Friday Favorite: Frost
Frost is a beautiful thing, perhaps not so much if you’re trying to eek a few more tomatoes and peppers out of the garden in fall, or if it kills all your spring seedlings. In the fall I like to wake up to a shimmering wonderland. Not only is it beautiful, but it signals the waning of the garden season and means that rest is ahead. Typically, the end of Sept is our first frost date. We managed to get a few extra weeks of decent growing this year.
Yesterday we woke up to a little bit of patchy frost outside. This was our first frost, which is pretty amazing for our area. It won’t be long until things the mercury drops, we’re supposed to have temperatures in the mid 20’s this weekend. Luckily, everything left in the garden can take the cold and anything that can’t is ready to go anyways. I’m certainly ready to curl up by the wood burner with my book or my crochet hook.
What are your frost dates in your garden?
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Hello Broccoli
My fall broccoli is turning out to be the best broccoli I’ve ever grown. I’m AMAZED at the beautiful heads, the size of them and the lushness of the plants. There hasn’t been a cabbage worm in sight either, though the turkeys have been sneaking out and nipping the broccoli leaves.
One of the best things about growing broccoli in the fall is that it doesn’t bolt. This head of broccoli has been standing in the garden for two weeks now. I’d rather leave them on the plant to keep nutrients in tact. It looks as if I’ll be eating a lot of broccoli this fall, what a wonderful way to extend the season when other vegetables are waning!
Have you ever grown broccoli as a fall crop?
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Truly a Gold Medal Winner
This is my first summer growing ‘Gold Medal’ tomatoes and it won’t be my last. In fact, I’ll never not have them growing in the garden. After trying this lovely tomato out, I know exactly how it received its name. For starters, this huge beefsteak tomato produced a ripe tomato around the same time that my cherry tomatoes were first ripening in the garden. If you’re a fan of heirloom beefsteaks, you know the patience required to wait for what seems like forever for one to finally ripen. Not this beauty, even with it’s gigantic size, it still ripened quicker than anything but the cherry tomatoes.
Not only does this delicious tomato ripen super early, it produces loads of tomatoes and it just keeps on producing. This photo was taken yesterday in my garden, yesterday. It’s mid October in Maine. My ‘Brandywine’ and ‘Cherokee Purple’ tomatoes quit producing tomatoes long ago, not this baby, it’s still flowering and setting fruit. If you live in a northern climate, especially one with cold spring and fall temperatures I’d highly recommend adding ‘Gold Medal’ to your list of must grow tomatoes. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed, in fact I’m guessing you’ll be singing its praises and will grow it every year.
What’s your favorite no fail tomato?
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Making Cidah
Cider (or cidah here in Maine) is one of Mr Chiot’s favorite fall treats. In Ohio, we had a local press we purchased gallons and gallons of cider from each year. We have yet to find cider as good as there’s here in Maine, so we usually get 8-10 gallons for our freezer when we’re back in Ohio for Thanksgiving. Lucky for our, our neighbor was given a cider press and we had an abundance of apples.
We have lots of different varieties of apples here, probably around 15, of which 8 are ready to be used right now. We have no idea what varieties they are, some over 120 years old. We’re hoping to figure out what they are here one of these days. We picked two of each variety and I made juice, which we tasted to see what flavor profiles they each had. It was amazing to taste the difference between them all, some where sweet, some were intense, others were watery, and still other were astringent.
After tasting the various juices, we started picking apples into big totes. Each tote holds around 2 bushels of apples, we picked three totes and a bushel. We picked for an hour or two and then loaded them up in the car to head down to our neighbor’s.
He was ready to roll, the cider press was fixed up nicely and on the front porch. After a little tweaking we were in business putting the apples through the crusher and making our first batch.
After a few hours we had all of our containers filled and tons of apple mash. Some went to his chickens, some went to our chickens, some went to a local farmer for their pigs.
Overall it was a really fun day, ending up with a lot of cider wasn’t so bad. The cider ended up being delicious, next year we might tweak our recipe a bit, but it’s still better than any of the cidah I’ve purchased from any of the local orchards. We were pleasantly surprised by how quick and easy the process was.
Have you ever been a part of a cider pressing day? Do you like apple cider?
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Quote of the Day: Autumn
“At this season, change was in the air itself, the scents of ripeness and death borne on the breeze, and the breath of winter in its chill. Still, they rhythms of the turning each brought change that was expected, ordained; body and mind met it with knowledge and–on the whole–with peace.”
Diana Gabaldon in The Fiery Cross (Outlander)
I hope you are enjoying the season, whether you live in a place with fall or not. I really enjoy the beauty that comes in this season before winter. The days are colder, the leaves are falling, the garden plants have pretty much stopped growing. It’s time for rest, for gardens and gardeners alike.
