Here They Come
The heirloom tomatoes are coming in hot & heavy. The ‘Ten Fingers of Naples’ have been the MVP of the season. I’m super impressed with the vines, the fruit, and the harvest.
The heirloom beefsteaks are coming in strong, I have multiple varieties ripening daily. I’m happily gifting them to friends and gobbling them up at every meal. My favorite way to eat them is sliced with a little sprinkle of sea salt.
This year I also grew a wide variety of small cherry type tomatoes. The most beautiful ones are the Bumblebee varieties, there are three of them: ‘Sunrise’, ‘Purple’, and ‘Pink’. They’re lovely little beauties with great flavor and good production.
Now the race begins to preserve the bounty. I don’t do much canning at all, but I always make a batch or two of tomato soup for the pantry and some jars of whole tomatoes. My ‘Principe Borghese’ tomatoes get dried in the oven like sun dried tomatoes. I love using them throughout the winter, their intense tomatoey flavor is perfection! Overall, the tomato season has been wonderful this year. I’m hoping to get out to get a few more photos of the different varieties I’m growing to give you a full report, right now getting all these lovelies into jars take priority.
What’s your favorite kind of tomato to grow?
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Give Me a B!
I love beets, especially pickled. Even as a wee little lassie I had an affinity for the pickled purple roots. My mom made them often and I gobbled them up. I don’t do a lot of canning, but I always make two half gallon jars of pickled beets for the fridge. When we eat up the beets, I love throwing boiled eggs in the juice so I can have lovely pink eggs for my salads.
For this reason, I’ve always grown beets in the garden. Not a ton, just a 15 foot row or so. Enough to eat throughout the summer and enough to pickle. I never thin my beets because I like have a wide range of sizes. I love the huge ones for slicing into big rounds and I love the tiny ones for roasting whole.
This year I grew ‘Early Wonder’ and ‘Detroit’. They were both fantastic, very long holding in the garden. In fact these beets were seeded very early and have been growing all summer.
We like eating the beet greens as well, but when it comes time to pickle a load of beets, the chickens end up with the tasty leaves. I’m happy to hand them over as they’re a welcome treat for them. It seems like beets are one of those vegetables that people either love or hate, I’m so happy to be on the love side!
Do you like beets? What’s your favorite way to eat them?
After being asked in the comment, I figured I’d add it here too. I love The Joy of Pickling: 250 Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market (Revised Edition) and most of my pickling recipes come from it.
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Sweet Delight
Last night we harvested the first sweet corn from the garden. And I mean the first sweet corn I’ve every grown (by myself anyways, we always grew it when I was a kid).
It’s really surprising that it’s ready this early, it wasn’t supposed to be ripe until the end of August, next week at the earliest.
I checked last week and it was still not ready, then we checked last night a few ears were.
What a great treat indeed. ‘Fisher’s Earliest’ was the variety, I got the seed from High Mowing Seeds. This is an old fashioned variety, not a super sweet hybrid. It’s lightly sweet with a good corn flavor. in fact, it reminds me a lot of the corn I grew as a kid. Personally, I’m not a fan of the sugar enhanced newer varieties, give me a variety like this please!
We’re certainly looking forward to having sweet corn for dinner every night this week. I didn’t plant a lot, only about 30 plants. That should do us for eating and I should get a few pints to freeze as well.
Do you grow sweet corn?
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Gold Medal Tomato
I harvested my first big heirloom beefsteak tomato, which is quite nice for our area. The other beefsteaks are a few weeks away still. It’s no wonder this tomato is called ‘Gold Medal’, and aptly so.
They’re large tomatoes, with good flavor and quite beautiful color.
It’s a delicious tomato, in fact I took one to a cookout on Saturday and everyone loved it. I harvested another one yesterday and we enjoyed it for breakfast and dinner.
How are you tomatoes doing? What’s your favorite beefsteak?
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A Summer Favorite
It is the season for zucchini noodles once again and that makes me very, very happy! I got this julienne peeler last year and starting making them quickly and easily.
Now we eat them all summer long and love them. You’ll find us topping them with meatballs and marinara, stuffing them into spring rolls, and tossing them with vinaigrette.
I wrote a blog post on how I make these lovelies last year, you can find it here. I always salt them generously to draw out some of the water, that way they have the a texture closer to noodles and aren’t as soggy. I also don’t slice up the inside of the squash, it usually gets way too mushy and the chickens make use of it.
Thankfully, my zucchini plants are producing like crazy and I have a second planting sizing up to last long into the fall.
Do you do anything creative to use up the zucchini from your garden?
