Pickles

Yesterday was probably the last time this year I will go to the farmers' market.  I hadn't really done any pickling this year yet and it was about too late, so I bought everything they had that would make good pickles.  I ended up with five kinds, shown here.  Left to right we have jalepenos, okra, totmates (from my garden, not the farmers' market), green beens, and brussel sprouts (which I have never pickled  before).  As you can see, I put some carrots in with the jalepenos.  They are great.

These are the tomatoes from the garden.  I had never had pickled tomatoes until about three years ago.  I tried them in a restaurant in Denver and have had to have them ever since.

This is the okra.  I put three thick jalepeno slices in each jar.  I didn't want to overpower them, but they taste good a little spicey.

Jalepenos and carrots.

Brussel sprouts.

Green beens.

Green Tomato Habanero Salsa

My brother gave me this recipe.  It makes a very good and spicey salsa and doubles as a great marinade for slow roasting meats, like pork or briskit.  I have plenty of tomatos in the garden, but didn't want to use them for this, so I bought all the fresh vegitables at the farmers' market.  The pictures show two batches of the recipe below.

15    cups chopped green tomatoes
3     habanero peppers
3     jalapeno peppers
1     med onion
4     cloves garlic
3/4  cup lemon juice
1/4  dry cilantro
2     tsp dry oregano
1     TBL salt
1     tsp pepper
1    TBL ground cumin


I chopped all the vegitables large and layered them in the jars, then put the other ingredients in individually.  Process in a water bath for 45 minutes.  Blend to a thick consistency for use.

Jam

There is a Peach orchard not far from our place in the country and we picked up fresh peaches there a week ago to make jam with.  It came out great.  I was telling a friend from work this and she said she had a plumb tree that was over flowing and would I like some of them.  Of course I would.  So I made plumb jam too.  My wife thought since I was making the rest, I might as well make strawberry jam too.  It was a long day yesterday, but I did a total of 14 pints, in half pint jars, of the three fruits.  They all turned out well.  They are not too sweet.  I used a little honey instead of sugar and no sugar needed pectin.  So, they actually taste like the fruit instead of just sugar.

If you want to try it, the recipe is the same for all three:

4 cups fruit

1 cup honey

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 packet no sugar needed pectin

Dice the fruit small and put in a high sided suace pan.  Put on medium high heat togethr with the lemon juice and honey.  Boil the mixture slowly for about 10 minutes.  Add the pectin while stirring constantly to avoid lumps.  Boil an additional 3 minutes with the pectin in.  Remove from heat and spoon into jars that have been heated in your oven for 15 minutes at 160 degrees together with the lids.  Place the lids on the jars and screw down the rings.  Let set on the counter for several hours.  The lids will pop as they cool so you know they are sealed.  

You can double the recipe if you want, but I wouldn't go any farther than that.  Recipes start to do strange things when you play with them too much.

Garden Update: Veggies

More good stuff from the garden.  These are the last of the first planting of beets.  I've gotten quite a few red tomatoes too, but the German Green Stripe look too cool.  They taste just like a yellow pear tomato or some other low acid variety.  The Purple Pod Green Beans are very good.  I eat most of them off the vines.  I've yet to cook any because they are so good raw.

Garden Update: Tomatoes

I always start with this view of the garden because it is easy to see how much things have grown.  You can go back to previous posts and compare.  Short story, the tomatoes are going crazy.

The plants are masive now and producing dozens of tomatoes.  You can also see the frame for shade screen I put up.  We are getting temperatures in the mid to high 90's already.  Tomatoes don't set fruit very well at those temps, so I'm hoping the screen will help.

Just a few shots at all the tomatoes.  I can't wait.  I've already been eating a few of the Sweet 100's and here's a shot of the German Green Zebra getting ripe.

I will actually let this one rippen completely on the vine so the seeds will mature.  I'll keep the seeds from it for next year's garden.

The squash are setting fruit now too.  I planted them quite a bit later in the year to make room for the potatoes, but it looks like even with the late start I'll be eating them in a couple of weeks.

Here are some small Purple Pod Green Beans.  I've been eating them off the vine for about two weeks now.  None have made it into the house yet.

This is a pretty poor picture of one of the onion heads in bloom.

Here you can see the spinach making it's seed heads too.  The spinach did very well this year.  I used last year's seed and was very pleased at how well it did.  I will let a few of these go to seed and continue eating the rest.

These are the Black Spanish Radishes.  I planted them just for the seed pods this year.  I had never eaten them until last year, but they were so good I decided to plant them just for the immature seed pods.  You eat them like snow peas or something and they have a very mild radish flavor that is great.

My VERY Local Dinner

From farm to table in one day and 15 feet.  Environmentalists, eat your hearts out!

Garden Update: Potatoes

The first of the potatoes are here.  These are some that had a lot a leaf damage so I thought I would harvest them a little early and get them out of the garden and hopefully prevent pests from spreading to other plants.

Nice little haul.  These are destined for dinner tonight along with some of the beats and  beat greens harvested yesterday.

Garden Update: Beets and Visitors

The beets are big and ready to eat.  I love the beets tops cooked like spinach.  I picked a few small carrots too to make room for the tomato plants to grow.  The carrot tops go to the chickens; they love them.

This is the beet patch before I picked a few and after a hard rain that laid everything over.

The rain left little droplets of water on each tip of the tomato leaves.  It looked pretty cool.  (Click on the picture for a full size version with a lot more detail.)

We also had some visitors to the garden.  There was a parent and four, large, kids.  They have made several repeat visits.  As long as they stick to the grass and leave the garden alone, I'm happy to leave them alone.

Garden Update: First Bite!

Bigger and bigger.  Everything is doing well.  Just in the last day the first flower buds appeared on some of the potato plants.  Good weather for the next month and my goal of harvesting the first of the potatoes in the first week of June looks possible.  That will give the squash and cucumbers I planted between some of the potatoes the room they need to spread and do well.  I will then harvest the rest of the potatoes through the summer as I need them.

The tomatoes, both in the garden and in pots, are doing really well.  The first close-up is of the German Striped Green.  The second close-up is of the Sweet 100s my neighbor gave me.  The small green fruit look like little emeralds.

The beets really took off over the last week.  The roots are about the size of a quarter right now.  It wont be long and I'll be eating these ones.  I have two other plots of secession planting to last the summer.

Carrot patch is doing really well.

The Eight Ball squash in the bucket isn't doing very well, but the blossom is still pretty.

And now, what I've been waiting months for. . . the first bite from this year's garden is, as usual, the Amish Snap Peas.  I picked a few last night and ate them.  They are so good and sweet and it's just nice to have the official start of the summer with the first bite from the garden.