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.