A beautiful butternut squash from our friend Erick McWayne reminds me that summer is still with us – trapped inside our pantry and freezer.
Parnsips pulled from the garden in November are now stacked in damp sawdust in the basement.
The bed of volunteer arugula survived until this week’s hard freeze. Hoping it will bounce back.
The kale forest came through the freeze just fine – bound to be sweeter, too!
My favourite tomato – the ‘Orange Queen’. Late-harvest and prone to end-rot, but soooo tasty. Close runner up is the prolific, early-season ‘Stupice’.
My other tomato: Brandywine heirloom. This year was a bumper tomato crop in the PNW. Lotsa hot days led to enormous tomatoes breaking all my trellises. Quite a few brandywines grew in this double-tomato fashion:
We pulled up the tomato vines in early October during a week when night temps were threatening freezing; hung them in the cool den and waited to see if the fat green ones would ripen and how long they would last.
We’ve lost a few to rot, but are roasting our way through fall. Our favourite roasted tomato meal is so simple:
First, roast tomatoes:
-Slice any taller than 1″. For large toms, this means cutting in thirds, for cherries, leave them whole.
-Toss in olive oil
-Crowd tomatoes onto a roasting tray (with lip)
-Leave a bit of room to throw in sliced, oiled onions to roast the last 20 min
-Roast 300-350F for 1.5h until house smells heavenly and toms are very soft (more info)
Next, make the sauce:
Right on the still-warm roasting tray, fold and stir the tomatoes. They should fall apart into a chunky sauce. Apply a drizzle of olive oil if they are too dry. Add fresh cut basil leaves, salt and fresh-ground pepper, toasted pine nuts, a gob of goat cheese, maybe a splash of red wine. Add homemade pasta, sprinkle with freshly grated parmesan, and if you haven’t tried this before, you’ll thank me.
Some photos of what we put up from before the rain.
Gold Nuggest and Royal Acorns. Now snuggled away in the bedroom closet with the garlic.
And, finally, the obligate chickens photos.
Permissive parenting. Though if you know him you wouldn’t expect it of him, he also taken to feeding the cat. At the table.
Baracka, the-most-curious-bestest-chicken-in-the-world, was intent on exploring every corner of the house — if we would but turn our backs long enough for her to sneak into the house undetected. While we were in & out of the house putting up storm windows last week, Scott found her in the kitchen eating the cat food.
Comprehensive exams for my PhD, climbing trip to Tieton, work retreat on Whidbey Island, wedding on Orcas Island, intensive motorcycle endorsement class. Amid this backdrop of busy-ness, things were getting ripe in the garden. Pears picked and eaten (how to make them last longer?), melons picked and eaten (small, but so good!), raspberry vines heavy with their first crop, and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes.
Some photos of the past month in gardenland:
First there was the last of the E.Wa peaches and tomatoes to can, blueberry-peach jam too from our trip to Linbo Blueberry Farm in Puyallup.
What to do with tomatillos?
Twist the husks off and (try to) wash the soapy tacky coating off the firm skins.
Halve them, then roast skin-side up. Combine with onion, cilantro, hot pepper, and lime juice…
…for the most beautiful PURPLE salsa, if you’ve special volunteers like mine. Like most purple vegetables, the colour is probably temperature-sensitive and would turn green or brown if cooked. I’m fascinated by vegetables (well, fruits usually) with photosensitive purple pigments. If anyone knows more about them, please school me.
Potato harvest! My first-ever. Plants did reasonably well all summer, then de repente in September the chickens decided they like potato leaves. Pecked the stalks clean over a couple of weeks (yes, nightshade foliage is supposed to be toxic – the birds generally take good care of themselves though, and they seem fine).
My boxes were 30×30 inches, with dirt ultimately piled a foot above the ground. Interestingly, only one variety set any potatoes above the original soil line. Red Sangre: 9 pounds!
Purple Viking fared poorly. Later I read that it is a compact early variety. It appeared to suffer from being mostly buried when I tried to train the plants to tower. 3 pounds.
Russett Norketah. Did very well for being in the shadiest spot. 7 pounds.
One afternoon’s tomato harvest from the back yard along the bottle wall. Mostly roasting these for dinner and making pico de gallo to freeze. And fresh tomato slices with basil, balsamic vinegar, and buffalo mozzarella. We are so blessed.
Buttercup squash from the front yard. Poor yield – 1/plant. Placed too close together, eventually succumbed to powdery mildew. Scott is not impressed. His position is that those three squash could have been 100 tomatoes!
My two biggest prizes so far this year are my first-ever eggplant (variety: Black), now the size of a golf ball, and melon (variety: Charentais cantaloupe), now softball-sized.
Sustainable Scientist 