The Falling Blog

Everyone’s posting their tomato harvests. This is mine.

After about a week of no harvesting. 16 quarts of tomatoes, many of them Romas, shining in the sunlight. 

Next year I will be reusing the A-frame design, but I will elevate the Romas slightly, so that they can climb a bit higher for easier harvesting. 

Looks like it is sauce making and canning all week! 

The cherry tomatoes are coming on in a big way this week.

I’m just about ready to go into full time sauce making and canning of early girls, the romas, and the beefsteaks. 
But in the meantime i need to do something with these little beauties that helps me preserve them for the winter (because it is coming :D) 

Simple procedure: 

1. Wash and cut each tomato in half. 

2. Spice. (I used oregano, basil, natures seasoning, and kosher salt). 

3. Put in a foil lined pie tin and drizzle with olive oil. 

4. Bake at 350F for 20 minutes, reduce temperature to 250 and bake for another 35-45 minutes. 

5. Remove from oven,and eat as soon as they are able to be touched. I recommend some crackers and some Havarti cheese. 

6. If preserving: let cool, and then freeze in a single layer. Then pull them and place them in a plastic bag. The sources I’ve found say that they’re good for up to 6 months in the deep freeze.

Also, 300th post! Woo!
 

Tomatoes! This plant has gotten out of hand in my garden and I love it. 

They are just over 5’9” tall in top bed. I have counted well over 100 blossoms. 

I have cherries and romas. We are going to have salads and spaghetti sauce and salsa to beat the band this year. 

It has been a really long couple of weeks for us. I’ve been out of town on business and my wife has had to hold down the fort. 

As a celebration of being together again after such a long trip, my wife and I went on a date . Kids got to have their sitter and TV time. We got some food at a nice restaurant and listened to some live bluegrass. Then, we went to the hardware store and bought a few necessities for racking wine and cultivating soil (I know we’re weird AND diverse). Got home and started getting the yard ready for the fall feed and reseed. The tomatoes were looking a little worse for wear after all the rain, so I decided to cull them all and collect what green tomatoes I had left for processing into relish. My kids helped out quite a lot with the harvesting. 

I’m still waiting on a few kohlrabi and some sweet potatoes and even a pepper. Not quite time to plant the winter rye, but getting closer all the same. 

While I was away, I bought 60 lb of honey for this years mead production. We’re doing 2x what we made last year. Got a tremendous deal from a wholesaler in PA. We’ll be putting that together this weekend. And just to make it a full day, we decided to rack the blueberry wine and get it ready for aging. I need the fermenter free anyway. Mrs. J had a lot of fun comparing the different sweetening ratios that we’re evaluating for the blueberry wine. We fermented it right to dryness (12% alc/vol), so we’ll need to sweeten just a bit before bottling. Looks like we’re going to have a pretty big wine year around here. By the time the mead is complete and the blueberry is bottled, we stand to have something like > 100 bottles of wine in our cellar from this year alone! I’m looking forward to next year’s competitions. We’ll be entering a few I’m sure. 

Have a great weekend everyone!  

It’s the weekend!! And I have made good on my promise to myself to sit around and do nothing…except instead I did tons of yard work. 

Kate and I are having dinner guests tomorrow, so we cleaned the whole place (actually Kate did most of it, she’s a trooper!).The yard got mowed, and raked, and watered. 

While we were moving stuff around, I got a bunch more tomatoes, we’ve got beans growing, a couple of squashes (amazing!) and the zucchinis look as if they’re about to flower. I planted some more pumpkins just to see if I can beat the frost. We’ll see! 

Speaking of moving things around, I decided that i was going to finally reorganize my shed because summer is winding down and I’ll need better space arrangments in my shed than I had last winter. But of course, no good deed goes unpunished. Wasps! I was just out of wasp doom spray too. (This is my one single vice in terms of the chemicals I work with in my home). Wasps need to be kept in check. Raid has something for that. I’ll tell you what though, the stuff in that can is concentrated awfulness. With new foaming action. Ugh. Had to be done.

On a lighter note, I opened up a 3 year old bottle from my stability study on 2008 Falling Stone Winery Blueberry wine! Look at the legs on it! The stuff tastes like a liqueur. I really should put more of my bottles away for aging, but oh man, is it nice to have a stash of inexpensively acquired wine in the house in the wintertime. 

Have a great weekend everyone!  

I had a whirlwind weekend. Drove from Maryland to PA, dropped off the children with Grandma, then drove to Western NY to witness my cousin get married in a lovely service. 

We just returned home and I saw my tomato vines heavy with fruits! The birds and squirrels had a shot at about 4 of them, but I definitely came out with quite a number of the red ones. I picked a few near ripe ones to finish their ripening away from the free loaders. I’ve found if you clip them with the vine still on them, they ripen up just fine inside a paper sack. 

See also my latest wine project. I put in the last sugar gallon and another gallon of water so that it can settle into the end of the secondary fermentation. I’m hoping for a nice strong table wine with vinous quality and drinkability. This is an improvement on a previous years recipe where I’d omitted raisins from the batch. I won’t make that mistake again. 

The beans, zucchini and cucumbers I planted on Thursday have made quite a lot of progress in four days. The fall planting is just as much fun as the spring I’m finding. It’s great to live in a place with such an extended growing season. We could use a little rain though. 

Have a great week everybody! 

Tomatoes are getting ripe. I couldn’t help but let my boy pick the first red one. We’ll be eating that tonight. I also wanted to update that the paperbag ripening technique works pretty well. I switched from apples to bananas because the banana seemed to speed the process along quite nicely. 

Happy Friday everyone! 

Had ourselves a fantastic thundershower with wind last night. Knocked over my tomatoes. Not to worry, the stems are in tact. So I staked them together and tied their cages together. The sad part is I’ve got some windfalls. I’ve done some research about this, and the consensus is not necessarily complete. Some people think you can ripen in a windowsill, some say a carboard box and some say a paperbag. The key I think is warm and ethylene gas (produced by ripening apples and bananas.) Trial an error. If you get these windfall tomatoes, give it a go and let me know how you make out. I will post my success or failure as well. 

Also, funny enough, right before the storm I braced my prize sunflower and he survived the storm! 

And to give me a little hope, a rose blossomed next to my garden beds. I thought that was pretty fantastic given how late in the season it is. 

Have a great week everyone!

Feeling quite a bit better, I decided to stroll through the garden this morning. 

The light is really perfect, the flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing, and I just couldn’t help putting together an update. 

The sunflowers look amazing, though I’m dealing with some kind of leaf blight. I’m dealing with it with a dilute baby shampoo and baking powder solution. I’m also removing some of the more far gone leaves. Some research has yielded that it is likely a fungus, and I’ll be rotating out of the edge beds next year. Thank goodness we don’t have the same stink bug problem we’d had last year. The few that have come into the yard I’ve captured with a dish soap water solution during my morning walk in the garden. The same fate happens to the Japanese Beetles. They are bastards. 

The garden is thriving despite the few little blights and pests. I haven’t mentioned it because I feel like the whole “green” gardening thing has gotten terribly pretentious, but honestly it bears mentioning. I do not use any chemical pesticides. I sparingly use plant food, most of my phosphate and nitrogen comes from my compost bin. I therefore have to work a bit harder for my plants health. It is worth it, let me assure you. To paraphrase the modern bards: I also don’t care about spots on my apples, I want the birds and bees. Ok, off of my soapbox. 

Tomatoes have become quite a thing. We’ve over 45 in the garden by my last count.They are quite sizeable, as you can see (with just compost!). I would have not planted my tomatoes quite so close together if I had imagined they would have gone as buck wild as they have. Next year, I’ll rotate them to the edge beds. 

The potatoes have flowered and have gone to wilt. This is great news. This means that it is almost harvest time for my spuds. I hope my efforts have not been in vain. 

Also, as you may or may not know, I am an avid home wine maker. We have started this years blueberry wine. 36 lbs of blueberries have gone into this years recipe as well as all of the notes we received from the competition. Our starting gravity was 1.080. Dry blueberry table wine here we come! 

Have a great weekend everyone. 

Brief garden update.

Before my camera ran out of juice, I snapped a couple quick pics. 

My tomatoes have just started bulking up since I pruned them a bit. The cucumbers are on their third or fourth picking with no abatement of flower production. The moths and bees are helping quite a lot. 

And Bees. I said it! Honey bees are all over my garden. The sunflowers opening up may have something to do with it. So excited. Happy Fourth!