Harvest Preservation Is Starting

For the last week or two, our harvests from the garden have looked very much like the one above, a few yellow squash and a couple handful of French green beans. Largely, we have been keeping up with them just eating them with our evening meals but we did break down and give away some squash to a couple of acquaintances that evidently weren't hooked up since squash and zucchini are practically everywhere this time of years.

With a cool streak for July, nearly breaking records for the lowest high temperature of the day in the upper 70's, we decided to take advantage of it by digging up what remained of our root crops. Above, you see what was left drying on our deck before we started the preservation process.

We had eaten most of our white potatoes over the last couple months so there wasn't a lot of them left. But we hadn't picked any of the red potatoes so there were quite a few of them. Being the first year for this garden, the soil quality is horrible but I was pleased with the potato yields. I planted enough cut up seed potatoes to fill one of those old tin coffee cans and in the end, we probably harvest 4 five-gallon buckets full of potatoes. I'm not sure if one of those Folgers tins held a full gallon but assuming they did, we got a 20-fold return in yield. The potatoes are now stacked in milk crates in our basement with a fan on them hopefully curing so we can have potatoes from now, well into winter.

Thus far, we had eaten through our mixed carrot row and the remaining two rows were the more traditional orange carrots. With the poor soil and the fact that we never thinned them, they did okay. We froze enough to make several cakes in the future and are planning on making two cakes today, one for us and one for a party on Monday. 

Closer to me when I took the above photo are our parsnips which did quite well, or at least I think so since this is our first year raising them. They were a real bugger to dig up as they rooted right down into our heavy clay soil below our thin topsoil layer. We are going to freeze them for making a parsnip puree sometime in our future.

Finally are the remains of our red onions. We planted quite a few yellow and red onions this year but something killed every single yellow onion and the red onions did only okay. I've never had such a poor onion crop in all these years. We've been harvesting the red onions for a couple months now as needed so what you see above is all that remains. Storage shouldn't be a problem since we'll get through those in a couple weeks.

Finally with our root crops dug, we looked at the other non-root crops and found several more yellow squash, some Japanese peppers and the first three ripe tomatoes of the season! I am pumped for the tomatoes because it looks like a heavy crop of them set on our vines which are now taller than I am. I only planted 13 tomato plants out, down from the 70+ we ended up doing last year, so hopefully this won't be as huge a year of preserving them as last. We are good on most of our canned tomato products but we went through our tomato soup supply quite fast so I will focus on preserving them in soup form when they start coming in en masse. We give away quite a few home canned goods as gifts throughout the year and the heat and serve canned tomato soup is always one of the favorites. 

A glimpse of our out of control tomatoes.

In this picture are our brussels sprout plants and a number of rows of dry shell beans which I can probably pick at any time but am allowing them to dry in their pods for as long as the plant structure keeps holding them up in the air. Between them and the tomato plants are a row of Japanese peppers and our two yellow squash plants.

On the other side of the garden are our eggplants which are starting to fruit, okra and a late planting of sweet corn. I think my wife also planted some more squash plants in the background where we had just dug up the carrots.

Finally, here is a shot of the best of our asparagus shoots that I planted way to late this spring. I think about three fourths of the planted crowns put up shoots though only around half have any above ground right now and most are less than six inches tall. This one is a couple feet tall and the one behind it maybe 18 inches. I think the true test will be how well they over winter and what stalks will be produced next spring. Thus far, I'm pretty sure that some of the missing 1/4 of the stalks were eaten by predation by rabbit or deer early on in the spring but here in the heart of summer, they seem to be leaving them alone. I'm guessing that is because there is plenty of better tasting vegetation to be had.