Happy Chanukah!

To all my readers who celebrate Chanukah, have a very happy holiday. For those who don't, please enjoy all the other upcoming festivals of light and love in this dark chilly December.

As my friend Anne commented, I haven't blogged much recently. That is because I have not done much related to the garden in a while. I have randomly rubbed seeds hither and yon from my hollyhocks, black eyed susans and cosmos. I am waiting to see what will pop up in the spring without me putting in new seed stock. I have not been swiping samples of seeds from the entire neighbourhood this year, but depending on how things sprout in the spring I may take up my old habits next year again.

We have yet to make tomato sauce, we are still using pesto from the freezer, and with the chest freezer we are not under pressure to liberate everyone else's freezers. Josh has been working on building our new kitchen cabinets so the sauce will wait.

We have had snow but then the temperature has been up and down so there is no snow on the ground. It rained today. I can see buds on some confused bushes. The garden looks pretty desolate, but the oregano, rosemary, lambeum, periwinkle, violets, anemones are still green. This amazes me, I would have expected the frost to have killed them. I did not check out the strawberries but they are probably sprouting new leaves as I speak.

I am not taking photos. It still looks too sad even with little pockets of green.

Getting ready for another year

I have just come inside after planting garlic. Thanks to my in-laws who agreed to spare us a bit of garlic last minute (I lost count but there were at least 190 usable cloves which is more than double what we planted last year. Possibly 220. I will let you know next July what comes out.) I went online a few weeks ago to see if I could order some garlic for planting and realized that it was way too late, every company had sold out. I planted either Red Russian or Music or a combination of both. They are both really good, tasty garlic, but Music is more resilient according to Chloe.

My nose is still running as I write. It is a cold, cloudy day in early November. Last week we had a lot of rain thanks to Hurricane Sandy who was on her way to oblivion when she passed Montreal. This meant the earth was wet and soft. I decided to wait to plant until the heavy rain was finished as I was not sure what it would do to the garlic. Josh and I spent some time this morning planning out our planting for next year, because we realized that we need to rotate our crops. I have been doing a bit of reading and consulting about rotating crops. My friends Jasmyn and Gu shared a great link which really is crop rotation for dummies.

http://www.todayshomeowner.com/vegetable-garden-crop-rotation-made-easy/#comment-118240

My challenge is that the past two years we did not put any thought into rotation and did not set the garden up well to do this in the future. We got really creative in our set up for next year to put rows in different directions and alternate rows of smaller plants like onions, garlic, basil and carrots in the areas where I had peppers and tomatoes. I needed to have a map before putting in the garlic and carefully mark out where I put the garlic so I can work around it in the spring. Chloe was in town staying at our house for a family Bar Mitzvah this weekend so she was very supportive with her ideas and advice.

Today also marks the first day in four months that I do not have any tomatoes on my tables or counters. This weekend Josh made a fantastic batch of salsa with some of the ripening tomatoes still remaining from the last harvest day on October 12. I have been throwing out the ones that were getting stiff or looking a bit off, and on Friday I dumped a bunch of the remaining green ones in the garbage. I am afraid to compost even the green ones because of our experience last year with forests of tomato sprouts from the compost. Josh also made a small batch of tomato sauce, a lentil dahl,  several litres of Chow chow pickle relish
(http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1836,153178-247202,00.html) and we even tried apple and green tomato crumble, inspired by the Joy of Cooking's apple pie recipe which recommends trying green tomatoes mixed in. We did not tell the kids what was in it. Orianne carefully picked out the tomatoes. Zara and Isaac assumed we left the peel on one of the green apples and ate it with no complaint. It did not detract from the cake, but probably would have been a better texture if we had used green beefsteak tomatoes or another softer, wetter tomato rather than the San Marzano which was a bit rubbery.

The rest of the tomatoes which ripened well have now filled my chest freezer to the top. We have a few bags of green tomato puree for soups but mostly red.

I will finish with a schematic of what we think our garden will look like next year.

Feeling picklish

So far we have made green tomato and corn soup and green tomato and vegetable pickles. I cannot give formal recipes because we did not measure anything, just threw it all together and adjusted the flavour until we liked it. But at least I can give you some ideas.

Green tomato and corn soup:
Green tomatoes puree, onions, celery, garlic, chipotle hot sauce, black beans, roasted red pepper, cooking sherry, olive oil, sesame oil,  rosemary, thyme, oregano, salt, pepper, lime peel, lime juice. grated cheddar cheese and hot pepper sauce added when served. This was Josh's idea of what a Mexican green tomato soup should taste like. We did not check out recipes nor have we ever tasted a green tomato and corn soup, so I have no idea if it is anything like traditional recipes. I am happy because it reduced the population of green tomatoes in my dining room and it tasted good enough for one dinner and two lunches last week. The kids did not like it, though, so the leftovers have been packaged and put in the chest freezer on top of the mostly repatriated bags of red tomato pulp and the new additions of green tomato pulp.

Hot Mixed Pickles:
Today I took on pickles. I got a recipe much like the one I just gave you for green tomato and corn soup from my neighbour Iulia last week, but was not comfortable "winging it" with pickles, so I looked up recipes. Unlike Iulia's though, nothing else I found was as simple. The others involved splitting or pureeing the tomatoes, using vinegar and salt, boiling and canning. Iulia's traditional Romanian recipe involves dumping washed whole tomatoes into a bucket with sliced carrots, celery greens, cauliflower, onions, garlic cloves, hot peppers, celery root with salted water and a bunch of spices: mustard seed, peppercorns, savory, thyme, rosemary. No cooking, no canning. She just leaves the bucket in the basement to pickle and takes out as much as she wants as needed. I set out this morning, harvested savory and rosemary and picked up some garlic, carrots and cauliflower at the grocery store. We just ran out of our own garlic : (  . I picked through all the tomatoes and separated the ones that have started to ripen from those that have spots or blemishes indicating possible bacteria infection and found the perfectly clean green ones. Once I had washed them, washed and cut the cauliflower, peeled and cut the carrots and onions and garlic cloves and dumped them all in a 20 litre bucket Josh picked up at a paint store, I called next door for help. Iulia was out, but her mother was visiting. Elena speaks some French but both of us have some limitations in vocabulary as neither of us usually cook in French. With a lot of miming and trial and error, she showed me how much of each spice to put in. Elena tossed in the hot peppers (I wasn't sure I wanted to try hot peppers in my first attempt, but Elena got excited when she saw the bowl and tossed some in). I am not sure there is enough salt in there. Iulia told me to put one tablespoon of kosher salt (that is coarse or pickling salt) for each litre of hot water, but Elena showed me to dissolve 20 tablespoons of salt into a litre of hot water (one spoon for each litre capacity of the container) and then enough hot water to fill up the bucket, which was not quite the same. She told me to swish the bucket around to mix the salt up and taste it, it should be salty but not too salty. I am going to invite Iulia over tomorrow to tell me if it is salty enough. I am not sure what too salty tastes like for pickles. She also told me to cover the top with celery leaves. I picked up more celery tonight, so will do that too.

Josh came home after I finished and asked me why I did not cover the vegetables with the liquid. It seems that they float, so adding more water still did not cover them completely at the top. Josh stuck a plate over the top of the vegetables to sink them under the brine. I am not sure that this is a traditional approach, but I will seek out more advice tomorrow.

Our next project: making and canning more hot sauce (using more green tomatoes in the process.

We bought a chest freezer!

 We finally decided that it was enough borrowing space everywhere, and took the plunge. I had been looking around Kijiji, but opted to buy new under warranty from the Sears liquidation centre one block away from my house. I had to wait for about a month because they had no chest freezers in stock. They only sell old stock or slightly damaged goods for a discount. Also because they are so close to my home, I have negotiated when buying large items there to borrow a dolly and walk it home, rather than spending another $75 on delivery. That makes it a better deal than what I found on Kijiji, and it is brand new. We have already reclaimed tomato pulp from several friends, as well as added a bag of frozen beans and some green tomato pulp which will be used to hot sauce or soups later.

Last night Josh tried making a green tomato and corn soup. A friend of ours suggested this as a way to use green tomatoes, said it was Mexican. Josh doesn't need much inspiration, he did not even look up a recipe but whipped up a nice soup flavoured with chopotles, roasted red peppers, limes and who knows what else. It was a bit thick, and the kids were not looking too enthused so I suggested we cook some pasta as a back up in case the soup did not make a hit. Then I looked at the thick soup, and the noodles, and suggested we try it as a pasta sauce. We added some of our home made hot pepper sauce and some cheddar cheese, and it was different, not bad at all. Today I had some straight up as soup in my lunch. I added the cheese and hot sauce again, and it tasted even better than last night.

I spoke to my mom and asked if she had any green tomato ideas. She floored me when she said that the Joy of Cooking has an apple and green tomato pie recipe. WHAT?? She said that she has used their apple pie recipe for years, and it has a line in it about trying to cut half the apples with green tomatoes for a change. I had to see it to believe it. She has an older edition than I do, and my copy is slowly dissolving at the ends so my index did not go far enough for me to find the page. She walked me through page by page (after the croquenbouche but not as far as Cherry tarts) until there it was, the suggested substitution in the apple pie recipe. We decided NOT to tell the kids, and Josh will do a small apple/green tomato crumble to test it out. I guess lots of people have been trying to recoup green tomatoes (like they do zucchinis) by trying to find creative ways to sneak them into all kinds of things.

A bunch of the green tomatoes have spontaneously started ripening. Josh and I are continuing to process and freeze what turns red for this week, but I really want to avoid diluting my tomato sauce with flavourless pulp like last year, so we are taking on the green tomato challenge more seriously.

I would like to highlight the amazing productivity of the single brown cherry tomato plant which Nathalie gave us as a gift when she stayed here with her kids last April. Last Friday when we harvested what was left of the garden, we picked all these from a single plant. They are turning red faster than the San Marzanos so we are eating/cooking/processing them, so the picture does not even represent the full crop. One plant, one day. Wow!

Green Tomato Olympics

 I have been carefully watching the weather the past few week because in Montreal, frost can hit anytime in October or November. We had a warm, dry summer, the best growing season in anyone's memory, and the promise of a long, warm autumn made it tempting to pay little heed to the danger of sudden winter. Such is life in this climate. Last week, we had a beautiful holiday of Sukkoth and happily ate outside every evening in our garden shed turned sukkah. We have not yet even taken it down, and our bikes have been sitting under a tarp in the yard, in the pouring rain this week, awaiting the return of the roof to the shed. I have been going directly to the garden every other day or so to pick anything that is ripening. I have not bothered the past two weeks to let tomatoes and peppers turn fully because it has been cold at night. Once picked, they ripen quickly inside. The yield has been slowing down despite the fact that the plants are still flowering. A frost was predicted for Friday night. Bad news for me, I had a really busy week. Sunday night through to Tuesday evening marked the end of the fall Jewish holiday cycle, and so I did not touch the garden. Josh, following a brief lay-off (one week) was fortunate to have been linked up to a company which does similar types of work to what he has been doing and started a new job midway through this past week. I had to hand my marks in for my course yesterday, and spent Tuesday night finishing my corrections and calculating final marks. I had an annual meeting for the organization where I volunteer on the board, and because of my course I left all the preparation for the last minute. I managed to harvest the ripening tomatoes and peppers before jumping into end of year reports, but had no time to pick everything that was left. My meeting was on Thursday night, and so Josh was home alone with the kids who had homework and there was no time for the garden. I checked the weather report twice daily, but it still predicted frost for Friday night. There was little for it. I had to find the time before the Sabbath started to pick what was left, and leave the taking down of the plants and frames for later.

Friday morning I woke a bit early, and so did my youngest daughter Orianne, so I co-opted her help and she picked hot peppers and I picked green tomatoes for fifteen minutes. I got most of the tomatoes off of one of the ten cages in that time. I also picked the one, tiny cucumber which I managed to save from the cucumber beatles. Based on the time it took, I figured with some help, I could finish the harvest in an hour and a half. That was approximately the time I would have from when I got home from work until the sun set. Not the way I prefer to prepare for the Sabbath, but there was not much choice. A good frost would destroy all that was left on the plants.

The last basil plant. We harvested the rest and made pesto.

Midway through my work day, I hear my colleague exclaim that it is snowing outside. Oh, great! There goes my garden. It was not much, just a few random flakes which dissappeared leaving nothing on the ground. In my haste to get to work after gardening in the morning I ended up taking my bike. Although I usually am a wimp about biking when it is close to zero, I would not only have been late for work but also would have taken too long to get home and finish my harvest before sunset. I was happy to see that I did not have to ride my bike through snow. I made it home in good time, and managed to get both Orianne and Isaac to help me outside. Time was limited and my wonderful children can be tremendous help when so inspired, but things did not bode well. Isaac wanted to go inside. I did not even let him put his schoolbag in the house or he would have made it back too late to be of much use. I brought out a small bin for peppers and beans, and a laudry hamper for tomatoes.

I was surprised that there were still plenty of tomatoes which were ripening, some fully red which I must have missed earlier in the week. Thursday was chilly but sunny so I was pleased that I left things until the last minute. Josh took care of making dinner and having the table set up so that I could run in and light candles and lose no time to finish the job first. How to get the kids to really help? We started out with a competition. I challenged them to count how many they picked and see who could pick more faster. I made sure they took a different patch each so they would not waste time sabotaging and fighting with each other. Isaac and Orianne got creative in making it a game. Two points for any ripening tomato. Rotting tomatoes counted even if they were thrown out. I wanted to make sure that they did not end up falling on the garden and growing infected seeds next year. There was one of the forty odd plants that was badly hit by the bacteria. The tomatoes which ripened on the vine were okay if I cut away the black part, usually the bottom half of the fruit, but the green ones were more likely to rot quickly when picked. Last week, at a party, I spoke to my garden consultant Claude about the tomatoes which were turning into bags of water on the vine, an affliction which affected one of the chocolate tomato plants, a beefheart tomato plant and a few of the beefsteak tomatoes too. He told me it was a potato fungal infection, to which some tomato plants are susceptible. It kills potato plants (aha! I wondered why my six potato plants died and left almost no potatoes underneath. I thought it may have been the cucumber beetles, but it seems another pest was at work.

Claude explained that this fungus strikes inside the plant and the plant may suddenly dry up and die, or in the case of the tomatoes, the problem is evident when the fruit rots before becoming ripe.

Getting back to my speed harvest, at first it was a competition, but eventually, the two of them decided that it would be faster and more fun to cooperate and just see how many they could pick. Honestly, I have no idea how many there are. Orianne and I had picked a lot before Isaac joined in and we started to count. I did not count mine, and the kids added extra points for colour, difficulty of removal when tomato was growing and stuck in the chicken wire, so their numbers are far from accurate, but they estimated well over a thousand. We raced into the house as the clouds were turning pink hauling our load and wondering what to do with some thousand green tomatoes just in time to light candles for the Sabbath.

Josh made chili for dinner, using the tomatoes I picked on Wednesday. It was wonderful. Tomorrow, I hope to buy the chest freezer that finally came into stock at the Sear's liquidation centre a block from my house, and we can collect all the bags of frozen tomatoes and bring them all home. Naomi commented that her freezer looks like a medical supply filled with transfusion bags. I hope Josh kept track of who has them all (I remember we gave some to Naomi, JT, Alan, Lisa and José but there may be more out there). I have been collecting ideas for green tomatoes. After the experience last year of letting my last harvest ripen in paper bags in the basement, I found that the resulting pasta sauce was not nearly as tasty as I had hoped. We decided this year to "go green" instead. So far, suggestions include pickled green tomatoes, green tomato salsa, Mexican green tomato and corn soup (if we can replace the sausages with something tasty and vegetarian), fried green tomatoes, tomato marmalade. Josh uses them for his hot sauces, and once the big pile of peppers finish ripening we should have enough to make hot sauce to last us the year. Looks like we will be busy for a while processing the harvest.

This morning when I got up, I looked out my window and all the tomato plants were wilted and looked like frozen lettuce. I was very relieved that I did not wait until Sunday to finish the harvest.

Josh and I have been discussing our plan for next year. I have been checking out a book by Nikki Jabour called The Year Round Vegetable Gardener which Chloe lent me, which has inspired her to garden under cold frames through the winter. This technique basically created mini green houses by putting windows or plastic on frames over vegetables growing in raised boxes, allowing you to continue harvesting plants right in the snow throughout winter, even in cold climates. I am not quite ready to go this route yet, it will take a lot of planning and organizing. First of all, our choice of produce this year were not good cold weather crops (tomatoes and peppers are tropical). Also, we have to build our garden differently. But I am starting to think about it, so maybe next year we can plan this out and experiment a bit. I also read about rotating our crops. I had not put much thought into this before, I have been thinking of finding the ideal place for peppers, the best spot for tomatoes, rather than thinking of the garden as a place that needs to be regularly changed.

Reading up on cucumber beetles, and the recommendation to move the cucumbers to another spot next year started me thinking on how to redesign the garden. Nikki Jabour had a whole section of her book with tips on how to organize your crop rotation based on what kinds of plants give or take different nutrients from the soil. She suggests alternating rows of different kinds of crops and switching them is yearly is a good approach. We had that in mind for the tomatoes and basil and garlic, but we failed to consider the size of the plants and their needs for light, and ended up with everything too close together. I moved all the basil once the tomatoes got too big. In fact, my garden was far less "according to plan" this year due to the massive number of surprise volunteer tomatoes. This summer we carefully threw all the tomato seeds we separated from the tomato pulp into the garbage, as much as this bothered my green soul, so we would not have a repeat next year. I can't even blame the "weed" tomatoes for the excess of green at the end of the season, as the early sprouted plants and store bought tomatoes provided as many unripe ones this weekend as the late sprouting volunteers. We need to make our decisions now because we plan to plant the garlic in the next few weeks. I am hopeful but have learned my lesson this year that no matter how well you plan, the garden is bound to throw surprises your way.

Fall again

We had heavy rain and winds on Tuesday, the second day of Rosh Hashana, which ushered in a change in the weather. It is suddenly colder, especially at night, although it is heating up mid-day. The sun is setting earlier. I was caught by sudden sunset while picking tomatoes and couldn't see anything and had to stop mid-bush. Leaves are late in turning because it was so hot early in September, but now there are patches of yellow starting, and the ash tree next door is dropping branches all over my yard and garden. I suppose that is not quite a fall thing but the wind is wreaking havoc on its crown.

Gentian finally in bloom!

I made a beautiful salad for our Rosh Hashana dinner with my last stunted lettuces, nasturtium leaves, cherry tomatoes, wood sorrel and green onions from the garden mixed with red curly and romaine lettuce and cukes from the grocery store and garnished with four different coloured nasturtium flowers. It was gorgeous. I am sorry I did not take a picture.

Iulia and her family were away and left me in charge of her garden in their absence. I was delighted that we had a good rainfall and that there is rain predicted over the next week. I am pleased that I have not had to find time to water both gardens, and their lawn. Ovidiu would never forgive me if I let his emerald green perfect lawn die. Iulia asked me to plant a bucket of lilies given her by a colleague before she left. She started a new garden patch around one of the trees in the front lawn and created a mound of earth so it would slope out from the tree, but without any ground cover to anchor the earth it was eroding. She decided to anchor the rim of the hill with the orange day lilies (Canadian lilies). She has resisted the orange lilies to date, being too plain and invasive. I have offered to share mine (so has everyone she knows who has any, they spread like nuts). She had no time before her trip, so I did the honours. I did not have time before the weekend, and the night before we had a big rainstorm so when I went to plant them they were immersed in water, well soaked. Good thing I planted them before they rotted.

I have had a lot of tomatoes to pick. Iulia has only large beefsteak tomatoes, so they are large but take time to ripen and there are only one or two per plant at a time. They are stakes to poles and carefully pruned. This may lead to fewer but larger tomatoes. Picking hers is faster and easier. Despite her complaints that her mother planted too many too close together, I have an easy time getting around and through. My tomatoes are a veritable jungle, and I need to approach each row from different angles, getting down low and looking up and from all sides or I miss tomatoes. There are buckets of tomatoes everywhere. I am starting to pick them before they are fully ripe just in case it gets too cold one night and we lose them. I also have less time so I am not getting out every day. I have been late for work three times in the past couple of weeks because I just needed ten more minutes to get the last patch of tomatoes.

I have a spectacular huge garden spider who makes amazing webs which I keep messing up trying to get the tomatoes in the back of the patch. I scared it this week so badly it hid in a fetal position under a leaf for a few hours. I know because I kept checking if it had rebuilt the web and if I could get a photo. No such luck. I think it is one of the ones which hatched out off of one of my basil pots back in late May.

I have basil going to seed again, the plants are half the size they were for the first two harvests but still sizable enough for another small batch of pesto. That is part of this week's plans. I have been going to the Sears outlet store near my house weekly to see if any chest freezers have come into stock. We have taken over a few more freezers (Naomi, Alan and JT) and are still producing several litres of tomato pulp weekly. Josh is making more hot sauce from the hot peppers. They are all producing lovely, bright coloured peppers in various shapes and sizes. The hot sauce it turning out very nicely. The groundfall green tomatoes are going into that pot.

I was at Walmart last weekend and as I walked in the door there were chrysanthemums on sale. I impulsively bought a deep red coloured plant and planted it right in front of my house. Iulia convinced me last year that they are perennials but I don't see any of the ones we planted last year. I figure for $6 I would splurge on a bit of fall colour. My flower garden is looking a bit sparse. The lamium is blooming yet again, and there are a few sunflowers left. The single gentian I transplanted from Alex's place has finally blossomed. I hope it spreads, it is really pretty. The nasturtiums are spreading and blooming and stunning. I hope they reseed themselves. I dropped some black-eyed susan heads in a different patch of the garden to see if they will colonize. Otherwise, I will do some splitting and transplanting in the spring. I am not cruising the neighbourhood snitching seeds this year. I am feeling like my garden is coming into its own. I can't wait to see what it will look like next spring!

Gardens of memory: a gardener's Shana Tova

Tomorrow night marks the beginning of the Jewish year, and in our tradition the new year is a solemn and serious time, a time for remembering, reflecting, and starting afresh on a clean slate to be a better person. It is a time of prayer and family, of feasting and fasting. The fall holiday cycle begins with the new year, followed by the day of Atonement for sins. The second part of the cycle is the harvest festival of Succoth and finally Simchat Torah, the Festival of rejoicing with the Torah in which we celebrate the completion of the reading of the Torah,and begin anew. Our new year is honoured on a personal and interpersonal level first, then a celebration of the abundant gifts of G-d from the land on the level of the environment, and finally a community celebration of our unique heritage and covenant with the Almighty in the form of our Torah, our law. 

Within the past weeks, members of our family have experienced the loss of a close family member and a close friend. Grief has coloured our start to this new year. I dedicate this blog to our family in this time of remembrance.

In life we are all gardeners. We come into the world, we have our first social experiences outside our family in nurseries and kindergardens where the adults in our life plant the seeds of our future selves. Children grow. They learn. The come to love the earth, feel compassion and fascination for its creatures. Even in today's modern urbanized world, children still celebrate the earth and its bounty. They plant plants in science class, rescue injured birds, watch in amazement as a butterfly leaves its cocoon. They grow and they learn to love and appreciate all that grows around them. We form relationships, with family members, with friends. We never cease to meet and engage and grow to love new people in our lives. We nurture these relationships, we feed them with patience, water them with emotions, weave our roots and branches together to become stronger, intertwined.

My garden teaches me about life. I have learned to love the sun for the sweetness it gives, but understand the need to temper its effects or it burns and dries. One beetle, the lady bug, is a trusted friend who devours the aphids. Another is the subtle and swift cucumber beetle who has decimated part of my harvest this year. I miss the sweet crispness of the fresh picked cucumber, which is like nothing you can buy. I have learned to love the rain with an intensity I never felt before. I understand the prayers for rain, the prayers for dew which we recite year round. As much as I can water with a hose, it never nourishes the way the rain does. After a unusually long, hot and dry summer, I celebrate every rain fall. I watch the skies open up and run to my door or window to watch and offer prayers of thanksgiving. Rain is lifegiving. Rain is nourishing, cleansing, bringing of joy. I have learned the balance of the ecosystem in my tiny world of my backyard. It is a place of surprises, where things grow unexpectedly, some of which are delicious, or beautiful, or invasive. It is a place where, when their needs are understood and met, living things grow strong and bear fruit. It is a place of cycles where living things sprout, grow, bear fruit, wither and ultimately die. There are times when all is desolate, until the cycle begins anew in the spring.

A family is like a garden, where each person's life is entwined with others. Each member is different and can complement and support the others around him or her. But like a garden, there is a season for everyone. We are born, we grow, we build our own family and community, and ultimately we fade and die. Some leave behind children, even grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Most leave behind friends, people who we have touched, who we have nurtured and shared with and loved. Everyone leaves behind memories.

This coming year, I am planting a garden of memory. I remember those who were lost, who have left this world. I will taste the sweetness of the memories of the beautiful times we shared and savour them. Shana tova, a good new year, to all of you, my friends, family and readers.

Counting our blessings

It has been a busy couple of weeks. The kids are back at school, and this year they are at three different schools with different schedules. I am back to teaching as well, doing a one-month intensive make up for most of a semester lost to a student strike. The Jewish holidays start in one week's time. I am also working full time at my rather challenging day job. On top of all that, it is harvest time. This week we will have one last, smaller, basil harvest. The beans and the tomatoes are still going full tilt, and the hot peppers are gradually ripening. Josh is making a jar of hot sauce once per week. I picked the potatoes, because the plants had died, but there were four marble-sized minis and one medium one. I tossed it in my soup last week with the two onions from the garden, some beans, tomatoes, garlic and some stuff from the grocery store to round it out (yams, lentils, celery and spices). I have been looking to buy a chest freezer, but in the meantime we have been using space at Naomi's, Lisa's, Alan's and have Julie and my parents on standby. Josh is donating half of our pesto and a bunch of frozen tomato puree to our synagogue for a future pasta night fundraiser dinner. The cantor has been helping him out making sure all is done kosher, even using the synagogue kitchen to make the basil. It has been very warm up until today, so the garden has not been feeling autumn yet. This weekend the weather shifted, and we had a big rainstorm bringing in some colder, windier weather. There were lots of fallen branches yesterday and hydro trucks everywhere repairing downed lines.

Our sunflowers turned out to be a wide variety of different cultivars, with only one being tall. Ironically, I had thought that was a small one and planted it in one of the cinder blocks in the back. It did well, and the squirrels did not get it despite the fact I ran out of fox piss. We never got around to reordering. None of the sunflowers had large seeds, though. Just the tiny black ones that you find in pet food, too small to get much out of, so I am not fussing with harvesting and roasting them. Next year I may try to plant the giant grey stripe variety again, and see how they do in the cinder blocks.

 

My bergamot are doing great in the back yard, I am so glad I moved them. The nasturtiums are amazing, huge and bursting with flowers. I moved the tiny mystery flower, which is still putting up a new blossom every week or so, to the side of the house so it is not lost in the tomatoes.

Just a note on tomatoes. We have had a unique opportunity to compare how different varieties managed under pretty much the same conditions. It was a hot and dry summer, but I did some watering especially in July when it was really hot with no rain for days on end (weeks even). The watering was at root level or low down, we had soaker hoses covering most of the tomatoes, the odd scattered weed tomatoes I hand watered rather than using the sprinkler.

 

The San Marzanos which Josh bought as plants from a garden centre were the second largest seedlings at planting time, and produced huge tomatoes, but did not have the clusters that the smaller plants produced. They had maybe three or four growing together maximum. The ones we planted from seed produced the most tomatoes, although the average size of each tomato was half to two-thirds of the size of the purchased one. The best producer was the one which Nathalie gave us, which gave us up to ten cherry-sized tomatoes daily from a single plant. It was the biggest when we planted it. I have been researching on-line and I believe that they are called black cherry tomatoes. The chocolate tomatoes were difficult to handle. They went from green-tinged to overripe overnight and they were big, soft and well attached to the vine even when fully ripe. They also melted if you did not eat them rapidly. Maybe they are supposed to be picked while still greenish? The beefsteak tomatoes from Iulia produced a small number of huge tomatoes, some of which fell apart while still on the plant, and a few were half-eaten by something even while green (which did not happen to the other tomatoes). The yellow ones were lovely, easy, prolific and tasty. They were bigger than cherry tomatoes and smaller than plums. I have no idea how they ended up in the garden, or what they are called. I will be sure to save some seeds for next year.

Still going...

I am not posting much now because I am spending my time harvesting, and getting ready for back to school. So I am just doing a quick update so my loyal readers don't abandon me.

I have reached 1000 pageviews this week. This impresses me, even knowing some of those are just spammers, and despite my regular clicking on the box asking me to ignore my own pageviews, I assume that my own views are still included there. I try to make sure someone is reading over my shoulder so I stay honest. I also have two new members, and I don't know either of them. I feel like I have really gone "public!"

I have an abundance of beans this year, so many I am freezing them or I would be sick of beans by now. They are very tall, right over the fence and above the chicken wire, so I have coopted my son, who has now surpassed 6'2 and can reach a foot higher than me, to become a bean picker. He has a lot to learn, but if I point he sees them.

I have a lot of varieties of tomatoes ripening. I have two varieties of brown tomatoes, one big and wrinkled and the other the size of a large cherry tomato. I have some round red types from Iulia (beefsteak I think) and several varieties of San Marzanos. There are also some round red ones which I am not sure what they are or where they came from. I also have some small yellow tomatoes, and I have no clue where they came from. I lost track of which were planted and which grew as weeds from the compost. I have been bringing the small brown ones to my various offices to share with my staff and volunteers, and they give them raving reviews. I even have requests for seeds. Thank you Nathalie for the plant!

We have started pureeing the San Marzanos and are going to buy a chest freezer so we don't need to keep borrowing freezer space from Lisa and José and my mom. We plan to have a lot of tomatoes this year.

The slugs seem to have been conquered. I think the 4 bags of Slug-b-gone combined with our having skimped a bit on hay this spring and the lack of rain has knocked them out. I have only seen tiny ones, and my tomatoes are able to ripen on the vine without getting full of holes. I anticipate more flavourful pasta sauce this winter. Josh has been spraying the tomatoes with hydrogen peroxide to counter the bacteria, though some are succumbing anyhow. The cucumbers, however, have been decimated. We had one single cucumber that made it through. I saw another cucumber beetle on a plant, and it disappeared so fast I lost it before I could pick it off.

Chloe has offered us to have a colony garden up at her place next summer to grow the things that are too big for our garden in town. We love the idea. I am starting to think about what I want.

Chloe and Abraham's garden

I just got back from visiting Josh's parents for the weekend. This weekend was the Williamstown fair, the oldest country fair in Canada, celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. Two of our nephews were visiting as well, and Josh's grandmother, sister and brother-in-law came to join us all at the fair today. Chloe has been submitting produce from her garden and various breads every year to the competitions, and this year she won twelve prizes, for her tomatoes, garlic, whole wheat bread, multi-grain bread, white bread and challah, blackcurrant preserves and a few other things. She will be entered into a regional bake off for winning first prize in the challah.

We camped out next to her expansive and amazing garden. I waited until today to take photos, and unfortunately there was a big storm with lots of hail yesterday which left a lot of things looking somewhat holey or broken today, and also reduced the number of butterflies slightly. I have never seen so many butterflies in my life, there were swarms of them. I think they are painted ladies.

I learned a few new tricks too. Chloe planted a big patch of buckwheat, and when they start to go to seed, she plans to cut them down and mix the plants into the earth. She says this is a way of enriching soil you are leaving fallow, the buckwheat acts as a fertilizer both while it is growing and once it is tilled into the soil. On Saturday the patch of buckwheat was in full white flower and swarming with butterflies. The hailstorm gave Chloe a hand in cutting them down, so there wasn't much to photograph today but broken stems.

This is echinacea with one butterfly visible.

Above is a photo of the shelves where Chloe leaves her canned goods from harvests past, pickles, jams, tomato sauce. I took a close up of her "Slightly spicy pickles" (I love that she has so many varieties that she has to be specific)

I lost track of how many varieties of tomatoes Chloe and Abraham are growing. She has something called Apricot tomatoes which are orange and slightly fuzzy and shaped like an apricot. These are another type to the right. She has San Marzanos too which are massive.
Below is yet another butterfly on one of her sunflowers. It turns out that this year was a relatively short year for sunflowers, even the winner of the tallest sunflower at the fair was not impressive. This makes we think that maybe I did not screw up my sunflowers, it was just the weather. The colour is due to a mistake in the setting on my camera, but it came out kind of interesting so I am posting it anyways. There are actually two butterflies on the same flower but one had its wings folded when I took this shot.

 Chloe has three types of onions, red, white and yellow. She is also growing dill, cabbage, melons, squash, cucumbers, broccoli, garlic (already harvested, they grew close to 1000 heads this year), two types of beans, peppers, lettuce, carrots, beets, borrage, potatoes and pumpkins. I am sure that is not even half of what is growing and I didn't even start on the flowers.

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 This is a Sivan melon (an Israeli variety).

 Chloe succeeded in getting her Romanescu broccoli to look like it is supposed to. We didn't even try this year. She has the room for broccoli, squash, pumpkins and melons. We found they took up too much space in our garden.

 The holes in the cabbage are compliments of the little white butterflies hovering all over the garden known as cabbage moths. The holes in the melon leaves were mostly from the hail.

 When I noticed that my camera had been set on manual and was taking very faded out photos I started over, and this is what the sunflower looked like with real colours.

 Wild roses.










Chloe is using wooden stackable crates which she gets from a neighbour. He has machine parts delivered in these boxes. She can stack two to protect plants when it gets colder, and cover them with a window pane to make "cold frames" which are like miniature greenhouses.

 Here are some of their garlic drying. There is more in the garage too.

 Some of the windowboxes and hanging flowers around their house.

 This is heliotrope, a bit past its most beautiful. Very intense colour of purple. Below is my youngest nephew Ethan with some of today's harvest.

  

Chloe has much more solid tomato cages than we have. She is just trying this out for the first time. She also is growing the Three sisters (corn, squash and beans) together, but only a few beans. Mostly corn and squash. Above (sorry it is not too clear) are some of her tomatoes propped up against a fence rather than caged or staked. Chloe uses hay to angle the plants in the right direction. This is a trick she learned from Ruth Stout's The No Work Garden.

They also have some nice morning glories on a little island in the middle of the garden.

Chloe and Ethan and Noah picked three baskets of onions, cucumbers and tomatoes to send home to Montreal with us and Toronto with my sister-in-law.