Chioggia Beets, Beans, and Tomato Harvest

Over the past week we've been getting more tomatoes than we can eat out of our garden, but we've also been seeing some great results from our beets and beans. I picked six relatively large Chioggia beets, with many more coming along nicely, as well as a mix of yellow beans and Blue Lake pole beans, and a Green Zebra tomato one day.

Since we aren't quite at the stage where we're getting enough beans from the garden for a meal for four people, our mom has been blanching and freezing the beans as we get them. The Blue Lake pole beans are really starting to speed up though. We have one plant that wasn't really producing, but it looks like now it's starting to.

With the Chioggia beets, I decided to try pickling them. I used a recipe from The Art of Preserving, with a few minor changes. The recipe was really basic, because once you've cooked the beets until tender, you make a simple pickling liquid from vinegar, sugar, reserved beet cooking liquid, and spices. The recipe called for apple cider vinegar, but I used plain white vinegar that had the same level of acidity, because that's all I had. The recipe also called for cloves and cardamom pods; I used the cloves, but I didn't use the cardamom because I didn't have any on hand. Instead, I added a sprig of rosemary to each jar. Onion also went into the jars with the beets and pickling liquid. I ended up with four 500 ml jars. The jars have to sit for at least a week before opening, so I have to wait awhile before I can try them.

Megan

First Week of August Harvests

This week we've been finally seeing some of our hard work paying off. In truth, most of the harvests I'm showing today are things that our mom planted, but there are a few things we grew as well that we've finally been able to harvest.

It started off with a small bowl of yellow and green beans that our mom planted, as well as a small bowl of our mom's Sungold cherry tomatoes and our Yellow Pear tomatoes.

A couple days later we picked the first Early Girl tomatoes, as well as a few more Sungold and Yellow Pear tomatoes. The Early Girls were planted by our mom as well.

Our mom's cucumbers have been very successful too, although we didn't notice one so it grew huge.

We got a few Roma tomatoes and Early Girl tomatoes out of the garden today, as well as more Yellow Pears. I also picked our first few Blue Lake pole beans.

Lastly, I got another small bowl of Sungold tomatoes out of the garden today.

I noticed our Cherokee Purple, Red Zapotec, and Purple Calabash tomatoes are beginning to show blushes of colour, so I'm sure we'll have a few of these off our plants very soon. 

Megan

Tomatoes in July

Red Zapotec Tomato

Our tomatoes are doing quite well. All plants have plenty of blossoms and have set more tomatoes than we'll probably really need this year.

In particular, we are excited about the Red Zapotec variety, with it's pretty pleats. Unfortunately we weren't lucky enough to get to try this one last year, because all of our plants died during the hardening off process, but luckily we have four Red Zapotec plants this year. While these don't appear to be producing as well as our other heirloom varieties, we have at least five on most of the plants, and knowing this will probably be a larger tomato, that's not too shabby.

Purple Calabash Tomato

The Purple Calabash plants, like the Red Zapotec's, are ones that didn't survive last year, but they are certainly doing well now! On just one plant I've counted over thirty tomatoes so far. These plants grow relatively short compared with the Red Zapotec's and Yellow Pear's, but they're really bushy, branching out into the pathways in the garden, weighed down by fruit. I had to tie many of the branches up, mostly to get the tomatoes off the ground, but also to create more room to walk between the rows.These certainly win on production, but I wonder, will they win on taste? We'll have to wait and see.

Yellow Pear Tomatoes

One of our favourite tomatoes last year were the Yellow Pear tomatoes, and anyone who tried them seemed to agree! I've noticed that it's become a very common heirloom variety. In fact, it's so common that we've seen it in garden centres, and even in Walmart. It's easy to understand why, because between growing them this year and last year, they seem to be consistently excellent producers that keep producing, and they have such a tasty tomato. Between the four plants we have this year, we're probably going to have too many!

Green Zebra Tomato

This year we have three Green Zebra plants in the garden, and they seem to be doing just as well as last year. Between all three plants, I've counted over thirty tomatoes so far, but there's still plenty of blossoms, so I'm sure that will change.

Purple Cherokee

And last but not least, here's our Purple Cherokee tomatoes. I must admit that these weren't a favourite last year, but since we have the seeds, we wanted to give them another chance. I must say that these are doing much better than last year too! We only have two Purple Cherokee plants this year, but both are producing  a lot more heavily than either of ours did last year. We are really excited to see what these are like again, and to see if we've changed our minds about this pretty tomato.

Megan

Summer Garden Salads

Three days ago, Megan and I got the first Chioggia Beets of the season out of our garden. These were five relatively large beets with very leafy tops attached to them. I decided that I would make a salad out of them with a nice light vinegar dressing. The result was sweet, acidic, and tasty, and the salad was a nice pairing to our barbecue meal of hamburgers and baked potatoes. We saved the beet tops for a stir fry later on.

Beet Salad With Mint

Ingredients

5 medium to large beets
3 tbsp water
3 tbsp white vinegar
1 tsp white granulated sugar
6 to 10 mint leaves, julienne
salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Parboil the beets with a tiny bit of vinegar or lemon juice in the water to prevent the colour from running.
2. Peel the beets and slice them very thinly.
3. In a bowl, emulsify the water, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper.
4. Toss the beets in the dressing and garnish with the julienne mint leaves.

I also chose to make a cucumber salad with one of my mom's garden cucumbers. This was inspired by the cucumber salad that my Oma makes which has a vinegar dressing as opposed to a mayonnaise one.

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

1 cucumber, peeled and thinly sliced
1 small white onion, finely diced
3 tbsp water
3 tbsp white vinegar
1 tsp white granulated sugar
salt and pepper to taste 

Directions

1. Emulsify the water, vinegar, sugar, and salt and pepper in a bowl.
2. Toss the cucumber slices and onion in the dressing.

Jennifer

Blossoming Beans

Bean patch with cedar poles

Our Blue Lake Pole Beans and Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans are growing high, blossoming, and setting beans. I have to admit that I sorely underestimated how high pole beans can grow, as my sister and I placed only  2 ft bamboo poles alongside them. Our Dad had some 7 ft cedar poles lying around that he wasn't using which are accommodating the bean plants heights much better than the bamboo ones did.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Blossoms

Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans

 The Cherokee Trail of Tears blossom beautifully with lovely purple flowers and their beans look to be green with purplish hues. The Blue Lake Pole Beans are a little bit behind, so I don't know what their blossoms look like yet. They had buds though, which is an excellent sign!

Blue Lake Pole buds

I can't wait to get a nice harvest of these beans. We will probably eat them all fresh, but if we find our harvest to be very prolific, we might dry some too.

Jennifer

Garden Pictures

It occurred to me today that there's a few garden pictures we haven't posted yet, and there's a few harvests we haven't mentioned, although they are a bit outdated now. The above picture is of some lovely radishes we got out of our garden about two weeks ago.

We've also been very lucky to harvest some tatsoi for the first time from the garden. This was also harvested about two weeks ago. Unfortunately the tatsoi was close to bolting at the time, so we haven't been able to get much more out of the plants. We might replant the tatsoi in the fall, as I think we'll have more success with it then.

This was a little radish harvest from awhile ago as well.

Megan

Final Week of June: Harvests

In the final week of June we managed to be quite successful in terms of harvesting from the garden. Considering we didn't have much of a harvest at all until July 1st of last year, I think we're becoming much more successful at gardening. We've been very lucky to get a couple lettuce and arugula salads, radishes to snack on and throw into salads, and tatsoi in May and June alone, whereas last year we didn't have much to show for our gardening until July, and even then, we didn't have much at all until August.

 It's getting so hot here now that many of our greens and radishes are beginning to bolt, so we had to pick them quickly, but we also managed to harvest something completely new: red currants.

We have two red currant bushes on our property and a black currant bush. I've found I'm not a big fan of the black currants, but the red currants have a tartness that's similar to cranberries. We like to use them in scones, but we have quite a few of them, so we plan on freezing some too.

We also harvested lots and lots of arugula. The above picture was our first harvest of the week. The three pictures below are of three other colanders full of arugula from later in the week. We ended up blanching the later arugula and freezing it because we couldn't possibly eat it all in such a short time. It tastes similar to spinach once it's cooked (at least that's what we thought), so we can potentially use it in lasagna and that kind of thing later on.

Our radishes have also been doing quite well too. The first row of radishes that we planted have bolted, but this last week our next row started maturing. I expect to see many more in the coming week. Jennifer pulled the following radishes from the garden, but we have had a few more harvests since.

Megan