Week 21, Season 2017-18; Peak Tomato

We celebrated Earth Day this last week with a farm clean up.  We gathered about 60 lbs of trash from the road and fields, mostly plastic trash.  Thank you to the boundless energy of the Steed family.  

While picking tomatoes this week the thought of peak tomato occurred to me.  Similar to the concept of peak oil.  We have reached peak tomato! The season is winding down and the crops are starting to show it.  We have reached the point in the tomato crop where maximum yield has occurred and now we are on the decline.  We have had a great tomato season with the varieties, ‘Celebrity,’ ‘Juliet,’ and ‘Charger.’  My peppers are doing very well and we have not reached “peak pepper” yet.

We are picking our potatoes and have had extremely tasty strawberry onions this year. 

Our corn plants are looking beautiful and I hope they can finish out strong.  They look like they will pick on our last week of the season. I am trying a new variety this year and it looks like we might get two ears per plant.  I can’t wait!

Around our house I have been watching collard greens in the crisper getting less and less crisp over a few weeks.  Jenn is reluctant to cook them as I am usually the only one who eats them.  So they hang out in the crisper until they are ready for composting.  This time I rescued them and tried something completely different.  Here is a recipe that I came up with.

In a deep frying pan, sauté a couple cloves in olive oil and then chop about a cup and a half of tomatoes and let them saute with the garlic.  While the garlic and tomatoes sauté, chop the collard greens and add them to the pan.  I add a little water at this point and create a steam with the lid.    You can add some pepper and salt or your favorite spices.  After the collards start to turn dark green turn the pan to a simmer and let it cook with lid on for about twenty or thirty minutes until tender.  Enjoy!  I even had some of the kids saying how good this was.  Now I look forward to seeing more collards in our crisper.

Here are a few pictures from the farm.

Collards, tomatoes, garlic, yum!

Tassels emerging

Guardian of the Corn

Week 18, Season 2017-18

We have managed our way through a rather challenging season.  High and low temperatures in the area were pretty dramatic and crops haven't liked it.  We are nearing the end of harvesting lettuce crops. Strawberries are also on the decline as night and day temperatures have increased.  We still have squash, beans, corn, melons, and cantaloupe in the ground.  Our leeks look good and I believe that we will have our first harvest of sweet onions this weekend.  Corn is about a foot high and beans are  2-4 inches tall.  The sweet potatoes are finished, and the red potatoes will be harvested soon. Cucumbers were burnt out by the frost for the third time this season.  I am thinking, unfortunately, that we will have to pass on cukes this year.  This period is difficult between cool and warm season veggies.  Cool weather ends abruptly and the heat takes off like a rocket.  Plants just can't react that quickly, so we usually have a few meager weeks around this time.

We managed to pick quite a few mulberries from a tree I planted about five years ago.  This was a nice surprise and the tree is still loaded.  I expect we will harvest for a few more weeks.  The first pick made its way into my mulberry and strawberry jam.  Sometimes I add blueberries and call it multi-berry jam.  I believe we might have enough for another week's pickup.  I really love the taste of mulberries right off the tree, in jam, used in smoothies, or as toppings.  I could do without the hitch hiking thrips, but that kind of goes with the season and  the fruit.  If you wash the mulberries or blow on them, thrips usually find other retreats.  I will propagate a few more mulberry plants this year and plant them in the fruit block after they root.