Harvest Monday - 28 October 2013

Welcome to another Harvest Monday at Eight Gate Farm!

The National Weather Service began posting "Frost Watches" on Tuesday. The actual frost did not occur until Friday night. But I took all the remaining tomatoes and peppers, as well as the tender herbs, well before that. I figured nothing was going to grow or ripen further.

The very, very last of the tomatoes:

 

The tiny peppers, and some raspberries:

 

 

And the herbs; basil, rosemary, tarragon, cilantro, parsley, winter savory:

 

So, as I said, the actual frost came Friday night, when it got down to 30F (-1.1C). On Saturday I pulled out all the tomato, pepper, and broccoli plants. I also pulled out the chard. It could keep going, but I wanted to clean out the beds.

 

 

I also took a pound of Brussels Sprouts, which had gotten their first "frost kiss," plus the few remaining raspberries:

 

There should be lots more Brussels to come. Everything else has gone south for the winter. But I did want to show our white-trash "cold frames," made from re-purposed skylights. They are now covering some of the teeny-tiny kale, and the fall carrots.

 

A look up the fenced garden, now forlorn and ready for its winter rest.

 

With that, the Eight Gate Farm blog will probably go dark. Nothing really to show you until maple syrup season starts in February. Here's one of the trees we will tap:

 

That is, unless I'm lucky enough to "harvest" one of these puppies recently nosing around in our woods:

 

 

 

Muzzle-loader deer season starts this Saturday!

 

I hope this doesn't offend any of you. But here in New Hampshire it's part of "country living."

 

Oh, now that I think of it, I may post a 2013 garden "report card."



Thanks for reading, and thanks especially to Daphne for giving me the opportunity to share my gardening experiences this season.

Harvest Monday - 21 October 2013

Welcome to another Harvest Monday, brought to you by the kind graces of Daphne's Dandelions.

No frosts yet, but the garden is pretty bare. Here you see Daisy-Cat enjoying some sunshine. She is an indoor kitty, but we do take her out with us to the fenced garden sometimes. Thus I call it The Prison Yard.

Harvests were sparse this week. Here are some raspberries and a serving or two of broccoli shoots.

More tomato drops too.

The Brussels Sprouts are still growing. I planted two varieties. Long Island, on the left, grew tall but its sprouts are still small. Franklin, on the right, is a hybrid that has already given us a picking, and its sprouts are much larger.

Re-showing the picture from 2 weeks ago to describe the amount of processed squash we got from it. This week the Kitchen Goddess got 12 cups (2.84 l.) from the Butternut, and the same amount from the Tatume. Also 4 cups from the smaller pumpkin. The bigger one is left for a Jack O' Lantern, for our non-existent Trick Or Treaters.

The verdict on Tatume: not as sweet as Butternut, and much harder to extract from the rind. So I would call it second-rate at best; not the “survival” crop it was talked up to be, and not particularly tasty. No room for it next year. Well, maybe I’ll plant the remaining seeds at the edge of the far compost pile and see how it fares as a neglected crop.

Well, I'm being unfair. The Tatume does produce a large number of seeds. Which is good, since my favorite football snack is roasted pumpkin/squash seeds. Here's my recipe for this delicious treat. Scoop out the guts, and separate the seeds. Run the seeds under hot water to get off as much of the gook as you can.

Put the seeds in a bowl, fill with warm water, and add salt. I like 'em really salty; you may choose to use less or even omit it (weird), in which case soaking is unnecessary. Let it sit overnight. Just before game-time, drain the seeds and place in a single layer on cookie sheets. I like to spray the sheets with butter-flavor cooking spray. Bake at 400 F. (200 C.) until they start browning and popping. They will need to be stirred with a spatula several times. Once a good number are really brown the lot is done and ready to enjoy, preferably with a glass of home-brewed ale. I'm too lazy to extract the kernals so I eat 'em whole. This has the benefit of providing valuable roughage.

The mild fall weather may be coming to an end this week. A frost is finally predicted for Thursday night. If the forecast holds, I will pick all the remaining tomatoes and peppers, and "summer" will be over.
 

Harvest Monday - 14 October 2013

Welcome to another Harvest Monday at Eight Gate Farm. Almost mid-October and still no frost in sight.

 

But the shorter days, cooler nights, and declining sun have taken their toll.

This is the end of the season for the eggplant. I'm not at all crazy about the productivity or size of Rosa Bianca, but they sure are pretty.

Still a few ripe tomatoes taken right from the vines. These are three Rutgers, and one Caspian Pink on the right. The Pink weighed 8.5 oz. (~240 g.) for comparison. That's it for the Pink plant. We still are gathering drops from the remaining plum tomatoes, and waiting for the others to ripen on the vines, if they will. Who knows?

 

This is also the last of the fall-planted radishes. Shown with them is a spring carrot that must have had its foliage broken off, so it got overlooked. The top grew back feebly, but we have a nice fresh addition to The Kitchen Goddess's Hearty Beef Barley Soup. The fall carrots are still tiny.

 

A decent chard-taking, enough for a good side dish.

 

Some herbs gathered for drying from the kitchen garden : basil, thyme, parsley, rosemary, tarragon, and oregano (or, as spelled by The In-A-Rush Kitchen Goddess, "oregnao").

 

 

Wish I had more to show! Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Daphne.

 

 

Harvest Monday - 7 October 2013

Welcome to the first Harvest Monday in October 2013. Thanks to Daphne's Dandelions for hosting.

Here at Eight Gate Farm, we are just starting our biggest-by-far harvest of the year--sugar maple leaves. They make great mulch when shredded.

The volunteer tomato plants in the compost that were looking so lush suddenly croaked this week, leaving us with a lot of green fruit with no hope of ripening. Making the best of a bad situation, The Kitchen Goddess put up 6 pints of salsa verde, made with green tomatoes instead of tomatillos, and using store-bought habaneros.

 

A fun fall tableau, featuring virtually our entire harvest of winter squash. I just could not keep up with the bugs this year.

Kind of sad. Five Waltham Butternuts, two pumpkins, and in the middle, a few Tatume left to go to their fall stage. Also a King Daddy sunflower head. That's not really the variety. I don't know what it really is. It was a volunteer in the squash patch.

We took the first of the Brussels Sprouts. I know they are supposed to be better once a frost or two has kissed them, but some were getting really big. There are many more left. It is amazing to me that I transplanted these on April 16.

Add to the above a few broccoli sprouts (shown below), some radishes, raspberries, and more tomato drops, and you are looking at our entire harvest this week.

Still, we can't complain. It's a damp, chilly Sunday night and we lit the woodstove for the first time this year, but no frosts are predicted in the near term, so we might yet get a few more ripe tomatoes and eggplant.

My name is Daisy-Cat, and I approve this message.

Harvest Monday - 30 September 2013

Welcome to the last September Harvest Monday of the year at Eight Gate Farm, hosted by Daphne.

Friday night an old friend was visiting from Vermont. It was a perfect night to dispose of some brush in a lovely bonfire.

The weather continues to be quite mild, and tomatoes are continuing to haunt The Kitchen Goddess. On Friday, 9 lbs. more, plus radishes, raspberries, and a serving of broccoli. The tomato harvest includes lots of drops, as befitting the blighty condition of the plants.

This week the KG canned 6 pints of sauce, bringing our yearly total to 68. That's 8 1/2 gallons! (~32 l.) We really do not need any more, but the tomatoes are still coming. She also did 4 more quarts of Bloody Mary mix, bringing our total to 2 gallons. I wish "we" could can some more salsa, but the peppers are completely finished.

So with canning shut down, we decided to try drying some ripe tomatoes. It takes a long time in our little dehydrator, but the result was pretty good. We will put some in olive oil.

On Sunday, another 4 lbs. of tomatoes, bringing the week's total to 13 lbs. (5.9 kg.). I've decided that since the weather is holding out I will leave whatever tomatoes cling to the vines to see if they will ripen naturally, and bring in only the drops to ripen indoors. Then we will dry or maybe freeze them.

Well that's it for harvests, but we were busy nonetheless. It was time to make apple cider. A few weeks ago I wrote that we had picked 5 bushels and jammed them into the freezer. This week, after thawing for 24 hours, they were ready to go. Here is about half of them on a workbench in the barn. Not particularly attractive, but nice and soft.

The point of freezing, besides buying us some time, was supposed to make pressing much easier. We were thinking we could avoid the intermediate step of grinding before pressing. After cutting the first few in half, I put them into the press and started cranking. They pressed well, but the resulting juice was a pale yellow, not like traditional cider. The KG believed that grinding released more goodness, and she was right. So we got into a rythm of cutting, grinding, and pressing. Here's the grinder and its product:

Here's the press ready for its next load:

The results were remarkably good. We pressed the 5 bushels in less than 4 hours, and got 10 gallons (~38 l.) of rich brown, sweet-tart goodness. We are sold on freezing! It cuts the time and effort in half.

Of course for us the process does not end there. While I did the cleanup, the KG did what is needed for hard cider. She simmered the cider for about 45 minutes, added 2 lbs. of brown sugar per 5 gallons, then let it cool for awhile. We poured them back into the fermentation buckets (after sanitizing them of course), and waited until it was cool enough to add the yeast. It turns out that took overnight. Early the next morning we pitched the yeast, stirred, put the lids on, and added the airlocks. Now we wait!

I still do not know what we are going to do with the other 2 bushels I picked last week. We sure do not need more cider, and I don't think we need more than 6 jars of applesauce.

Wait, one more "harvest." Passing through one of the gates at Eight Gate Farm, on my way into the woods to dispose of some dropped apples, I saw some sumac along the fenceline. It is an attractive native tree, but it spreads like mad if uncontrolled. I cut a dozen few seedheads. I'm going to let them dry naturally, then use them for tea and the Middle Eastern spice za'atar, once I figure out how to do that.

Thanks for reading and thanks again to Daphne for hosting.

Harvest Monday - 23 September 2013

Welcome to another Harvest Monday, courtesy of Daphne's Dandelions. I hope you too are having fine fall weather. And there are no predicted frosts in the foreseeable future. That means more tomatoes (take that, Kitchen Goddess) and maybe even some more eggplants.

We started the week with 10 lbs. of tomatoes left over from last Sunday's canning. What to do, what to do? Well, how about a gallon of Bloody Mary mix? It's like tomatoes for breakfast! Just add Vitamin V.

 

On Tuesday, 2.5 lbs tomatoes and a cup of seedless red raspberries. On Thursday, 12.5 lbs. tomatoes, many of them drops and not immediately usable. Also a weird fall harvest of radishes, more raspberries, the last melons (lemon-sized), and the last cucumbers (misshapen). We take what we can get this time of year.



I took another 2 bushels from the mystery green apple tree. There are still more up there, but we really have enough. And the easy ones (and not-so-easy) are already picked.

 

I did not think it would be possible, but one of the volunteer tomatoes has produced ripe fruit. I guess this is due to the mild early fall weather we've been having, or maybe the pure compost it's growing in. I never water it, and it really does not get much sunlight.

 

I gave the chard a haircut.

 

 

I grew 2 varieties of chard: Fordhook and Perpetual. Neither has done especially well, but the Fordhook is better.

 

On Saturday, another 13 lbs. of tomatoes. The weekly total is 28 lbs. (12.7 kg.). Tomato production is really on the downward slope of the Bell Curve. No time to make sauce this week, so fruit in varying states of ripeness is piling up on the counter.

 

 

That's basically it for the harvests this week. Now a little foray into my fall gardening, or lack thereof. I really have never had luck with it. I'm never sure when to plant things, despite reading a lot on it. It probably doesn't help that the available space at this time of year is shaded a lot. But I try anyway.

 

My kale is just sitting there. Something's wrong. It was planted at the end of July.

Same with the carrots. But in this case I'm not so upset since we got so many spring carrots this year.

And even the radishes are scraggly! Kids can grow radishes! Why not me?

The "fall" broccoli and Chinese Cabbage really turned out to be summer crops, and are either all picked or tired now. The cabbage was nice but the broccoli has only produced small heads and not a lot of sideshoots. I don't really like Asian greens so I don't try them, and we had so much lettuce earlier this year we got tired of salads, so I saw no need to grow it in the fall.

Well, I guess we'll be picking Brussels Sprouts and the winter squash one of these days, so we will have some fall produce. But I'm envious of all you gardeners who are able to extend the season with nice green stuff. Enjoy!






 

Field Trip - Dublin, NH

On Saturday September 14 we took a field trip to see the cousins in Dublin, NH. Okay, they're not really my cousins, but we share an uncommon last name, which prompted me to look them up many years ago, and we've been dear friends since. The purpose of the trip was to divide up some of their perennials that have gotten too large. Karen can truly be said to have the proverbial green thumb.

A number of people came, and all walked away with beautiful plants that would cost a fortune in the garden centers. Here are some shots of their perennial gardens, pre-distribution.

Of course, no visit would be complete without a visit to her vegetable...wait for it...



Cold frames

Beautiful chocolate peppers

 

 

 

Thanks for the plants, Cuz. Love to stay and help you fork compost, but we have some babies we need to get in the ground!