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.