t much care if it’s 45 degrees in the morning. They like it cold. In  fact, a cousin in New Jersey gets two pea crops: spring and fall. Lucky her.

In previous years we’d put peapods into the boiling bag along with everything else. This year I got the idea to set them aside for peapod-only broth, used to make split-pea soup. And am I glad that I did, because it made the most amazing dish. The hyper-sweetness of the broth was a perfect foil for the smokiness of the ham (DF had cooked it on the Weber), and the soup was further strengthened by some of the last frozen celery from our 2020 garden. It cooked into a perfectly balanced and deliciously strengthening meal. Can’t wait to have this again; currently we have two quarts of peapod broth in the freezer and a half-full bag of uncooked pods. When I get done picking later, it will likely be a full bag.

DF had charge of one of his granddaughters the other day, and allowed her to pull up a carrot for all to share. Where I grew up, the carrots you bought in the store invariably had a slightly bitter aftertaste. Up here, where it’s sunny but not really hot, carrots pile on the sugars as they grow.

The sweetness of the carrot that kiddo picked made me think of the woman who told me she never harvested a single carrot while her grandkids were young – and how happy she was that they loved to browse in her garden. She never harvested any peas, either.

This photo of our celery bed doesn’t do it full justice. It’s so vigorous. Soon we will chop and freeze the stalks – and then look for new homes for the leaves. We dehydrated a lot of celery leaf last year, and still have a few gallon-sized Ziploc bags full. Saving more seems pointless.

Apparently you can make pesto with the leaves, but DF isn’t a fan of cheese so I’ll keep looking for possibilities. We’ll also ask a vegetarian neighbor family if they could use some.

I recently posted “free celery leaves pretty soon, anyone interested?” on the Buy Nothing Facebook group and got just one reply. At least some of the greens won’t go to waste.

Other than that, I’ll be putting it back out on Facebook with an appeal to owners of chickens or goats. They’re always hungry.

The Norland apples are smaller than we’d like to see them, but again: Time is a curious thing lately. I keep thinking the fruit needs to be harvested soonsoonsoon, but we’ve still got another three or four weeks for them to mature.

When they do, we’ll core and slice them (peeling isn’t needed) and put pie-sized quantities in freezer bags with some sugar and cinnamon. I make a darned fine pie* if I do say so myself – and if I didn’t, DF would say it for me. He’s an amazing cook and loves to bake, but has never figured out pie crust.

As usual, the bigger apples are kicking some of the runts off the branches, so we of course are gathering them up, splitting them in half and dropping them into the boiling bag. The other day DF shredded a few small apples into our ham/sweet potato hash supper. They disappeared entirely into the slow-cooked yam sweetness. If he hadn’t told me they were there, I’d never have known.

Up next: I’ll shred a few more of them into the jam I make later today. No doubt they, too, will disappear into the syrupy red preserve. (Updated to add: Not only did they disappear, they added a ton of natural pectin to the mix. The two batches I wound up making had a noticeably firmer set than my usual jam, which I cook without store-bought pectin, which runs about $5 a box up here. The National Center for Home Food Preservation has loads of info about making jams and jellies without pectin.)

DF started half a dozen of these lovely things in April, so they’d bloom earlier than usual. Generally we have volunteer sunflowers here and there, thanks to the black-oil sunflower seeds we put out in fall and winter for the birds. Those rarely bloom before mid-September, though.

The ones started indoors were completely open by the third week in July, and acted as small  local suns on cloudy, rainy days. The two put directly into the ground in front of our house developed multiple blossoms, probably because they had much more soil medium in which to wiggle their toes.

All the blossoms, front yard and back, were regularly swarmed by bees (two neighbors have hives). We enjoy watching them clamber around, stuffing pollen into their pockets. Yep, we’re nerds.

The hope is that they’ll develop seeds before it gets so cold they die off. If so, we plan to cut off the flower heads and lay them on flat surfaces for the birds this winter.

A cooler-than-usual spring and summer left our two pumpkin plants stunned. Until fairly recently they remained stubbornly barren of anything except male flowers.

In the past month or so we wound up with three female flowers; some very randy bees did the rest. Sadly, one pumpkin died aborning after something (probably a vole) chewed on it. Two modest-sized pumpkins seem to be hanging in there, a trend we hope will continue: DF has two grandkids, after all.

A third sibling joined the group within the past 10 days. It’s about the size of a ping-pong ball, so we won’t get our hopes up. Again, though, sometimes a garden will surprise you. At the very least we can slice it thinly and divide it among the apple-pie filling bags in the freezer.

Readers: How does your garden (or your farmers market) grow? Are you setting anything aside for winter, or just enjoying the bounty fresh?

*Recently I tried a new variety: blueberry-rhubarb, which I called “bluebarb” pie (you would have done the same). DF was so enamored of this flavor that we thinly sliced and froze enough rhubarb for half a dozen future confections. We’ve also been promised a chance to pick pie cherries in the near future; since cherry pie is his absolute favorite, DF has cheerfully offered to help pick and pit enough for a canner-load (17½ pounds). Here’s hoping.

Related reading:

• Gardening: The definition of hope
• A tomato haiku
• Extreme frugality: Gardening edition
• Looking back at the garden