Monday, October 01, 2007

Our garden is mostly done for the year; my two attempts to put in broccoli for the fall were foiled by the slugs, and I didn’t take the time to plant greens because none of us really LIKE them- we’ll usually eat them (though much of our spring spinach went to seed), but we don’t especially enjoy it. We still have tomatoes and peppers, which I’ll leave out for a couple weeks, and then we’ll hang up cherry tomato vines from our kitchen windows and spread the bigger green tomatoes out on trays to ripen. The past few years we’ve eaten the last of our tomatoes right around Thanksgiving. I don’t think they’ll last so long this year- the cherries ripen more quickly, and the larger tomatoes were mostly determinants this year, so they’re pretty much gone. We’ll see what the Romas do, though.

I planted the Romas for drying, but didn’t get to do a lot of that. They tended to drop before they were ripe, and then the bugs damaged them on the ground before I collected them- not sure whether we were supposed to pick them when they were green or if the plants were unhealthy or what. We still got to use a lot of them in cooking, but since they were not perfectly ripe I didn’t take the time to dry them.

So far, the local produce experiment has gone well, though Dan and I have had some disagreement about what qualifies. I didn’t think we should be buying processed potato products, like fries and chip, but I was overruled. This weekend I felt a sore throat coming on and bought orange juice to fend it off- though maybe I could have found local cranberries instead? The kids demand bananas whenever they see someone else eating one; we let them know we’d be buying them in the winter. We’ve been less able to obtain organic fruit, but we knew that would be the case. I’ve been trying to keep everyone away from apples while we have other options- the peach and blueberry seasons just ended, and we can still get pears- but I’ve pretty much given in now. (Good local apples are available until early spring, so I don’t want everyone to get sick of them now- they’re our main winter fruit.)

I should itemize what’s in our freezer; we’ve been putting in small quantities whenever we have a chance. We have a lot of black raspberries, pesto, and tomatoes in there, my lone jar of pear butter, and several quarts of blueberries. Nowhere near as much as we’d originally planned, but this pesky job wasn’t on my radar then.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There are a bunch of different kinds of apples, of course. Maybe disallow the granny smiths while everyone eats the mac's.