I just LOVE August!

It's hot, it's humid, and we're in the best season of eating in Minnesota! I seriously LOVE August in Minnesota. It's summer's last hurrah. It's fairtime. It's corn season. The tomatoes are ripe. Ahhhhh!

I think besides eating myself silly with sweet corn, my next favorite summer food is gazpacho. It's a cold tomatoey vegetable soup chock full of cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, onions, and cilantro. Here is how I make it (I know using V-8 is cheating, but oh so yummy!):

April's Gazpacho

I cut up a bunch of cucumbers:

 Then I cup up a bunch of tomatoes. The varieties I show here are (from top big one, then clockwise) Brandywine, a couple Rutgers, Oregon Spring, Amish Paste, and Green Zebra (center). I like to use a mix of paste and juicy slicing tomatoes in the gazpacho. This batch I only used the Brandywine, Rutgers, and Amish Paste. We had the Green Zebra cut up for supper.

Next on the chopping board: onions!

And then a nice big green pepper!

After mixing together all these wonderful fresh vegetables that came straight from the garden, I add a few cloves of garlic-chopped, ground black pepper, and salt. (Oh, the more garlic, the better!!!) Pour a bit of regular V-8 over all of it and refrigerate for a couple hours to allow the flavors to blend. I've skipped the V-8, especially when I have lots of juicier tomatoes, and then you just have to make sure not to skimp on the salt. Other good additions are lime juice and cilantro. 

 Certain members of my family enjoy this for breakfast... be warned that if you do this, you will have definite garlic breath! Oh, but so worth it!




So, as I was saying... I just love August. And here is why: this week my CSA customers can expect a couple dozen ears of Bodacious sweet corn, tomatoes--both cherry and slicers, cucumbers, onions, purple scallions, peppers--sweet and jalapeno, green beans, and possibly zucchini (I got my zucchini in late so it's just starting). Next week should include more sweet corn (possibly 2 varieties), more tomatoes, more cucumbers, more onions, zucchini, and hopefully broccoli. And it just keeps getting better... squash will be on the list soon, along with turnips, salad greens, watermelon (!), kale, cantaloupe... Oh yeah... I LOVE AUGUST!

The tomatoes are coming! The tomatoes are coming!

 

Yesterday was the weekly CSA pickup day. The baskets contained beans, peppers, jalapenos, a purple kohlrabi, cherry tomatoes, and even a REAL standard tomato--the first ones to ripen! The picture above is the FIRST tomato I found in the garden. There was just the one, mostly ripe, and our family sliced it up to eat for supper. Yesterday I found about 6 more smaller ones. The heat will really get these guys coming! There are tons of green tomatoes up there, so I'm looking forward to a good harvest.

The rain has me a little concerned, though. It has been very wet and humid here in SE MN. Various fungi are sprouting up in the middle of lawns, in the mulch, and elsewhere. There has been a bit of blight showing up on the tomatoes and the peppers are even showing some leaf drop. The melons and cucumbers are loving it, though. I might have to do a bit of judicious pruning to keep the tomato plants in check and allow them more airflow to try to remove and head off some of the blight. Thankfully, it is not the late blight that is hitting parts of the country. This is the early blight which shows up as spots on the leaves, very common but usually preventable with mulching. The blight spores are in the soil and splash up on the plants during rain. My entire tomato patch is well-mulched, but with the immense rains, it seems that there must have still been some soil splash.

The peppers are not doing as well as they usually do, either. Many of the fruits are getting sun-scald from the lack of leaf cover. This is very frustrating since it means harvesting the peppers before they have a chance to ripen to that beautiful red, orange, or yellow that I love. A couple of the new varieties I planted this year are faring better than the others--Revolution and Flavorburst. Revolution is putting out some huge blocky peppers! Flavorburst are a paler green, almost yellow. As you can see from the photo, some of the peppers are just odd-shaped. These tend to be the New Ace. New Ace are not my favorites, but they usually can be depended upon for plentiful and early yields. They seem to be the worst hit by the sun-scald this year, plus the odd shapes. The kids get a kick out of them, though. 

The planting continues... yesterday I planted a bunch of fall crops--chinese cabbage, pac choi, rutabaga, turnips, and kale. There will be more planting occurring through the next few weeks, too! We had a lot of rain this morning, so that puts a hold on re-working some areas, but second crops of  beans, peas, and lettuce will be going in right away, along with more kohlrabi (hopefully the rabbits don't find them again!), beets, chard, radishes and carrots. The first plantings of most of those are just being getting ready for harvest now, except for the lettuce, which all bolted a few weeks ago. The lettuce can be a finicky germinator in the warm summer, but we'll see what happens. That might have to wait until later in August.

You might have noticed a new addition to the blog--you can now subscribe to receive updates via email! How handy, eh?! Just type in your email addy in the block to the upper right. The FeedBurner service will send you a confirmation email which you need to respond to in order to be signed up. I'm not collecting email addresses, so no worries there! 

Enjoy the heat! Summer is quickly slipping by!

It's planting time!

This week I started getting some of the seeds planted. I was a little late getting those onions in the dirt, but the peppers and tomatoes are right on schedule. Planted so far are:

• Red Zeppelin Onions (gotta love the name! haha!)
• Candy Onions (in place of my favorite Expression which were "out of stock")
• Red Marble Onions
• Hardy Scallions (the first planting... these will continue every few weeks)
• Peppers: Peacework, Revolution, New Ace, Carmen, Jalapeno, Valencia, and Flavorburst
• Tomatoes: Brandywine, Green Zebra, Oregon Spring, Pruden's Purple, Amish Paste, Juliet, and Sun Gold Cherry

I'm very excited about the new peppers and tomatoes I'm trying this year. Those would be Peacework, Revolution, and Flavorburst peppers; Green Zebra, Oregon Spring, and Pruden's Purple tomatoes. I've discovered that tomatoes and peppers are my favorite vegetables to grow. I enjoy starting them in the house and watching them come up, transplanting them, turning the house into a jungle, moving the plants out to the cold frames and greenhouse, and then planting them in the garden. Then comes the REALLY great part--watching the plants really take off in the garden soil and produce their fruit. I really enjoy the challenge of coaxing early tomatoes and peppers in short Minnesota growing season.

I am hoping to put up a hoophouse for my tomatoes and peppers this year. I would love to extend our harvest season another month or two. I've been doing some research on these things, and currently am trying to decide if we have the know-how to build one from scratch or if we'd be better off with a kit. Cost will most likely be the deciding factor. So, most likely we will be building one without the assistance of a kit. Thankfully I have been able to find a few different websites and books with very good instructions. Of course, that won't happen for a few more months--we have to wait for the snow to melt first!!!

In the meantime I can create my little jungle inside the house. I'll be posting photos as everything starts getting green. Spring is just around the corner!

"What Would Life be Without Homegrown Tomatoes?"

Tomatoes!
The tall jungle-like bushes in the back are Brandywine tomatoes while the shorter greenery directly behind the wagon are grape tomatoes.

Have you ever heard John Denver's song Homegrown Tomatoes?

Ain't nothin' in the world that I like better
Than bacon & lettuce & homegrown tomatoes
Up in the mornin' out in the garden
Get you a ripe one don't get a hard one

Plant `em in the spring, eat `em in the summer
All winter with out `em's a culinary bummer
I forget all about the sweatin' & diggin'
Everytime I go out & pick me a big one.

Isn't that the truth!? I dream of real tomatoes all winter. The plastic tomatoes we have to deal with during the winter are a disgrace to the word "tomato." I avoid them most of the time, but there comes a time about mid-January when I am lured to the display of red orbs in the produce aisle. Even though they seem rather firm, I find myself wanting to capture that summer taste and buy a couple. I am always disappointed. So, let's dream-plant some real tomatoes. Tomatoes that ripen in the sun. Tomatoes that you have to put in flat boxes because if they are piled, they bruise and crack. Tomatoes that smell and taste like tomatoes. Tomatoes that don't CRUNCH!

It seems with tomatoes, you either love 'em or you hate 'em. The majority of my family falls into the first category. The two who fall into the latter category enjoy all the great meals made with tomatoes, even if you won't catch them popping any cherry tomatoes in their mouths. Our oldest daughter, Alycia, is one who could live on tomatoes, I believe. Well, that and cucumbers. If they are ripe, she is out there snitching them. Not that I mind, of course, but it'd be nice if she'd bring a basket and pick a few to bring in the house while she's there!

I grow more tomatoes than I do peppers. We eat as many raw tomatoes as we can possibly stuff ourselves with during harvest and do our best to can or freeze the rest in quite a few different forms. The majority get canned as simply as possible because of time and the sheer quantity. Quite a few get made into salsa and either canned or frozen. I have a couple favorite salsa recipes and am always on the prowl for more. I would like to try ketchup sometime, IF it would taste like store ketchup because (whispering) we do love our Heinz here. I canned spaghetti sauce a few different times, but decided it was faster to just coldpack the tomatoes and fiddle with the sauce making later when there weren't bushels of fresh and quickly over-ripening tomatoes to deal with.

As for fresh tomatoes, most of them are eaten sliced. There are differing opinions on how to eat them--some like with pepper and/or salt, sprinkled with sugar, even spread with Miracle Whip, and quite often in their pure naked wonderfulness. There is nothing quite like picking a tomato and eating it right out there in the garden like it was an apple. Of course, MANY cherry and grape tomatoes are consumed up in the garden. One of our favorite dishes to make when we have plenty of tomatoes is gazpacho--a cold tomato and cucumber vegetable soup. Extremely delicious and refreshing!

Like my peppers, I work hard to extend the harvest season as much as possible. This means starting those little tomato seeds at the same time I do the peppers--around mid/late February, early March. They are not as dependent on warm soil to germinate as peppers; usually room temperature (65-70 degrees F) will result in excellent germination rates. I start them in mini soil blocks, potting on to 2 inch blocks quite soon after they have germinated and before the first true leaves. They are under growlights the entire time so that they do not get leggy. The growlights need to be lowered to just a few inches above the plants so that they don't have to stretch to get light. I keep an eye to make sure they don't touch the lights--even though fluorescent growlights are cool, they do produce enough heat to burn the leaves if they are too close. As the seedlings grow, I transfer them to larger pots--4 inch and then 6 inch--burying the stem below the leaves to encourage good root growth. Stems of many plants, and especially tomatoes, will sprout roots wherever they are in contact with soil. Burying the stem creates a larger rootball and makes for a sturdier plant stalk.

I follow the same timeframe for my tomatoes as I do with peppers as far as when to move to the cold frame, green house, and garden. The main difference is that while the peppers are usually content in 4 in pots until transplant time, I like to have the tomatoes in 6 in pots which results in a larger plant to set out. This means they take up a LOT of space, so they get priority in the greenhouse. In early May, I want to move these space hoarders out of the greenhouse to make way for other seedlings. I accomplish this by creating a mini greenhouse environment right in the garden, an idea I found in a great book called The Small Commercial Garden by Dan Haakanson, a former commercial gardener from North Dakota.

The process of setting out tomatoes is multi-step. I start by tilling the bed and then mark out the rows. All of my tomatoes are set out in double rows. We run a strip of 3 foot wide plastic mulch the length of the row, and hold it in place by pressing the tomato cages into it, right against each other in double rows. We made our own tomato cages from concrete reinforcing wire mesh--some stand 2-3 foot high (for the determinate tomatoes), some stand 5 foot high (for the take-over-the-world indeterminates), and all are about 18 inches in diameter. This spring I will take pictures of these sturdy cages and post them. Having them against each other means they support each other as the tomatoes grow. Since they are so big in diameter, each tomato plant has plenty of space, but is nicely held upright. At this point I'm ready to start planting. One by one, I lift each cage, cut a hole in the plastic, dig a big hole (remember, I'm putting out 6 in pots and if need be, burying extra stem), put in a quart or so of water and 1/4 cup Fertrell Feed and Grow, and planting the plant. Then I set the cage back in place and move on down the row. The last couple years, I've put the watering and fertilizing jobs in the hands of my youngest children, who seem to enjoy getting wet and measuring! LOL! I usually leave a 2 foot walkway between the rows of cages and mulch this using paper covered with old hay. It's important to keep mud from splashing onto the plants since blight and mildew spores get splashed there right along with the mud. Plus the mulch keeps the water down in the ground where your plants need it rather than evaporating. It keeps your shoes (or barefeet!) a lot cleaner, too!

After the row of tomatoes is put out, we need to protect them from late freezes and give them that greenhouse temp they like so well, so we use a heavy plastic (like vapor barrier) and wrap it around the sides of the entire row, leaving the top open. Over the top we stretch and tie (with twine) Agribon garden fabric (row cover). Light and rain can get in, but while it's less than 60 degrees outside, the tomatoes are enjoying a taste of the tropics!

We leave the plastic and fabric in place until the plants start to touch them. If we have some unseasonably warm weather, we might have to remove the fabric to keep from baking the plants. By the time we remove the plastic, many of the tomatoes are flowering and they have quite a headstart on other local tomatoes.

The last 3 years I was able to harvest my first tomatoes by July 4! These were generally my New Girls, the earliest tomatoes I plant, but they were followed closely by the paste tomatoes and finally the big slicers.

Of all the varieties of tomatoes I plant, my favorite has got to be an heirloom favorite--Brandywine. The plants are massive with huge leaves that look more like potato plant leaves. The fruit are just as impressive--huge deep pink tender fruit. Be careful or your thumb will poke right through the ripe ones. I try to harvest them when they might still have a hint of green near the blossom end so they don't mush on the way to the house. And OH, do they taste heavenly. I daresay they have the perfect tomato taste. They are wonderful for BLT sandwiches--one slice is the size of the piece of bread! Absolutely delicious!!!

Of course, the tomato harvest ends quickly in this northern climate. An early freeze has been the demise of many a ripening tomato. I do my best to protect my precious tomatoes when a freeze is predicted. Tarps, sheets, and blankets are spread over the best rows with hope that it won't get THAT cold. Inevitably, the cold gets them. It's a disappointment, but usually also a relief. Finally we can let up on the canning mayhem. There's usually a couple boxes of ripe tomatoes and (if we got out there) quite a few boxes of green tomatoes that will slowly ripen, or rot, depending on their mood.

I've been saying for the last few years that I want to move my greenhouse up to the garden and put it over a few plants to prolong the harvest a few more weeks. So far it hasn't happened, usually because we are just plain exhausted from the long summer days! So, maybe this year we'll get that done. And then maybe we'll have fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes into November!

Sadly, it's only the first of February. The seeds won't arrive for a few days yet. So until July remember:

Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes
What would life be without homegrown tomatoes?
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love and homegrown tomatoes.