Garden 2020

Had a pretty good haul after I got back from Namakan this weekend. My Tomatoes are a little slow, but looking like I’ll have quite a few a week or two!

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I picked almost a 5 gallon pail of tomatoes today including one of those sumo Romas that I set aside for tacos tonight. Before I chopped it up I set it on my digital meat scale and it was just a hair under 13 ounces. Maybe ten or twelve seeds inside. Weird suckers they are but they’re very tasty.

Ate our first tomato of the summer tonight. It was pretty and delicious!

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Anyone have recommendations for using Cayenne peppers? Planted them on a whim this year, and they are going crazy, we will have dozens of them in the next week or two. They are super spicy, and would like to do something other than make my own ground cayenne or crushed red peppers.

Guessing you could find a good hot sauce recipe. If you wanna kick it up a bit my ghost peppers are going nuts. Planted 3 plants thinking a few per plant. Major under estimation.

BigWerm wrote:

Anyone have recommendations for using Cayenne peppers?

I grew them on a whim about 7 years ago, and they do go crazy. I dried most of them. Gave lots away. I think I finally used the last of them 2 summers ago!

BigWerm wrote:

Anyone have recommendations for using Cayenne peppers? Planted them on a whim this year, and they are going crazy, we will have dozens of them in the next week or two. They are super spicy, and would like to do something other than make my own ground cayenne or crushed red peppers.

Using fully red-ripened peppers, simmer them in white vinegar until very soft. Put one of the infamous masks on to cover your nose and mouth and run them thru a blender until very liquid. Pour the puree thru a fine sieve and discard any skins and seeds. Lastly, put some big boy pants on and take a small nip of the puree to see if you need salt or perhaps a bit of sugar or even a little more vinegar. You can store this in half pint jelly jars in the fridge and transfer to smaller, sealable bottles for table use. It’ll be a lot like any HOT hot sauce you get in the stores.

You can rinse the peppers off and dry, then make a slice down one side and then dehydrate them. When bone dry crush them up and run thru the blender to make a fine powder. Mask up again and run the powder thru the sieve and discard anything that doesn’t go thru. Store the powder in tight sealing jars…again a jelly jar or two will work great… and keep in a dark cupboard. The powder works well is anything you want to charge up a bit. Chili. Dust on scrambled eggs. Lots of ways to use it.

I do mine both ways.

Wow, gardens are looking great fellas! I harvested a couple of garden goodies earlier in the week and then pulled the carrots last night. It wasn’t quite the same, gardening and now harvesting without Billy. We made such a great team when it came to the garden. 😔 I’m thankful that by some miracle I was able to find the willpower to plant this spring and now start harvesting solo.

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Been a slow start, but starting to come around. I lose about 50% of my cherry tomatoes to my 2.5 year old picking assistant. Well worth the cost! 😜

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Damn Sharon those are big carrots.

Bigwerm, I had the same problem with a granddaughter. but she ate what she picked and never any in the bucket.

Here are some of the mega Romas I’ve been picking. For size perspective, the drain mat under these critters is 13″ from bottom to top. The tomatoe that seems like normal size came from a plant smack between the ones that the others are growing on. Just those two plants and many of the other tomatoes on those two plants are smaller but not as small as the standard sized one in the picture.

I picked and canned this morning. I had 13 of the bruisers ripe along with a whole pile of Rutgers Selects. The 13 big Romas filled three jars, firmly packed, with about a tablespoon of juice at the top when the lids went on. Had just enough tomatoes to fill the canner.

The Heirloom Pinks [thanks DennyO] and an Heirloom yellow variety are kicking out some great slicers now. Some of those pinks weigh about 2 pound apiece. Cukes are going nuts. Ma’s doing refer pickles as I type. Again.

Very glad your pinks are doing well Tom!
The man I got the pinks from and mine have not done well the last 2 years. Mine this year are 1/2 of the growth as are the rest of my maders. They may not get planted next year. These seeds are from maders that come from Poland back in the 50’s I was told and have been planted every year since.

Anyone hear that some of the poor garden produce is from the lack of pollination?? We have a big garden produce place north of town and rumor has it they aren’t getting much and that’s what they claim it is???

glenn57 wrote:

Anyone hear that some of the poor garden produce is from the lack of pollination?? We have a big garden produce place north of town and rumor has it they aren’t getting much and that’s what they claim it is???

Not an expert here but I will tell you from my experience garden output changes by plant and by year. Some really good and sometimes the opposite. Seems that the majority of the plants where I live are doing good. I have also noticed that sometimes a certain crop we are growing is doing great but neighbors same crop is not. Obviously can be a different seed or different variety of the same crop. Are the plants large or small in your opinion? I have seen gardeners use to much nitrogen and they have very large plants with very little produce.

odd, i have a combo of both. some of the small plants seem to be doing ok and the larger ones also, then i got the opposite.

i’m also hearing alot in the area of the cucumbers not doing so hot.

glenn57 wrote:

Anyone hear that some of the poor garden produce is from the lack of pollination??

This could very well be true. Pollinators are very important and there are groups of individuals who dedicate time to spreading the word about the importance of planting specific plants for pollinators. If they don’t have much to eat, then we might not either.

This spring I planted some coneflowers, columbine, and black-eyed susans to help the pollinators. Other helpful plants are sunflowers, lilies, lupine, bee balm, and sedum.

Some vegetable plants are self-pollinating though. This article has some helpful info for those interested:
https://harvesttotable.com/self-pollinating-vegetables/

And this one talks about pollinating by hand, if needed:
https://www.growveg.com/guides/pollination-for-vegetable-gardens/

The photo below is a sign I found on etsy. I’m not sure where I’ll hang it yet – it’s currently in my kitchen.

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Picked 1/2 my green peppers yesterday and a few maters.

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MNdrifter wrote:

Picked 1/2 my green peppers yesterday and a few maters.

Dang Drifter you must have some fertile soil and/or plenty of feed for them, they look great! All the stuff in my garden looks like mini-versions of vegetables lol

BigWerm wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>MNdrifter wrote:</div>
Picked 1/2 my green peppers yesterday and a few maters.

Dang Drifter you must have some fertile soil and/or plenty of feed for them, they look great! All the stuff in my garden looks like mini-versions of vegetables lol

It’s good soil. I haven’t put any fertilizer at all on. Only thing I did is work in 2 clean outs of ashes from my wood boiler. One last fall just before freeze up, and another this spring about a month before I planted everything. Thinking I will do the same next year. It worked well.

My tomatoes are THICK!

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I picked tomatoes for about 1 week and that was 3 weeks ago. Finally there are more fruit. Plenty of flowers.
Only picked 2 zucchini where I’m usually giving them a way. This year my backyard is full of clover and I think the bees aren’t going in the garden. I usually see bees around the zucchini early morning and haven’t seen that this year. I’m going to try and pollinate them by hand.

I’ve got a couple gallons of grape tomatoes. I’d like to preserve them somehow, just not sure what to do. I could could stew em and freeze em, or maybe slice and dehydrate.

Speaking of dehydrating has anyone tried dehydrating cucumbers slices?

Split and dehydrate the tomatoes. We dehydrate, freeze on a sheet pan and throw them in quart bags in the freezer. A great addition to chili, stew, soup, pizza and whatever other savory foods you cook in the winter.

I picked another 5+ gallons of tomatoes this morning and have 7 quarts in the canner plus two quite full gallon ziplocks in the freezer. LOTS of tomatoes on the vine yet with many that were half ripe. About half of this picking were those weird, over-sized Romas that let me fill a quart jar with four or five of them.

I’ve not heard of someone dehydrating tomatoes before. Sounds interesting.

I had a bunch of tomatoes from my garden turn red over the last few days, so I chopped them up with a garden green pepper, some onion, garlic, and italian seasonings to make a homemade spaghetti sauce! It smells wonderful and was the perfect activity to focus my mind after a gloomy couple of days. 😊🍅🍝

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Was out to check the garden after the rain today. Started looking at the squash and found this.

That is a size 13 shoe next to it. I found 4 more of them that size.

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Holy cow, that’s a huge squash!!

I love spending time in my garden… and then making a mad dash to the house laughing because the sky just opened up to a strong rain! 😂💦

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Sharon wrote:

I’ve not heard of someone dehydrating tomatoes before. Sounds interesting.

I do this with grape tomatoes. Cut in half, place on cookie sheet sprayed with non-stick oil. Lightly salt cut side up. Set oven to lowest setting and cook off – dehydrate for 4-6 hours or until the consistency of a raisin. Stores in fridge or freezes well for a few months.

Concentrates the flavor nicely. They go good chopped up in scrambles eggs. Nice snack right out of the fridge.

-J.

Picked an pulled my green beans last nite. While alot of things where poor those did well this year.