Tomatoes at last!

Oh, there had been a ripe tomato or two in early August, along with a basket of cherry tomatoes. But never enough to bother making pasta for. The harvest finally got going with a bang at the end of August. Now I am tripping over baskets of tomatoes in my kitchen--red ones, yellow ones, orange-and-red striped ones, round ones, pointy ones, squashed ones with many fantastic lobes, like brains. Tomatoes that show a pattern of red and yellow rays when you slice them. Tomatoes that are almost purple inside. Tomatoes five inches across. Really the loveliest tomatoes I've ever been blessed with; the photo doesn't even come close to doing them justice.

Meanwhile, the vines outside are groaning under the weight of more bounty. One cubic foot of vine has 15 tomatoes in it. Where earlier it was, "Is it ripe? We'll say it's ripe enough," now it's "Can these stay on the vine a little longer without disintegrating? We'll say they can."

I've made tomato juice, tomato soup, lots of Vitamix sauces with tomatoes, peppers, onions, carrots and a host of whatever else is available. This morning we had tomatoes and the one eggplant with garbanzo beans and rice. Tasty. I've hauled out my pasta maker and whipped up bunches of pasta to serve as a vehicle for shoveling more tomatoes into my mouth. Another thing we've done is sliced the tomatoes up in a little balsamic vinegar, garlic and basil and later piled the marinated tomatoes on cheese sandwiches.

I can say this is a local meal, sort of, since the bread is homemade. The wheat, however, is from got knows where--no one grows wheat in California.

Now if the tomatillos would only hurry up. They've never been so late as this year.

Apples and green beans are piling up. Here's one day's harvest--enough green beans for a generous meal, a few more tomatoes, and a dozen or so apples. Most of my apples tend to go to waste because each one of them has its own resident codling moth larva. But for some reason, there were many bug-free apples this year.

By a stroke of serendipity, I acquired a small juicer for $5 at a garage sale. I'm not a big apple eater, but I love the fresh juice. So...I gathered all the apples--even the ones that had fallen on the ground and gotten bruised or sun-scalded, and made apple juice that is beyond description, thick, creamy, exploding with flavor. Apple juice you have to drink up in short order, because it's not pasteurized or frozen or preserved in any other way. And on a hot summer day, this is not a chore.

I buy carrots in large Costco-sized quantities because they keep a long time and I like to add one to the soup. But the collection in my vegetable bin was beginning to look a little shriveled. No problem! I turned a bunch of them into delicious juice. Why is it that carrots are kind of a ho-hum vegetable, but the fresh juice is divine (and the canned stuff so awful)?

This was a bumper year for nectarines. There must have been at least a hundred on our little tree--which produced basically zero nectarines last year. They are small ones with big seeds--probably because of deficient watering--but very concentrated in flavor. After wondering what to do with the baskets of them, I hit on the idea of drying them in the solar oven, leaving the glass top off so it wouldn't get too hot. The first batch got a little over-heated and acquired a delightfully toasted flavor, like peach cobbler. The next batch was a little moister and just as good.

I've started harvesting winter squash. Two of them are curing on my back porch now. I'm letting some of the beans go to seed for next year, and getting ready to plant onions and garlic, broccoli and spinach. I have cilantro started in a pot on the porch and under the tomatoes. Is there any way to preserve fresh basil for the winter? If so, dear non-existent reader, please let me know.

My only heartbreak, one that I experience nearly every year, is the usual pepper crop failure. This is a serious problem, because the ones I like aren't available in the stores and nurseries.

I like to make salsa verde, which requires poblano chiles, tomatillos and cilantro. Every year, I manage to have two of the three ingredients, but never all three.

I know it's not just my garden location, because one year I had baskets full of my favorite peppers--poblanos and pimentos. Unfortunately, that was the year that the tomatillos didn't do too well.

This year, I can't find the poblanos even in the farmers markets. It seems no one has peppers to sell. Why that is, I don't know. It's been a dry year, but that doesn't explain it. Summer has been a bit cool until the last two weeks, when it's been decidedly hot.

Another perennial crop failure is spinach. Now, Steve eats a LOT of spinach. I'd like not to have to go to Safeway or Costco and buy those 4-pound bags every week. But I've gotten precious little spinach out of my garden so far. Well, I'm going to try again. This time I'll try planting it while it's still warm and dry, so the slugs and pillbugs don't get them all, and hope it cools off before they bolt.

You know, I'm not getting nearly enough done of the other stuff I have to do, because of all this produce growing and processing, but what is life for if not to grow food and eat it?

Okay, I have to go check the bread in the solar oven.

Next: Summer of Love photos.

Urban Homesteading

Wonderful new movement! I guess I've been unconsciously involved in urban homesteading ever since I turned my driveway into raised-bed gardens. The photo on the left is from Reality Sandwich. Click on it to visit them.

Reality Sandwich | Become an Urban Homesteader: "What is an Urban Homesteader?

An urban homesteader is someone who enjoys living in the city, but doesn't see why that should stop her from engaging directly with nature, growing her own food, and striving for self-sufficiency.

We don’t wish to retreat to the countryside and live like the Unabomber in a plywood shack. We believe that people are best off living in cities and cooperating with other like-minded folks. Instead of hoarding ammo and MREs, we're building the skills and forming the conditions and networks that sustain us, our friends and our neighbors, now and into the future.

Urban homesteading is about preparedness, but we don't like that term very much. It connotes stockpiling things that you hope will keep your ass alive. Survivalism in general is about the fear of death. Urban homesteading is about life – it is a way of life founded on pleasure, not fear. Our preparedness comes not so much through what we have, but what we know. We are recollecting the almost-lost knowledge of our great-grandparents, those most essential of human skill sets: how to tend to plants, how to tend to animals, and how to tend ourselves."

More...

The point is, you don't have to be an agricultural genius or spend hours and hours and lots of money to grow food on your urban property.

For a how-to blog, visit Homegrown Revolution.

I just spent an hour perusing the links from this site. Thanks to Ellen Bicheler for bringing it to our attention.

More garden space

Here's my back yard with the green manure crop I planted last fall.


And here it is after I mowed it so it wouldn't go completely berserk after tomorrow's expected rain.

I left as many of the fava beans as was feasible. They were supposed to be all in one clump, but somehow got scattered in different parts of the garden. Now I have to prevail on a friend to dig his rototiller out of the barn so I can borrow it, or rent one myself.

I've fenced out the deer, and I haven't seen any gophers back there lately, so I'm crossing my fingers that I can augment my driveway garden with a big space to grow squash and other space-hogging plants.

Oh, and here's a bouquet of pea blossoms I picked before weed-wacking the crop.