2020 gardens

DJ54 · Sep 2, 2020

Another approx. 60 lbs. of tomatoes to work up today. At least that many more like that left in the garden. Thisshould do me for this year, and seems all but one has al they want. I know there are 10Z that many that have split, and ruined from last weeks rains.

The food kitchen where I normally donate excess to, has changed their fomat, to basically sack lunches, and not preparing dinners, due to the Covid thing going on.

Towards the weekend, if more start ripening, I'll more than likely post an ad in a local neighborhood newsletter, for free to pick. I did that several years ago, and was really surprised at how many responses I got, and amounts they got, for home canning. Not sure how that will work this year, with all of the supply shortages.

Better get with it here, gonna' be along day...

Sonny580 · Sep 8, 2020

Did another 21 quarts of greenbeans and now working on some red shellbeans---14 quarts so far and many more to go!

a couple quarts of the 14.

most of the garden is winding down even tho it was planted late but we did get a good supply of produce from the efforts.

herm0016 · Sep 8, 2020

while you guys are harvesting, we had to tarp everything and move small stuff into the greenhouse for the first snow. currently about 35 degrees outside, 55 in the greenhouse with no heat on. hoping our peppers, squash, tomatos survive for 2 days under tarps. we should be able to get a couple more weeks out of the plants before its really too cold. this is an early first freeze.

Industrial Toys · Sep 8, 2020

Tomatoes are still as green as many TBNers with their first tractor.

Had tomatoes under a tarp nights. Now using some vapour barrier. Can't that just stay on? Info says not to water them anymore anyway to promote ripening.

Not much hope. Also sprawling pumpkin patch vegetation and one pumkin!

Sonny580 · Sep 9, 2020

When tomatoes are starting to turn ripe----NO water!--it will rot them.---we have heavy rain here now and it is rotting all of our tomatoes!
So far temps. are not too bad but not much sun to ripen tomatoes and the ones that do turn red taste like store bought "gassed" ones, so we quit on them.
Wanted to do one more batch of sweetcorn in the freeze-drier if possible. --- All of the heavy rain and wind put the corn down almost flat on the ground making it hard to pick. Also the third planting did not pollinate very good!
Nobody here had any pumpkins this year. --- Sis has about a dozen nice sugar pie pumpkins on her 3 vines.

herm0016 · Sep 9, 2020

we will uncover and take stock tomorrow morning. you should try Rouge Vif d'Etampes
also known as fairy tail pumpkins, we got about 16 of them on 3 plants this year, they are large and much more tasty than sugar pies. we have 8 in the celler, and we have about 8 more that need to be canned.

hoping we get more red curries after we uncover. we have 8 in the celler. we also have 8 spaghetti / acorn hybrids. I am going to bring 10 more to the food pantry, as 3 large squash a month for the next 8 months is plenty for us!

anyone else still can in half gallon jars? we use a propane burner and a huge aluminum pot for processing them, but some places say you should not use them? i remember my grandmother having shelves full of them.

Jstpssng · Sep 9, 2020

herm0016 said:
we will uncover and take stock tomorrow morning. you should try Rouge Vif d'Etampes
also known as fairy tail pumpkins, we got about 16 of them on 3 plants this year, they are large and much more tasty than sugar pies. we have 8 in the celler, and we have about 8 more that need to be canned.

hoping we get more red curries after we uncover. we have 8 in the celler. we also have 8 spaghetti / acorn hybrids. I am going to bring 10 more to the food pantry, as 3 large squash a month for the next 8 months is plenty for us!

anyone else still can in half gallon jars? we use a propane burner and a huge aluminum pot for processing them, but some places say you should not use them? i remember my grandmother having shelves full of them.

The way that I understand it, they haven't taken the time to establish safe processing times because there aren't many people who can with them.
Yet if you have a way that's been working for you...
That's like processing low acid foods in a boiling water bath. It isn't recommended for beans, corn, meat, and other low acid foods because the temperature doesn't get hot enough to kill botulism toxins. Yet people have been doing it for years... we don't have the soil conditions here for botulism to thrive in the first place which is why it doesn't affect our food.

herm0016 · Sep 9, 2020

Jstpssng said:
The way that I understand it, they haven't taken the time to establish safe processing times because there aren't many people who can with them.
Yet if you have a way that's been working for you...
That's like processing low acid foods in a boiling water bath. It isn't recommended for beans, corn, meat, and other low acid foods because the temperature doesn't get hot enough to kill botulism toxins. Yet people have been doing it for years... we don't have the soil conditions here for botulism to thrive in the first place which is why it doesn't affect our food.

we did tomato sauce and peaches i think? high acid stuff, we add citric acid to our tomatos. we also pressure can. just ordered a new bigpressure vessel as ours is too small for the volumes we do now.