Lots of Green Tomatoes

The cool, rainy weather continues here and I noticed today that one of the tomatoes was rotting on the vine. So I packed it in, and harvested them all. Five pounds of mostly green tomatoes. I think a few of them will ripen off the vine but most of them won't. Any ideas for green tomato recipes?


The fall garden still has some good stuff going on. Lettuce is still coming, and carrots and beets are still putting in some time in the dirt. I planted these bush beans in mid-August, just for the heck of it but not really knowing if the'd have enough time to produce before it got cold. They seem to be coming along alright, and little teeny beans are growing a bit every day.

September has been cool and rainy and we have these mushrooms growing all around and in the vegetable garden. Nevertheless I planted fall veggies and we'll see what happens. Cabbage, brussel sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower. I have a feeling I planted them too late and without a nice hot September to give them a kick start, they may not mature. Who knows, but it's all part of the experiment.

A girl after my own heart

I came across this article about a cost-benefit analysis of urban agriculture in Tokyo. This academic study is much like my backyard hobbyist study (really I've had enough of academia for a while, but I can't completely shake it), where the costs of the garden and value of the harvest are measured. As in my "study", it was a money losing endeavour. However, the author is much more eloquent in describing why it is that despite this, people still love to garden in the city.

Harvest 2010... so far

I have been keeping diligent track of the harvest, weighing and recording as I bring things in. Well, I'm not sure "harvest" is the right word. It seems a little pretentious for our wee little veggie garden. In any case, the totals are in, so far. There's still carrots and beets that will stay in the ground for a while, zucchini and tomatoes still coming, and bush beans, I hope. But so far, we have the equivalent of... drumroll please... $55 in vegetables and $80 in fruit.

For a $200 setup cost, it's kind of a dismal return, and I can't count the $80 in fruit against that cost because the trees were already there.

The most cost-effective crop has been lettuce. Go figure. With three successive plantings I've managed to keep us in lettuce and mesculuns continuously since the first picking in mid-June, and have even given some away. Next to lettuce, zucchini, potatoes, broccoli, sweet pepper, and snap peas have all saved us between $3 and $5 at the grocery store. Eek, that sounds so sad. But you know, I'm pretty sure I can harvest a lot more of everything next year. Maybe $10-15 worth for each, and that would really add up.

Don't get me wrong, the real purpose of the veggie garden is not actually to save money, although that would be pretty cool, but to eat lots of healthy foods grown locally, and well, for fun. I want to keep track of the economics of it to have a realistic view of vegetable gardening. I didn't want to be just an idealistic foodie, and it helps to put things in perspective to know that I spent more money than I saved on the garden this summer. With all the labour involved in addition to the cost, what on earth is the point? The point is food security, and learning basic skills for sustenance, and because I love it.

Book Review: "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

I promised myself I'd wait until I'd finished reading this book to blab about it on the blog, which took all my will power, then I finished it last week and forgot. The sub-title of the book is "a year of food life", which it really is. A year of food life written by Barbara Kingsolver both an excellent author (of reputed fiction fame, just Google her), and farm-dweller. She and her husband and two daughters move to the farm in Virginia that they've owned for years and rented out, but always planned to leave Arizona and settle there permanently. Then they do, and pledge to live off of what they can grow on their farm or buy locally for a year. They did this around the same time as the 100-mile diet people in Vancouver, but were less militant about the rules. (Here is where I admit I haven't read The 100-Mile Diet, but Barbara Kingsolver makes the comparison herself in her book). The narrative rolls through the seasons from April to April and is interspersed with factual info a la The Omnivore's Dilemma (which I did read and loved although found it a bit dense and longer than it needed to be), and anecdotes, recipes and meal plans. You learn about the younger daughter's egg business and how she decides to also sell the chickens for meat, "but only the mean ones" when she calculates how long it will take her to save for a horse only selling eggs. You learn about turkey sex through the author's project to breed turkeys naturally which astonishingly, is an art almost extinct in the US, and the instincts for it are actually bred out of most turkeys!

Wow that was all one big paragraph. Deep breath. Since the European Earwig's Rampage of Destruction, I have not felt discouraged nor felt my energy for the garden waning, but this book gave me a jolt of inspiration I didn't know I could use. If it's possible to be more into the garden than I was before, well I am. Thanks Barbara Kingsolver. I have forgotten all the quotes I was going to write out in this blog for you, so you'll just have to take my word for it and read this book!

Harvest Monday

Every Monday Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday on her blog where she posts links to blogs of other gardeners who sent in their Monday harvest posts to her.

We got back from a weekend away on Monday afternoon, and after a patrol of the garden I had Big News and a harvest of a salad for my lunch today.

The Big News is that the mystery of the rotting zucchinis is solved. It was blossom rot that was causing them to ALL rot at a certain size. Thanks to the advice of a friendly farmer I talk with through work, I tried plucking off the blossoms from the ends of the zucchinis, and bada-bing bada-boom, suddenly the zucchinis have doubled in size and are not rotting at all!

And the harvest. Lots of lettuces, three kinds of heirloom tomato (Black Cherry, Marmande, and Peace Vine), coreless nantes carrots, gypsy sweet pepper and broccoli, I had my lunch today. A confession: I don't like the taste of all those mesculus. I think next year I will grow plain-flavoured ones and some arugula and maybe that's it. I'd like a red lettuce too for interesting colour. Any thoughts on a good one?

Letting it all go to seed

I decided to let one of the broccoli crowns go to seed. Just to see what would happen. Turns out the bees love it!

Otherwise things are a little quiet around here at the moment. The beets and carrots are still in the ground, and the tomatoes are ripening. The broccoli is shooting out little florets from the sides of the plants where I've already harvested the crowns, and the third planting of lettuce continues to give us as much salad greens as we want.

The zucchini continues to rot as soon as it gets about six inches long. Matt though the problem was that they were not getting pollinated, but someone else told me today that it might be that the flower that's still stuck on the end is causing the rot and suggested I pluck off the flowers. Well I tried that today and we'll see how it goes.

Oh, and I dumped out the big coffee sack of red chieftain potatoes and only got about 2.5 lb. (The picture above is from May 31) Perhaps I was too early in harvesting, but I wanted some new potatoes and it was difficult to pick out just a few. The bag ripped and dumped dirt all over the patio, so I just dumped it all into a wheelbarrow (well, shoveled it because the bag disintegrated). Oh and these potatoes are the most creamy and delicious I have ever tasted. Definitely growing them again next year, although maybe I will do some in the ground too if I can find a sunny spot.