Harvesting The Garden

Fall has arrived and my gardening focus has shifted to harvesting and preserving the bounty.
Life is an experiment and this year’s experiments included sun-drying tomatoes in my car. I spread brown paper bags in the windshield with tomato slices on them and they dried nicely. I was amazed at how many tomatoes could fit in a small zip lock bag!

I grate up all of my large or excess zucchinis and fill baggies with them and freeze them for the winter. Zucchini bread is great in the winter, but I am not into baking in August. I have harvested boxes of different varieties of potatoes, cabbages and winter squashes, all stored in cardboard boxes with holes cut in them for ventilation. I love looking at the rows of boxes of fresh foods waiting for winter meals. I will be adding apples and pears to the shelves soon.

The aquaponic system (APS) has been moved up to the glass house with my lemon tree and it has again begun to put out large amounts of food in a very small area with almost no work. No weeding, digging, fertilizing or even bending! I have 6 varieties of strawberries, bush beans, cucumbers, lettuce, egg plant, peppers, basil and jalapeno peppers in two 3 x 4′ beds. The amount of food coming out of such a small space has really amazed me, and I haven’t even mentioned the Tilapia yet! They are growing well, and I look forward to fresh fish in the near future. I guess we could already take a couple of the fish, considering the size of them, but I am waiting for them to get bigger. I’d like each fish to be large enough to feed two people.

I started snow peas for a fall harvest and my pole beans are still producing, as are my tomatoes, zucchini, squashes and melons. My banana squashes are huge, and we’re waiting for them to turn yellow.

This year’s basil has done wonderfully! I think I have had pesto more times this year than all other years combined. I found an amazing new recipe! It calls for 2 cups basil, 5 cloves garlic, ½ cup olive oil, ½ cup walnuts, ½ cup Parmesan cheese, ½ tsp. salt and 5 big juicy beef steak tomatoes. Whiz the ingredients in a blender or food processor, and then pour it onto pasta. It is my new favorite, we had it 3 days in a row, once I found the recipe.

Oregon is wonderful in the fall. We enjoy blackberry sour cream coffee cake with home grown scrambled eggs. This will change to apple crisp, as soon as the apples and walnuts come on. The climate in Oregon is warm enough that cloche growing can be done year round and almost anything can be grown at home here. I have an avocado on my tree and I grew almost 40 lemons last year.

This year, I planted 3 varieties of bananas in my cloche. One of them is supposed to be hardy enough to grow and produce here, but I am not taking chances. I planted four varieties but lost one to a gopher—at least I think that’s what happened. One day it was just gone!

I added Korean pine nut and Chilean nut trees to my orchard and am excited for them to produce.

My grape arbor looks amazing, my son was married under it last year and now it is starting to lean with the weight of grapes! It is probably due to a combination of excessive weight and rotting wood, but what to do? My husband and I will have to ponder on that awhile. Maybe I should search the web for possible solutions to save this structure, or any ideas about what we can do from readers would be helpful. I have to say, life on the farm is interesting, if not laid back. Enjoy it.

Happy Gardening

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