Garden Update: September 2024

While it seems this slow start to garden season this year delayed everything, it’s yet to be seen if it has an actual impact on harvest quantities. Things are coming in fast and heavy right now, but with the weather starting to cool and as we inch toward fall, the ripening might slow down and we might not see much more coming. The next few weeks will be crucial for stocking up this year’s haul—which provides next year’s food.

August harvests

While we’ve had a few things here and there that were ready early, like a few potatoes that needed to be harvested extra early and a couple bell peppers, here are the significant harvests this past month:

• Corn, 28 cobs. This is down considerably from the 130 we had last year. However, we planted a significantly fewer corn than last year, and of what we planted, some stalks developed a fungal growth and several healthy cobs were stolen by the squirrel.
• Cabbage, 2 heads. This is a new-to-us crop. I’m fermenting one right now to make sauerkraut and I gave the other one to my mom.
• Garlic, 188 bulbs. This is a record haul for us. I’ve already dehydrated some to make garlic powder and with the rest I’m letting them cure so they store nicely in the pantry. I’ll likely pickle some.
• Tomatoes, currently around 100 pounds, with lots more to go. I’m not sure if we’ll reach last year’s haul of 206 pounds. There are a lot of green tomatoes so we’ll still get a lot more, just not sure if it will be as much as last year.
• Cucumber, currently around 60 pounds. There’s more coming, but I’m not sure how much. It’s not looking too promising for reaching last year’s haul of 173 pounds.

Likely coming this month are the massive hauls of our:

• Black beans
• Peppers (bell peppers and hot peppers)
• Grapes
• Onions
• Beets
• Carrots
• Parsnips

And in early October before it gets too cold and wet we’ll harvest our squash, potatoes, and popcorn.

The salsa experiment

For the last several years I’ve been canning a very tasty salsa using a premade salsa mix intended for canning. You chop the tomatoes and throw them in a pot with the salsa mix and vinegar, cook it a bit, and then can it. It was super easy and delicious. But that salsa mix has been discontinued!

This year I need to find a new salsa recipe, but I’ve always found salsa recipes intimidating. The ones I’ve seen seem to require several different types of hot peppers and a whole list of spices. But I don’t want to go shopping for ingredients; I just want to pull them from my garden. I did some digging and found three easy recipes to try. I’ve canned them all up and will soon have a taste test with some family or friends to determine which is my new salsa recipe going forward.

Here’s what I’ve put together this year (so far):

• Tomato and corn salsa. I made this with cherry tomatoes, so it’ll hopefully be a bit sweet, and it has homegrown corn and a couple homegrown jalapeño peppers. I’m hoping it has a nice flavour to it and it isn’t too spicy.
• Tomato and jalapeño salsa. This is similar to the above recipe except it has no corn and about ten times the number of jalapeño peppers! This will likely be very spicy.
• My Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving (which, for US folks, I believe is the exact same as the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving) has a roasted tomato salsa ranchera recipe and in the notes it mentions a Sicilian alternative where instead of using jalapeños you mix in chopped pickled banana peppers. I went with the Sicilian alternative and am really looking forward to trying this one! While the Sicilian variation is technically a relish (relishes and salsas are pretty much the same, but relishes are more acidic), I would use it as a salsa.

Lots of tea…

Our chamomile plants have stopped flowering for the year and we ended up with about one litre / one quart of flowers. These make excellent chamomile tea! Next year we will plant a lot more of these flowers so we get a year’s supply, since we expect this litre of dried flowers to last only for two or three months.

We’re also working on dehydrating our mint and saving that for tea. We’re currently at 3.5 litres with a LOT more to go!

Building up the pantry

Earlier this year I posted a photo of my food storage room and its bare shelves. These are starting to fill up again. Around that time, our freezers were mostly empty too, and now everything is packed to the brim.

I’m really looking forward to when the end of October rolls around and all of the processing is done, and we’ve got packed shelves and stuffed freezers and we get to just spend eight months enjoying the fruits of our labour.

We want to be more strategic with our meal planning this year. Usually, the squash and potatoes start going bad around February or March and we rush to use as many as we can as soon as possible. This fall, we’re going to do meals like shepherd’s pie and dinners with roasted root vegetables, so we use much more of these up before we get to that new year rush to use them before they go bad.

August photo dump