Changing Seasons

I was out picking some fruit for lunch during a break in the rain, and snapped a few photos of a portion of the backyard.   The rains have re-greened the garden very quickly.  I’m struggling to pick and roast and preserve tomatoes before the continued rains split them all.  Same with the plums.

It’s not officially autumn yet, but it sure feels like it this week.  The chill in the morning when I handle garden chores is quick to remind me that the days remaining in the garden are relatively few.  The summer veggies and fruits are beginning to fade, but so many fall foods are coming in, I am swamped with produce.

It’s always been my goal to have an even distribution of fruit crops throughout the year.   Late September is no exception.   Raspberries, grapes, late plums, apples, goji berries are all still going strong.  Physalis (Inca berries and ground cherries) are just beginning to ripen, and the quince, medlars, kiwis won’t be ready for another several weeks.

Here are a few photos from a little portion of the garden, as it appears today – lush and green, but beginning to ebb for the year:

 

It’s nearly November, and yet we’re still finding fresh food in the garden every day.

George helped me pick some green tomatoes so I could make a batch of lacto-fermented pickles with them.

I picked the last of the quince for the year and have membrillo simmering on the stove right now.  Can’t wait until it is ready to pour into a pan and set up and finally EAT.  Nothing goes better with a cup of tea on a rainy afternoon than membrillo with cheese and smoked-paprika-spiced crackers.

Bea helped me dig a few sunchoke tubers for dinner later in the week.  Sunchokes are an easy-to-grow perennial food-crop that are ready late in the year.  They contain about 110 calories/cup and one serving contains 28% of your daily amount of iron.  They are also a good source of vitamin C and potassium.  Sunchokes also contain a lot of inulin, and while they are tasty sliced fried in ghee or bacon grease, they can cause gas in some people unless cooked for long periods of time.  The best way to prepare them that helps break down the inulin is to simmer them in the crockpot in chicken or veggie broth and then make a mash with other root veggies.

Bea found an exceptionally large sunchoke while we were digging.  She was awfully proud of it.

While I was cutting back some rhubarb plants – whose leaves are beginning to die back due to the cold night temperatures, I noticed one of the ground cherries nearby still going strong.  One quick shake and full cup of ripe fruit fell onto the ground.  We ate most, but I kept a few back in order to save the seeds.

On Monday I picked over 50 lbs of pumpkins for Birch Community Services, but today I picked just a few for our family.  These are (my absolute favorite) Burgess Buttercup on the left, and on the right a kabocha-type variety whose seeds were gifted to me, which I want to say is Confection, but that might not be correct.  I look forward to trying the one on the right and seeing how it compares to the excellent texture and flavor of Burgess Buttercup.

I’m very grateful for this late-in-the-year gifts from the garden, and look forward to a few more weeks of nourishing foods and healing herbs from the garden before it is put to bed for the winter.

 

After a serious drought most of the year, the rain has finally returned.  (It actually feels like Oregon again here.  So glad for the grey and the rain!)

Despite the fact that we had what felt like an eternal summer, the reality is that it is now September, and the cooling temperatures and rapidly-shrinking day-lengths mean the bumper tomato harvest can only last a few more weeks.

I frequently hear from folks who are frustrated to find most of their tomato fruit still hanging green and rock hard on the vines by the time temps dip into the 40’s at night and the vines begin to die.  So much effort is put into a crop that never matures before the season ends.  And there are only so many batches of green tomato pickles and chutney one can put up in the fall!

So, I thought I’d give you some of my tips for encouraging your tomatoes to ripen before the end of the season:

First of all, obviously not all tomatoes are red when ripe, so color is not a good indicator that your crop is ready to pick.  This variety, Indigo Rose, rapidly turns a dark purple, but isn’t ripe until the green color under the purple turns brownish-orange.  Despite being a cherry tomato, it is one of the longest-ripening tomatoes in my garden, fooling many volunteers into picking it underripe because of the early purple blush.

Knowing the characteristics of the varieties you are growing will help you determine ripeness.  Knowing the firmness/feel of a ripe tomato when you gently squeeze it is `important thing to know.  As well as knowing that most (but not all) varieties of tomato slip easily from the vine when ripe.  If you have to tug and tug to pick the fruit, it probably isn’t ripe (although I have a few heirloom beefsteaks that will hang on for dear life until they are very overripe).

Here’s another very soft, very ripe tomato, although it doesn’t look particularly ripe.  Some of my favorites have green stripes when ripe, or are completely green (Evergreen and Green Zebra come to mind).  Again, here softness and ability to slip easily off the plant are the best indictators of ripeness.

Volunteers here frequently skip over pink beefsteak varieties, thinking they are not yet ripe because they aren’t deep red.  But they will never turn deep red, and if left hanging on the vine, they will attract creatures who know  they are ripe and tasty in their pinkish hue: birds, mice, slugs, will damage them and crops will be lost.  The same goes for lemon-yellow varieties, which folks tend to overlook, waiting for an orangey indictator of ripeness which will never come.

So, now that we know how to tell if a tomato is ripe, how do we get those green tomatoes to hurry up and get in that state?

Tip 1:  As soon as early September hits, I snip off all of the the flower blossoms and buds from the vines.  These flowers don’t have time to turn into harvestable crops before the end of the month, and they are robbing energy from the vine that it could be putting into maturing fruit.

Removing the flower buds also signals to the plant that flowering time is over, and fall is approaching, and it should focus on ripening already-set fruit.

Tip 2: Remove all very small, immature fruit.  These little guys are never going to ripen into 1 lb Brandywines in two to three weeks.  Again, removing them keeps the plant from wasting energy attempting to mature them, and allows more resources to go to larger fruit that have a chance of ripening before the end of the month.

Tip 3:  Stop watering.  A shortage of water stresses the plant and encourages it to hurry up and ripen its set fruit before dying.  Now, in Oregon, that may not be an option because sometimes the rain returns in September.  But many years, September is very dry until late in the month, and the combination of lack of water and dipping night temperatures will help those beefsteaks mature.

Ceasing to water also helps prevent fungal diseases on ripening fruit (and believe me, while late blight is rare here, it will devastate your entire crop in 48 hours.  Ripening tomatoes and their vines will turn into black mush before you know what has hit you, and there is no cure.)   I lost 300 lbs of tomatoes one year to late blight (which is spread on the wind, and brought into our state by big-box store’s tomato starts cultivated in the South, where the disease is common), and I hope to never experience that again.

Tip 4: Grow more cherry tomatoes!  Some years, Oregon has cool summers, and beefsteaks are never going to be able to set and ripen many fruits in the season.  I always grow a few beefsteaks and large slicers, even knowing that many won’t produce a large crop for me if the summer is mild.  Brandywine and Mortgage Lifter are particularly prone to setting fruit late and having buckets of green tomatoes for me at the end of the season (they do make very tasty lactofermented dill pickles, though).  Small slicers such as Green Zebra and cherry tomatoes like Sungold and Chocolate Cherry are sure winners no matter the weather.

Hope that helps you, and I hope you get lots of tomatoes in the next few weeks and enjoy the tail end of summer.

I know I am beginning to anticipate fall crops like the late September glut of tomatillo and ground cherry fruit, winter squash, quince, lingonberries…

More soon, and happy gardening!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few images from the garden in early November.  There are a few carrots, and oca and potatoes to dig, and still an abundance of Swiss Chard and kale.  Most everything else has been harvested, although there is still some cleanup to be done, and there will be winter pruning in two months.  Here and there, a few calendula flowers are the only thing still blooming, but they are bent down with persistent raindrops.   Tomatillos in their skeletal husks will germinate in the spring and yield a crop next year with no help from me.                   Hal commented that some of the grape leaves look like topographical maps.     The comfrey is still going strong where they ducks haven’t eaten it back.  Most of the new perennial fruit plants (a tiny baby Saskatoon in the red cage above – Shropshire Damsons, and Chilean guavas elsewhere in the garden) have comfrey nursemaids planted next to them.     The persimmon tree is on the cusp of a spectacular fiery display.  Hopefully by next year, there will be a crop of Early Fuyu persimmons left hanging once the red-orange leaves fall.

The half-high and high-bush blueberries are just beginning to turn color.  They are four years-old, so in coming years – as they grow considerably – this whole side of the house will be awash in bright red blueberry and Aronia berry leaves in November.     Hope you have a cozy, restful weekend.  I’ll leave you with an autumnal Waldorf verse, of which I am always reminded this time of year:

The north wind came along one day,
So strong and full of fun;
He called the leaves down from the trees
And said, “Run children run”.
They came in read and yellow dress,
In shaded green and brown,
And all the short November day
He chased them round the town.
They ran in crowds, they ran alone,
They hid behind the trees,
The north winds laughing found them there
And called “No stopping please”
But when he saw them tired out
And huddled in a heap,
He softly said, “Goodnight my dears,
Now let us go to sleep.”