Last tomato harvest

In June, and after a number of frosts. Clearly shade cloth provides good frost protection. They won't ripen, but will be useful for some more chutney - waste not, want not!

Quick catch up

Once again apologies for the long time between posts, but between work, work and uni there hasn't been much time for fun stuff like blogging. Also, as I didn't really grow much this season there hasn't been an endless supply of produce and recipes to blog about.

My staples of tomatoes and garlic have been very successful. I harvested over 200 garlic bulbs, and I've been dehydrating some and making my own garlic powder before it all starts to sprout. It's really easy, and smells amazing. Hopefully that will carry us through the "garlic gap"  between harvests.

We're still picking tomatoes, although with the first hard frost predicted this weekend there probably aren't many more to go. So far I've eaten, bottled, pureed and chutneyed my way through 114 kilos. From about 26 plants. I lost probably another 5-6 kilos at least to blossom end rot. Mostly Romas, which I've never done well with. Next year I think I will concentrate on amish paste / oxheart for bottling, as they just keep on keeping on, seem more resistant to problems like end rot and taste lovely. I had a few plants of beefsteak tomatoes that did well and they were just divine eating, so I will grow them again too.

I have about 50 bottles of passata / diced tomatoes. Not as many as I would like, but I can make them stretch I hope! So far I've made 30 jars of green tomato chutney - and that only used up 7kg of green tomatoes, so there's still more chutney to make.

It's been a good year for chillies as well - those plants that survived the attack of the bower birds. I've harvested about 2kg, and dried they will keep me in chilli powder for at least a year.

I have also just picked a few of the random pumpkins that grew out of the mulched up vegetable scraps we got from the green grocer. No idea what they are but they look tasty. I grew a few butternuts this year, but they fell prey to possums before I could net them.

The raspberries are still going, but again I don't think there will be many more to pick. We've harvested just over 8kg this season. I've made jam, muffins, raspberry vinegar and also frozen a lot for muffins. We've also had raspberries with breakfast almost every day for the last 3 months. The strategy of planting early, mid and late varieties has worked well again this year, with raspberries available for eating from early December until now, mid May. The flavour of the early ones is the best to me, with a delicate perfume that the late varieties can't match, but they are all lovely compared to the shop bought options.

Once semester finishes in a few weeks I'll be getting back into the garden for a major tidy-up and mulching for winter.

The best kind of mail

is a present form a friend! Thank you lovely Estelle for all these French delights. I particularly love the chicken cereal bowls. You can't see them here but there is also a lovely set of tea spoons that spell out tea in French. I don't know about you, but to me everything looks better in French  :*)

Oh and while we are at it, here's a few pics of Jerry trying out the "latest"Austrian technology...his scythe. It's a bit tricky on a hill, but we'll get the hang of it. It is certainly a lot lighter than the strimmer / whipper snipper.

And the obligatory "food porn" pics: bread, home grown tomatoes, basil and garlic for roasting, a recent harvest basket (potato, aubergine, courgette), and a batch of chutney (courgette and aubergine) ready to cook

Saucy Minx

OK, ok so technically it's pasty minx and I'm not that minxy but it you have to admit, it was a great title!

I sourced some cheap saucing tomatoes (seconds, $1.50kg) so decided to make tomato paste out of them. I slow roasted them (they were commercial and not home grown so this was to help bring out the flavour) with some local olive oil for a few hours, then put them through a food mill, then put them in the crock pot overnight  (or a saucepan during the day) to slowly cook off the moisture. Then I gave them the fowlers/water bath treatment for storage.

 

 

 

From 20kg of tomatoes I got about 15  small (about 250g) jars - that will keep us in pizza for a year if nothing else :)

Tomato Tally

The last of the tomatoes have been harvested, so I can give you the final tally

• 45 kg ripe tomatoes
• 5 kg green tomatoes

So, 50kg of tomatoes. Not bad really. Just taking the ripe ones organic tomatoes are about $5 per kg - that's about $225 worth of tomatoes for an outlay of about $15 in seed and maybe the same again in potting/ seed raising mix.

Most of the ripe tomatoes have been bottled, and a few have been dried, and of course we ate quite a few fresh. That's the tomatoes taken care of for the rest of the year.

The green ones I have made into chutney, and a spicy green tomato sauce.

The eggplants and the peppers are still hanging in there, but I will have to pick them soon as I don't think there is much more growing to be done.

Here a tom, there a tom

Everywhere a tomato...or that's how it seems at the moment. So far we've picked over 26kg (I haven't remembered to weight every picking), but I'm hoping for many more, as there is still plenty of fruit on the vines.

I've just put 5 bottles in the fowlers unit to preserve - I even took the time to skin the amish paste's before quartering them! I don't bother to take the skin off the small ones - these are perfect for a quick pasta sauce.

You can see the remnants in the baskets, along with the courgettes-on-steroids!!!! These will be worm food as I was so busy last week I didn't have time to do anything with them, and they've started to go a bit icky.

The last pic, my keen eyed readers will notice, is NOT of tomatoes. They are two of the tastiest, juciest peaches I have ever eaten. These and their 10 siblings were the total harvest from our peach tree - but we were delighted as it's the first year it has given us any fruit.

Yesterday's harvest basket

The tomatoes are finally ripening - yesterday we picked 4kg of a mix of amish paste, zebras, purple russians, beefsteak, red fig and tommy toe. Oh, and another 2kg of courgettes....

Of course, when you're taking photos of your harvest you need to keep an eye on your chickens...

or they will just help themselves!!!!!

Busy Saturday

With temps predicted to be in the 40s again today we were up early to clean the gutters before the sun rose above the trees and started heating up the roof. At 6:30am when we went out to get started it was already 26 degrees. The breeze was cool-ish, but alas didn't stay that way for long.

By 9am we'd finished what we wanted to do outside and retreated inside. I spent much of the remainder of the day in and out of the kitchen. Jerry bought me 20kg of sauce tomatoes (seconds) at the fruit and veg market on Friday, and they needed to be processed. I also had 2kg each of peaches, nectarines and plums to do something with. Yesterday I salted about a kg of courgettes (zucchini) to make pickled courgette so I had to make the spiced vinegar for that too.

Yes, it is mental to be in the kitchen on a day like today, but alas, it had to be done. Luckily there is an openable skylight in the kitchen so I could let some of the hot air out earlier in the day.

By the end of the day I had:

• canned 8 1 litre jars of chopped tomatoes,
  
• canned 8 jars (about 5L) of tomato stock (just the cooking water for the tomatoes with bits of pulp - great for using in casseroles etc...waste not, want not!)
• made 5 jars of plum jam
• roasted and pureed about 4 kg of tomatoes - will probably turn that into tomato paste tomorrow
• finished off the pickled courgettes - 3 jars
  
• a loaf of sourdough rye bread rising to go in the oven later
  

And I'll be doing it all again tomorrow, as there's another 10kg of tomatoes, and the peaches and nectarines to do something with! But right now I think I have earned my glass of wine and a nice sit down with a good book!

Bottling / Canning update

Today was going to be a scorcher, so I got in early and did a couple of batches of tomatoes, and tomato stock in the canner. They can go on the rapidly finning shelves in the pantry. Up to 56 jars of tomatoes now!


Then there are the jams, chutneys and pickles spread over the pantry and the linen cupboard. There's also a shelf of home dried fruits, tomatoes, courgettes and chillis.


Thanks to a windfall of bottles (over 50!!) from one of Jerry's colleagues, my bottle storage area is full again, so I still have plenty of opportunity to fill up the pantry shelves.

Latest harvest and kitchen happenings

I've just taken a heap of photos in and around the garden - head over to our flikr site to see them. Meanwhile.......

Tomatoes in the solar drier, some of the 9kg of potatoes I harvested today, and pears in the electric dehydrator


More sourdough - my first attempt at a fruit/spice sourdough loaf (not bad, but needs more fruit) and a wholemeal/white sourdough mix. YUM!

Bottling tomatoes

With the tomato harvest in full swing my fowlers unit has been getting a good workout. Yesterday I did 5 bottles using recycled pasta sauce jars (collected from Jerry's work colleagues) and new pop-top lids (purchased from the excellent Green Living Australia ).

I halved this variety of tomato (can't remember the name they self-seeded from last year!) and put in the jars with a couple of basil leaves, a bit of citric acid and then filled almost to the top with water. THen it's into the fowlers for about an hour. In the last pic you can sort of see that the pop-tops are in various stages of pop-ing in as the vacuum seal is forming in the jar.



I also put a couple of batches of smaller tomatoes (red fig, cherry, tommy toe) in the dehydrator overnight to make a few jars of semi-dried tomatoes in oil. Fingers crossed this year they work last year they all fermented and fizzed all over the shelves...YUCK! (and what a waste!!!)