Mid winter garden blues

Hello faithful fans,

Anyone looking for a bit of summer on this snowy January day? Time for an update on where things are with the parts of my garden which have moved indoors.

Just in time for the Christmas holidays, Josh finally found a day to make his pasta sauce. Since our last harvest late in October, I had put all the green tomatoes into paper bags and hidden them in my unheated laundry room. This was Jack's suggestion, and slowly over a full month, they turned red. By the time the last one was ripe, it probably was no better in texture and flavour than store bought tomatoes, but as they were to be integrated with the tomatoes which were vine ripened and frozen, I didn't fuss. Almost all of them turned red. I picked through the bags every other day, to take out the ones that were turning, and weekly I ground them in our new tomato grinder. We had to borrow space in my mom's freezer and another friend's by the time we were done. Josh cooked up twenty seven litres of pasta sauce, and Chloé my mother in law came to town to help us by canning it all in mason jars. No storebought tomato sauce in my house for a while!

Josh also bottled all that cider he made in October. He made 140 litres of cider. They are in the basement with the tomato sauce and the pepper plants.

I discovered that the pepper plants have been infested with aphids. I suspect some had migrated from the Jersey mac apple tree which was close to the pepper patch, and I did not notice until they took over the plants in my basement. After drowning them unsuccessfully in diatomaceous earth (my solution to insect infestations), I am trying a solution of dishsoap and water. They don't look so good right now but I am stubborn and have seen nearly-dead plants come back to life so I am not giving up.

I also finally got around to packaging and labelling all the seeds which I had collected which were still wet, such as cucumber, beans, squashes. Unfortunately, my memory of what exactly was what is a bit fuzzy so perhaps we will be surprised by which squash or melon turns up. There was one type of seed which I cannot identify at all, nor could Chloe, so I will just toss them somewhere and see what happens.

The garden is pretty much buried in snow. I am ready to go once spring approaches to start sprouting in my basement, except for the aphids which must go first.

Hang in there, garden fans, the days are getting longer and spring is not far away.