I know, I know… It’s been a long, long time since I wrote anything here. Here it is mid September already? Where the heck did the summer go?
It was an incredibly busy summer here. Busy in a good way, though. The gardens were spectacular this year, but everything except the tomatoes and squash are finished up for the season and we’ve been working on cleaning out the beds.
We processed the last of the beets and carrots this past week. We have enough carrots, beets, peppers and beans in the freezer to last us for at least a whole year, I think.
The tomatoes just don’t want to stop, though. The darned things are still producing like crazy and we’ve already put up something like 30 or 40 pints of spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, marinara sauce, bloody mary mix, etc. More than enough to last us an entire year. But the darned things are still going.
We can’t use them any more so whatever we’re getting from now on is going to the local food pantry and St. Vincent de Paul. They said they’ll take whatever extra we have.
We put in a whole bed full of celery more or less as an experiment and even that was wildly successful. And the flavor was amazing. We used a lot of it ourselves in sauces, froze some, and gave the rest away.
One thing I am really going to miss is smelling the sauces simmering away all day. There were days when walking into the house was like walking into an Italian restaurant with the whole place filled with the aroma of basil, thyme, garlic, onions and tomatoes simmering away.
Now that the canning season is finally over things aren’t quite as hectic here.
MrsGF and I both got in to get our flu shots and the new Covid vaccine. Covid is rearing its ugly head once again. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing. Local hospitals and clinics are requiring people to wear masks when coming in their buildings again, etc. It’s getting nasty out there.
grouchyfarmer 
Congrats on a productive year….those tomatoes make me hungry….onto next spring. chuq
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Thanks. The tomatoes were fantastic this year for some reason, probably because of all the rain we had in the first half of the summer. We’re already planning what we want to do next year 🙂
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We are planning as well….the extreme heat in June and July pretty much stopped my tomato production…good luck next season. chuq
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I got my flu shot yesterday and thanks to local farmers and kind-hearted neighbors, I actually got to eat some fresh produce that tasted exactly the way it ought to taste …I love a tomato that is soft and sweet.. not the kind from the store that is almost crunchy….I love a pear and an apple fresh from the trees rather than the kind you get at the store… the kind that is as hard a month from now as it was the day it was purchased….I don’t know what they do to make produce tough and tasteless but they are good at it as they soak you for 5 or 6 times what it is worth…why, for example, does a single tomato often cost $2.29 at a super market when there must be a million of them in a single field…??? I loved my summer too– heat waves and all.
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Oh wow, absolutely true! I can’t stand most of the stuff that comes from the grocer’s produce shelves any more. Pears that are so hard you have to cook them to make them edible? Tomatoes with the consistency of foam rubber or worse? They have bred varieites of most vegetables and fruits to withstand the stresses of shipping so they have to be hard as rubber, and they want a long shelf life so while the produce may look ripe, it’s actually still not ripe despite the color.
Last year we grew our own brussels sprouts as an experiment. Even people who hated brussels sprouts like these. They had a lush, sweet, even nutty flavor and beautiful texture when steamed or roasted. They didn’t even taste like the same species as the ones we get at the store.
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Industrialized farming, and Monsanto are the villains. Happy that you have a home, so you can grow your own, unadulterated produce. Haven’t had access to a real Peach, Pear, or other fruit since the 70’s. BTW – Hope you haven’t used Roundup; it is a Monsanto weedkiller, but derives from their damn Agent Orange, a big cancer causing risk.
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We avoid anhy kind of chemical agents if at all possible.
When I was farming we dealt with weeds and pests through a combination of crop rotation, cultivation, grazing and even in some cases manually pulling weeds if they weren’t too prolific, and we avoided commercial fertilizers when at all possible. Our yields were not as great as those of the farms around us that were using that stuff, but at the same time because we weren’t buying all of the chemicals our expenses were much lower, so low that our profit margin was actually a bit higher than the guys who went all in on the chemical route.
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Monsanto ruined many a small farmer. I Hate them for what they’ve done. Good to know you still thrive.
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Fall is upon us. No doubt. I don’t have garden stuffs to go by, but I do have a bush in the yard, I call it my season bush, when it’s leaves start falling, fall is right around the corner, and when spring is springing, you will see that bush budding before anything else.
I don’t even know what kind of bush it actually is, it produces small red flowers, and has freaking thorns in it! So, it’s the “season bush.”
The flowering quince looks very similar, but mine has thorns…
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