October Harvest Update

As an urban farmer, you never really know just when the gardening season is going to end. Toward the end of the summer, the tomatoes and peppers will be producing like crazy to the point where you can't think of how you could possibly use them all. Then one night you hear a foul five-letter word on the news and your stomach sinks. F-R-O-S-T, and you know it's only a matter of time before you have to pack it all in for the year. For us, that moment occurred on October 5th, just before we left on our travels to Chicago that we talked about earlier.

Suspecting that our plants wouldn't live to see our return, we hastily ran out to the garden and picked everything that even looked marginally ripe. We had multiple kinds of peppers, both hot and sweet, and a multitude of tomatoes that had at least a tinge of orange to them. We gathered all that we could carry and brought them in. It was quite a haul!

We only had time to leave them on the counter before we set off on our action-packed trip, but when we returned we were glad that we had at least done that. It turned out the temperature in Des Moines had dipped as low as 28 degrees, which had killed off everything that wasn't frost-hardy. We came home to a backyard full of plants that looked like this:

Any fruits that remained on the vines had turned pale and oddly squishy, as though Bunnicula had gotten to them, and the plants were brittle with droopy leaves. All that's left for the rest of the gardening season is to pull out and compost the dead plants. So, our October harvest totals are, with the exception of egg gathering, most likely our last totals for the 2012 season. Here's how we did:

4.7 ounces of cherry tomatoes

6.8 ounces of kale

1 lb 8.2 ounces of Anaheim peppers

1 lb 9.7 ounces of Poblano peppers

2lb 1.0 ounces of Bell peppers

4 lb 1.4 ounces of sauce tomatoes

5 lb 3.7 ounces of slicing tomatoes

and 173 eggs

It was clear after picking everything that we had a lot, but nearly 10 pounds of tomatoes in one harvest was still a bit of a surprise! We've been trying to use this all up before it goes to waste, which has been fun, but still a challenge. Having a good, freeze-able pasta sauce recipe on hand has been a real help in that area.

Next year we'd like to do a better job of planting a late season garden of crops that can survive a light frost, but our busy schedule this fall meant that we missed our opportunity to get it done this year.  We hope that by this time next year we're still growing broccoli, greens, carrots, and brussels sprouts.

We haven't yet totaled up our bounty for the whole year, and we haven't bothered to track the costs of our inputs all along, so it's not easy to determine if we've saved money by maintaining a garden this year. However, it is clear that we've had a ton of fresh, healthy, locally grown food, and that has been quite the reward in itself!

A Sauce of Our Own

One of the many perks of having a plot of fresh produce just outside your backdoor is how easy it is to cook simple, delicious meals. We both enjoy cooking, in pretty much all its forms. There are nights that we want to make something from a fancy recipe, and spend hours in the kitchen rolling roulades, whipping up demi glaces, and scads of other french-sounding culinary tasks. If we're in the right mood, that can make for a whole evening's entertainment. But other nights we just need a simple way to use some of our fresh garden produce.

This has particularly been the case recently, as our planned canning tomatoes have come in bit by bit rather than in one giant harvest. It seems we never have enough at one time to can up, yet if we try to wait for more to ripen, the first few will start to go bad.  So why not make up a batch of garden-fresh tomato sauce, not to save, but to eat right away? A tasty sauce, inspired by this find on the internet - roasted tomato sauce from the "Sweet Pea Chef" blog.

We started with two pounds of our sauce tomatoes, romas and a variety called agro. Both of these tend to be meatier than a regular slicing tomato, so you don't end up with a bunch of watery goosh when you cook them. We opted to use some of our older ones as well, just cutting off any parts that looked or felt a bit past their prime. These we cut in half, and placed into sprayed baking dishes, along with a roughly chopped onion, several cloves of smashed garlic, and a couple cut-up carrots (they were small ones). As an added bonus, every single one of those ingredients was grown by us in our own backyard!

We drizzled the pans with a hearty amount of olive oil, then salted, peppered, and threw them into a 350 degree oven for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Hey, we said it was simple; we never said anything about quick! After an hour, the house began to fill with the aromas of roasting tomatoes, and by time we pulled them out, some of the veggies were just starting to blacken a bit and caramelize, like this.

Now you have to resist eating the lovely roasted tomatoes on their own - remember, we want a sauce here. And this is another time where an odd little kitchen tool really comes in handy. Sure, you could blend up the vegetables and probably get a good, smooth sauce. But if you use a food mill, it will separate the slightly tough skins from the now-softened meat of the tomatoes. No tomato skins getting stuck in your teeth, they all get caught in the top of the food mill! Either way, the whole pan's worth - tomatoes, onions, garlic, and carrots - all get pureed through the food mill.

Those skins at the top sure don't look too appetizing, so they go to the compost bin, while we go on to making this into a meal. The sauce is yummy enough on its own that you could use it with noodles if you wanted a basic spaghetti marinara. We wanted to fill it out more into a full meal, so we added a couple cut-up links of chicken sausage, plus some chopped zucchini that we just sauteed in olive oil. Put all that together on top of some spaghetti noodles, grate some parmesan cheese and sprinkle on some fresh basil, and that's a hearty dinner.

Spaghetti with red sauce is never going to earn any Michelin stars or make it into a fancy French cookbook. But it's delicious comfort food, and sometimes it's just what you feel like. We've long felt that food doesn't need to be fancy as long as it's made from quality ingredients. This is a perfect example. We know that the tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, zucchini and herbs are grown in a manner we agree with, because we grew them. And short of making our own sausage (eww) or making our own pasta (time consuming), this is about as close to an entirely homegrown meal as you can get. We may have taken some inspiration from a recipe we found online, but this really was a meal we grew ourselves. Not just from farm to fork, we took this from seed to sauce!

July Harvest Update

If it feels like it's been a really long time since we've posted, trust us, we feel the same. We've both been on the road a lot lately for our (non-farming) day jobs; Greg was in Atlanta last week, with Stacia in Dallas right now. That makes it hard to keep up with even maintaining and caring for our garden, much less finding time to blog about it. So here's a brief (and overdue) update on our fruitful July harvest, after which we should be back to our regular posting schedule.

As we mentioned last time, it seems that we have all the zucchini plant pests you possibly can. But those plants are real troopers, and just keep churning out zucchini after zucchini. We've been pretty diligent in harvesting them before they reach baseball bat-size, but it's still a heck of a lot of zucchini. This shows just the amount we happened to have on hand this evening, not counting the many we've already eaten or the three that are almost ready to pick. Considering the duress they're under, these are some pretty incredible plants!

Not surprsingly, zucchini lead the way in the harvest totals. Overall, in July we harvested:

0.4 ounces of snow peas
0.7 ounces of Poblano peppers
1.1 ounces of Roma tomatoes
9.8 ounces of Anaheim peppers
12.2 ounces of strawberries
12.3 ounces of kale
12.7 ounces of cherry tomatoes (52 tomatoes)
13.9 ounces of green beans
1 pound 13.1 ounces of garlic

And... 11 pounds 12.5 ounces of zucchini (8 zukes)!

Unfortunately, while the zucchini haven't seemed to show any sign of slowing under the attack of the various bugs, the same can't be said for our tomatoes. We've had a lot of the fruits split, most likely due to uneven watering with the intense drought we've been having this year. Well, the cucumber beetles have been using those soft spots as entry points into the tomatoes and just wreaking havoc. They don't all look this bad, but we do have our share of tomatoes that end up looking tunneled through and chewed up like this.

We should probably keep a better eye on watering so they don't split so bad to begin with, but for now it's been necessary to cut out the good bits to keep around the damage. They taste great, but it would be nice if they didn't look so terrible.

And of course, we still have chickens, and have probably been criminally negligent in not posting photos of them. The ladies still haven't laid any eggs, but according to what we read online and in books, we're very very close to that happening. Most likely within another couple of weeks we should have our first egg. Other than that, they're doing well - they may not enjoy the heat we've had but they've been dealing with it very well. And how's this for a fun chicken discovery: they seem to love the taste of Japanese beetles! Thankfully we don't have very many of those around the garden but when we find one, we pluck it off and give our hens a snack. With tastes like that, who wouldn't want backyard chickens?