Year of the Garden: Update

The baby lettuces you see in my previous post grew up into an astonishing array of variety in colors and shapes, nice medium-sized heads. I picked them all before the freeze last week. The kale, chard and chicory breeze right through mild freezes near 30 degrees. This was my most successful garden bed. Planted in mid-July, the greens had time to get good sized before frost. We had many servings of delicious thinnings along the way too.

I picked a big bowl of little tomatoes before the frost. My varieties this year were Austin's Red Pear and Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry. Both small and very flavorful. We picked only a dozen ripe ones, with hundreds on the bushes. I covered the plants, but the foliage got zapped anyway. However, the remaining green tomatoes survived, and I picked the rest of them the next day. I have 5 trays of the little guys waiting to ripen up (or give up).

The pumpkin vines did fine, making ten pumpkins. The watermelon and cantaloupe didn't ripen. The beans were a total disaster this year--I think my problem was rabbits or voles eating all the new shoots.

The flowers and herbs in their cement-block pots did wonderfully. They were easy to water. The mint stayed within bounds. And they were so pretty. Hopefully the perennial herbs will overwinter.

I'm now in apple harvest. We have three mature apple trees, variety Delicious, as Delicious used to be: sweet and flavorful. Great keeper in the garage over the winter. Sweet enough to not need any sugar to make applesauce and apple butter. They're also a good cider apple, mixed with bitter-sharp cider apples.

These are Delicious as they were before the plant breeders got to work trying to make them more red. The watery, pithy, flavorless Red Delicious in the stores, mostly from China, are so cheap that U.S. growers have been grubbing out their Red Delicious trees. There is no U.S. market any more.

Delicious need to be allowed to ripen on the tree to get their full flavor. Mine were finally ready to go this week. I've been sampling the last couple of weeks, to make sure they have come into their full flavor. We'll put aside the best into storage boxes, and I'll make applesauce out of the ones with worm damage.

A friend of mine offered to bring a troop of Girl Scouts to help pick. I figured maybe 5 or 6 girls, very much appreciated. Wow! Thirty girls showed up with at least 10 parents. They were scampering around, climbing up in the trees, filling up boxes. In less than an hour they had the trees pretty much picked, and they are big trees, full of apples. The energy of the young is astounding! And the power of community.

Picking apples has been close to an ordeal in previous years, when my DH and I did all the work. It is still fun to pack those beauties away in boxes and give them to friends and neighbors, but it's a lot of work. Now I have the boxes packed, and the girls had fun and took apples home with them. The chickens are enjoying the windfalls.

I didn't get to the wild plums the way I wanted to. I checked when they were not ripe (and VERY sour). Then time got away from me, and they ripened and mostly fell off before I got them picked. They are tasty when very ripe, a lovely dark pink color. Since we're not big jelly eaters, we just eat them fresh, or I freeze a few.

I picked the Greengage plums about a month ago, just as they were dead ripe. I made jam out of them; they are hard to dry, being so sweet. The jam was sweet, spicy and flavorful with just the plums--no sugar required. They're really almost too sweet to eat out of the hand.