My First Ripe Tomato of 2009

I harvested my first ripe tomato on Saturday morning (actually I harvested 2, I took one to my mom). It’s one of my Tumbling Tom Tomatoes that’s planted in a hanging basket. I thought my Sub-Arctic tomato would be my first ripe one, but they’re all still green. The plants are loaded with tomatoes though, they should be ripening any day now.

I haven’t eaten it yet. I think I’m going to cut it in half, salt it and share it with Mr Chiots. I’m looking forward to many more tomatoes this summer!

Any ripe tomatoes from your gardens yet?

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Garden Harvest Spreadsheet

I finally finished my garden harvest spreadsheet template, so I’m ready for the Garden Harvest Challenge. Many of you expressed interest in the file, so I am adding it to my blog for you to download. I saved them as templates to make it easy

I have a Numbers file for Mac users and an Excel file for you poor Windows users. The Numbers file is much prettier of course, but they both work wonderfully. The Excel file has 3 tabs, one for the input table, one for the total harvest table, and one for the bar graph (I’m not as familiar with Excel as I used to be so it probably could be better, feel free to make any changes to improve it). The Numbers file has all of the tables & graphs on the same sheet. When you enter your total harvest in the first table it will update the amount in the second table and include the totals on the bar graph. You do have to manually change the crop titles on both tables, but that’s easy. If anyone has any great additions to the file let me know (particularly the Excel file).

So fellow Freedom Gardeners, let’s see how much of a dent we can put in the million pound goal!

Garden Harvest Spreadsheet – Excel
Garden Harvest Spreadsheet – Numbers

I have to admit this is a far cry from the file I used last year. I just kept track of my tomato harvest by type last year, which I may do again this year in a separate garden harvest file. I’ll keep you up to date every month with my harvest tally, I can’t wait to see how well all of you do this year with your freedom gardens.

How are you keeping track of your harvests?

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My First Harvest of 2009

On Tuesday afternoon I was able to weigh in my first harvest of 2009 for the Freedom Harvest Challenge over at Freedom Gardens. This year they’re trying to get all the Freedom Gardeners to tally their harvests and shoot for a million pounds of produce. I joined several weeks ago, but I was sad that I wouldn’t be able to contribute anything until later this spring when I have my garden is up and growing again.

If you remember back in September when I planted my spinach, you’ll recall I was hoping for an early spring harvest after mulching my spinach throughout the winter. I put a floating row cover over the spinach in late fall and I’ve been periodically checking it throughout the winter. I decided I would mulch it when it froze.

This was me checking the spinach bed on 12.29.08.
However, the spinach never froze. I checked it last week on the nice warm day we had and the spinach was looking good, so I decided I could harvest some for a salad.

I went out on Tuesday afternoon and pulled up the frosty row cover and harvested from spinach for a salad that evening for supper. So how much was my first harvest of 2009? 4.5 ounces. It’s not going to help much towards the million pound goal, but it’s a start.

We enjoyed 6 salads from our harvest and there’s plenty more out there (along with the mache). There’s nothing quite like enjoying a salad on a frosty February day from your own garden. I even got to enter in into my handy file to keep track of my harvests (which will be done as a template soon and available for download).

Is anyone else harvesting already? How much have you gotten so far in 2009?

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