Well, turns out I totally spaced on Harmonious Belly’s second birthday! It was February 8. A lot has happened in this past year – a layoff sprurring on lots of writing, preserving, and food experimentation. My garden was awesome this past year (no blight, hooray!). And a little guy entered my life (I love you, Linus) and captured my heart, while my beloved girl passed on (RIP Marina).
So happy birthday, little blog! Here’s to many more collaborations, learning more, nurturing old friendships and creating new ones, and lots of delicious food! Paid work would be nice, too, universe. 🙂
A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the garden of new friends in the neighborhood, WT and Erich; I met them at our last WHA blogger social. They are the forces behind Gardenfreude, a terrific Astoria blog about food, health, gardening, design, and knitting. I hear they are excellent knitters and make some amazing sweaters and things over the winters (I, on the other hand, can make a scarf and a hat, but that’s about it). They are also passionate gardeners, and we three connected over gardening and food especially.
Their garden is quite large, especially for NYC standards. They have an arrangement with their neighbors to use their yard, which gives them a lot of land to work with. In face, they currently only use half the yard, but have gotten the green light to use the rest of the space, so they have plans to expand next spring.
I’ve been writing a lot about my garden, but not much about the harvest. Well, it’s been kind of small so far… I expect that will change as we get into August. However, I have gotten to eat a few homegrown tomatoes, and some ground cherries, as well as plenty of apricots.
The first tomato I harvested was a Tommy Toe, which is a large cherry tomato.
Tommy Toe tomatoes
These tomatoes are a large cherry tomato with firm flesh, balanced tomato flavor, and there is a creaminess to them that is just delightful. They are super delicious. I’ve harvested a half dozen of these tomatoes.
I’ve also harvested a half dozen or so of the Mexican Midget tomato. This was one of two plants given to me by my friend Alex.
Mexican Midget tomato
This is a small cherry tomato, almost what I’d consider to be a currant tomato as far as its size goes. It’s small but packs a big flavor punch. So delicious. Their size is perfect for snacking, and when I see ripe ones out on in the garden, I usually just pop them in my mouth and eat them right there. Super tasty.
Apart from the tomatoes, ground cherries have just started to become available for harvest. They are ripe when their husk dries out (the texture reminds me a little bit of onion skin paper) and they drop onto the ground.
Ground cherries
I think of ground cherries to be an old fashioned sort of fruit. It has an unusual flavor, kind of a combination between a tomato and a pineapple. The fruit are about 1/3 inches in diameter and they’re full of seeds, sort of like tomatillos (which they also look like, and are related to). Some people consider ground cherries to be much like the cape gooseberry.
They are delicious to snack on and also make good jam, so I’m told. I have a lot of them out there, so jam may be in my future.
The apricot tree also produced enough apricots for jam.
Apricots on the tree
More on the jam later, which is quite delicious. I picked about 4 pounds of fruit, one pound of which was not usable (blemishes, mostly), but 3 pounds was just enough to make 4.5 pints of delicious apricot jam! It will be nice to have that taste of summer in the winter.
Although it’s still warm here in NYC, since Labor Day it’s really felt like summer has ended. Once the temperatures become more moderate, it will really feel like fall. I am of mixed feelings about this – normally I don’t care much about or for fall, in my mind it’s just the transition season to The Dreaded Winter. I am not big on the frigid weather of the Northeast. However, this year’s summer was so terribly scorching hot, with multiple 90+ degree temperature days in a row, cooler weather can’t come soon enough. I am eager for fall.
First tipoff to the transition out of summer – I received an acorn squash in my CSA share this past week. I’ll save it for a cooler day, though – I absolutely love winter squash of all kinds, so this is an awesome score!
I expect I’ll have some green tomatoes to fry later in the season. To my surprise, my paste and Prudens Purple tomatoes are still producing! I really thought the Prudens Purple tomato was on its way out for sure, but there are a few little tomatoes on the plant, and none have blossom end rot so far.
I think the BER problem really was with me – I don’t believe I watered the tomatoes nearly enough this year, which would explain how nutrients couldn’t get to the fruit. I’ve been watering more intensely this past few weeks, and all the tomatoes are doing much, much better. I have close to a dozen little paste tomatoes hanging on, too!
The mystery plant – the one that looked like a cucumber plant – is not a cucumber at all. I think it might be a melon or a winter squash – the fruit is small and hard, about the size of a large fig. I have no idea where it came from, but I’m enjoying watching it grow and do its thing.
In general, the garden is looking quite rag-tag. The lemon cucumbers are at their end; the tomatillos did not fruit one whit; the tomato plants are looking scraggly. It’s a little scary looking out there right now.
I’ll be in Portland OR for a few days and hope to enjoy some of the delicious food in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll bring my camera and take pictures and share some of them here after I return.
As you can see from the picture above, my yellow pear tomatoes have started to ripen! They are a little funny looking, kind of like bowling pins, and they are very tasty. My plant keeps producing them, even as most of my other tomato plants are on their way out.
My paste tomatoes suffered from a lot of blossom end rot, but not nearly as bad as the Prudens Purple. The mystery volunteer tomato did fine, as did the Silver Fir. Both of those plants produced small to medium sized fruit. Larger tomatoes just had problems this year.
I had a bumper crop of lemon cucumbers, too. I will definitely grow those again next year.
Soon, it will be time to pull up the tomato plants and consider what to grow for the fall. I like the idea of carrots especially, and some more tatsoi.
Apart from the garden, I’ve done a lot of canning. I made 6 half pints of fig-orange-honey preserves, which turned out great, and keeps getting better as it ages. The figs came from the backyard trees – can’t get more local than that!
I’ve also canned tomatoes and made salsa – 9 pints of crushed tomatoes, and 4 pints of salsa, 3 of which are lacto-fermented salsa. The tomatoes came from my CSA in the form of a 20 pound tomato share, and were fabulous – really healthy, firm, and meaty. Not to mention tasty.
I have a lot of nectarines and peaches, so I may make preserves out of that as well.
My social life ramped up for a little while, and that meant dinners out, and less cooking at home. I’ve also been sick, so little appetite. This will all change soon.
This weekend I pick up my salmon share! Very exciting!!
Well, my garden is still pretty green – foliage is thriving, though no red tomatoes are to be seen. I did spy my neighbor’s garden from the back deck Sunday afternoon, and saw only one red tomato amongst the urban-vast stretches of green, so perhaps our little microclimate is just sluggish in getting our tomatoes to turn red.
The tomatoes that are on the vine are green, firm and healthy… except for another small tomato found with blossom end rot (BER). This tomato was on the same plant, in the same part of the plant as the other tomato with BER. Both tomatoes were sharing a branch that created “big bertha”, as I endearingly call her – a gigantic tomato, probably 5 inches across. I wonder if that tomato is just sucking up all the nutrients, denying the other two tomatoes any chance of thriving. This question will be answered perhaps if this gigantomato turns red without any rot.
I also picked this beast of a lemon cucumber last weekend:
It’s about 3 inches across, by far the largest lemon cucumber I’ve ever seen. It was hiding under the leaves in the corner, so I’m glad I found it when I did.
Remember this?
This is a mystery plant that appeared under my ground cherries and in the middle of my tomato plants. I thought it was summer squash but now believe it to be more cucumber plants; the flowers are quite similar to the cucumber flower on my lemon cucumber plants. I’ll know for sure once it starts fruiting.
I’ve also started harvesting ground cherries.
These ones beat the pants off of the ones I grew last year – they are sweeter, tastier, and bigger. I believe the quality of soil I’m using is just much better than the soil I had access to at the community garden. The weather – hot, hot, hot – probably has something to do with that, too.
Last week, I believe, I discovered a horrific development in my garden:
My immediate reaction was, “eeuw, gross”! It really does look nasty. It was soft and squishy, too. Double eeuw.
This is one of the first tomatoes to appear on my Pruden’s Purple plant. At first I thought I had come across late blight, but the leaves looked pretty good and healthy, as did the surrounding plants. So, I did some research and came to the conclusion that this tomato suffered from blossom end rot.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the remaining tomatoes on this plant, and they all look good so far. The tomatoes on the Silver Fir, Amish Paste, and mystery tomato also look fine – still green and firm, no rot.
My understanding is that blossom end rot has to do with the plant’s inability to absorb enough calcium and/or water. I have ordered some seaweed extract to add to the soil to bump up the calcium content in the soil, in case BER becomes more prevalent.
I’ve also heard that it can crop up after a heat wave, and that’s exactly when it showed up on this tomato. We’ve been in the middle of another heat wave this week, but it hasn’t been nearly as intense as the one just after July 4. I hope this won’t set any BER into motion.
