Friday, October 03, 2008

Garden - October




Here are the latest pictures of our garden crop, which is just about all harvested.


In the end, I think we spent:

$20 on organic fertilizer

$10 on organic compost to supplement the worm bin

$15 on tomato starts

$20 on misc. starts

$20 on misc. seeds

$20 (?) on blueberry bushes
$10 on strawberry plants

...plus the extra water in the water bill, which I haven't yet calculated.


We got soaker hoses and bark mulch for free, and we used our own compost (worm bin) for most of it. So, for about $115 plus water, we got:
- several pounds of strawberries (averaging about 20 per day at the height of the season; we're still getting everbearing and alpine varieties several per day)
- about 10 blueberries - not our best crop!
- several pounds of sugar snap peas
- many pounds of carrots (still some in the ground, picked a big crop today, and we've been picking them at will for months)
- a couple pounds of starburst squash
- five enormous cabbages
- perhaps a dozen onions
- several plants of basil
- 3 cloves of garlic (many didn't grow well, only 3 heads were sizeable enough to use)
- no leeks (didn't grow well)
- two months worth of lettuce
- several pounds of radishes
- enormous quantities of rainbow chard
....and the piece de la resistance.....about 40 pounds of heirloom tomatoes!
The tomatoes are the best part, in my opinion, as they taste so much better than anything from the supermarket. The first ones came in so slowly, one here, one there....and then a couple of weeks ago I picked 13 pounds of them. Today I picked perhaps 20 pounds of them - hurrah! Many are green, so I've spread them on a tray and set them in windows (see picture of our kitchen window) and I'm hoping that they'll ripen soon.
In short? I think that our investment paid off handsomely, and I'm proud of myself. I'm delighted that Tessa is learning a connection with the earth and how to grow food, and I'm proud of the frugal elements, too. The tomatoes cost about $15 to plant, and I harvested over $100 worth (and I'm ashamed to say that many of them rotted before I picked them today - the colder/damper weather got to them....live and learn for next year), so that alone was worth the investment. Fortunately, our family likes tomatoes!

And now, I'm going to roast some tomatoes for use this winter. Simple pasta with tomato sauce will taste so much better to me remembering where the tomatoes came from. :-)

2 comments:

*susan* said...

Kristina,

Green tomatoes are a given here in New England, and for generations, women have sweat in their cool Fall kitchens making green tomato relish. This is _SO_ good. You serve it on the side as a relish, or my favorite, in a turkey sandwich.

Use the Joy of Cooking... I like more vinegar and less sugar. Next weekend, I will harvest all the remaining tomatoes. Winter is on its way.

Or I can post the recipe if you want.

Love ya'

Anonymous said...

I envy your tomato crop! The deer ate ours this year...just as they were ripening on the vine. Bummer. But, I figure that the deer were here first, so it is just the way it is sometimes. Hey, we got two great big pumpkins! This is the first time we got anything other than leaves from our pumpkin attempts. When we cut back the pumpkin leaves we "found" succulant cucubers (I forgot we planted them). So much to be thankful for, eh? Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (8 more days!)