"No gracias, yo quiero jalapeños, nada mas"

Due to a busy weekend with the River Roots Festival and the Quad City Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, we didn't get a whole lot done over the weekend, so I took yesterday off work to do some gardening and canning.

While I was waiting for the jars to wash, I put in our fall crop of beets and watered everything outside.  That should be the last of the planting for this year.

Then I got busy making salsa!  After harvesting a couple of our celery plants and some more peppers, I started skinning tomatoes and playing some flamenco music.  A few hours later, we had a glorious pot of chunky, hot salsa ready for canning.

Then, once the kids got home, we took a trip over to my parents', where we threw the kids in the pool and picked a bucket of green beans (Nicole suggested that we might want to try a batch of "dilly beans"), a couple bags of still-ripening pears, some inadvertent tomatoes, and swiped a couple more bags of peaches for a cold fruit soup for our gaming session this weekend.  I cannot wait to make that.  It should be very yummy.

Peaches and Cream

We looked at the calendar this weekend and saw that the kids are heading back to school this week, all our summer shows were over, and we are already almost late in planting some fall crops, so Sunday, we got busy outside.  We put in four rows of peas and three rows of round carrots.  We planted a row of spinach, then broadcast other salad greens and a small patch of basil.  Nicole weeded and trimmed down some of the more exuberant perennials.  I want to get some new beets in the circle bed, and then we should be set for fall!

This weekend, I went out to mom & dad's and got some peaches.  They are delicious this year, but we don't really need to process any more -- we have plenty of canned peaches, peach preserves, peach pie filling, and fruit cocktail.  I'm going to try to can some peach rum sauce.  We are running low on that, and enjoy it on ice cream.

We also got some of the last of the fresh sweet corn.  It was also fantastic this year.  We discovered a new way to prepare it that we really like: coat in olive oil, salt and pepper, on the grill for 2 minutes per side.  Delicious.

Baby, it's cold outside

We had our first major frost this past weekend.  We covered the tomato plants, but they still look like they got a little frozen at the top.  In preparation for the frost, we brought in every tomato that even looked like it was close to ripe, and pulled all the basil, peppers, and eggplant.  We even got most of the rest of the beans.  We made some tomato sauce, but only enough for one dinner (of Eggplant Parmesan) plus about another quart of frozen.

Also, last week we harvested apples.  We've got four or five large sackfuls.  This weekend, Nicole and the kids made an apple pie, and yesterday, they canned seven quarts of applesauce.

Tonight, I'm hoping to get back to the apples.  I want to dry some for snacks and can some baked apples or apple pie filling.

Harvest moon

We are deep into harvest and canning season now, and while this summer's drought did hurt, there is still plenty to do.

Our beans were a huge success -- we have several quarts of dried pintos, yin-yang, turtle, and black-eyed peas.  In addition to the fruit cocktail we canned (below), we put up three quarts of peach pie filling.  We also canned 14 quarts of tomato-basil soup.  We opened one of those on a cold, rainy night last week, and found it delightful.

Last night, we just canned our second batch of whole tomatoes.  We did pop a jar by putting it into too-hot water again, but fortunately, were able to save the tomatoes.  A little over 20 pounds of Opalka and Polish Linguisa tomatoes = 6 quarts.  This week, I hope to get some of mom's tomatoes and make some salsa.

For future planning purposes, this year, in our new raised beds, we put in six pepper plants and sixteen tomato plants.  While it looked good for the beginning of the year, by the end of summer, things were completely overrun.  The tomatoes completely engulfed our peppers, killing some of them, and spilled out all over the lawn.  Stronger cages are a must, as is a more spread-out plan.  A few tomatoes sprinkled in several places might be better than a solid block of them.

Also, the two pots of basil (sweet and purple) have been fine, but the basil we put in the tomato bed was covered and smothered.  We may not be able to freeze much basil this year.  Next year, we should definitely get some in the garden as well.

Fruit cocktail

Yum.  That is all.

"Millions of peaches, peaches for me!"

We also helped ourselves to a bunch of mom & dad's peaches this weekend. Cole and I have talked about putting in some fruit trees in the coming years, but for the foreseeable future, we'll need to acquire our fruit elsewhere. The plan is to ultimately have pear, peach, apple, and cherry trees.

After a quick bout of canning last night, we wound up with seven quarts of peaches in light syrup, and one extra-special quart of peaches in a brandy-syrup concoction. Can't wait to try that one out!! We've got several fresh ones left for snacking on, too.

"You like tomato and I like tomahto..."

Our tomatoes didn't do quite as well as we were hoping this year. We planted five plum-type Roma tomatoes, which are really good for making sauce, and are supposed to come on all at one time. We only grew a few other, indeterminate-type tomatoes. All our tomatoes produced, but we never got that one huge deluge of ripe tomatoes all at one time that we were expecting. The plants grew pretty good, but seemed to dry up and turn around the bottom... they just never got healthy enough to produce a lot at once. This meant that for canning purposes, we had to supplement with tomatoes from mom & dad's garden.

We went out and picked for the second time out there on Saturday, and got quite a haul. We now have fourteen quarts of whole tomatoes and a few bags of frozen. We'll have to see how well this works. The plan is to use these whole tomatoes for chilis, sauces, or whatever as we need them. I'd like to do some tomato juice this week or next, and of course we need to can fresh salsa in the near future as well.