Our Happy Acres

Cherry Tomato Salsa

Jun 29th, 2010 by Villager

Last week found us with a quart or so of cherry tomatoes but no ripe large tomatoes, which is not a bad thing for the last week of June. I cooked up a pot of black beans to go with some tacos and the meal plan just begged for salsa. So, I decided to make some salsa using the cherry tomatoes.

We had Sungold and Sweet Baby Girl tomatoes, as well as some onions and cilantro, and I found a small but usable serrano pepper in the garden. I added a bit of crushed garlic, a little lime juice and a dash of salt. The natural sweetness of the cherry tomatoes contrasted nicely with the tartness of the lime juice and the heat of the pepper. And other than the salt and the lime, it all came fresh from the garden.

This salsa is quick and easy to make and a nice change from more traditional tomato salsas. We like a little garlic in our salsa but if you don’t, leave it out.

Cherry Tomato Salsa

Print This Recipe
A Happy Acres Original

1 pt cherry tomatoes, quartered
2 tbsp onions, finely chopped
1 jalapeno (or serrano) pepper, diced
1 clove garlic, minced in press
1 dash salt
1 tbsp cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp lime juice

1. Mix tomatoes, onion and pepper in a bowl. Add garlic, salt, cilantro and lime juice, stir to combine.

2. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes to let flavors combine.

Servings: 8

Nutrition Facts
Nutrition (per serving): 11 calories, 1 calories from fat, <1g total fat, 0mg cholesterol, 23.4mg sodium, 100.4mg potassium, 2.5g carbohydrates, <1g fiber, <1g sugar, <1g protein, 4mg calcium, 0g saturated fat.

Tags: peppers, tomatoes

Posted in Recipes | 4 Comments »

Harvest Monday: Garlic and More

Jun 28th, 2010 by Villager

The big harvest item for the week was garlic, though it isn’t reflected in the totals. I won’t weigh it until it has cured and I can get it trimmed up for storage. All of the garlic is harvested now except for a silverskin variety called Silver White that is still not quite ready. I hung it all up in the basement to cure. The basement is warm and dry this time of year, with a dehumidifier there to control the moisture.

I’m not sure which smells better to me – the garlic drying in the basement or Lynda’s lavender drying in the garage! The garlic aroma is definitely stronger.

The early cherry tomatoes are really coming on now. I experimented and planted two Sungold plants in one cage this year. No wonder they are going nuts! The ones in the bowl are a mix of Sungold and Sweet Baby Girl. We have other small fruited varieties that are just now starting to ripen, but so far no slicers are turning yet. It won’t be long. We got enough of these two to make some cherry tomato salsa.

It’s also blackberry season around here. We got the first real harvest this week. I filled up the quart container below and had to go back for the gallon bucket! We wound up with about a half gallon total, weighing a little over 3 pounds.

The varieties planted are Apache, Arapaho, and Triple Crown (all thornless). I think the Triple Crown berries have the best flavor, but the Apache have been the biggest. The berries in the photo below are all Apache, and the largest weighs 13 grams! They are sweet and juicy as well as big.

Apache blackberries

Some of them found their way into this cobbler my wife baked. Mmm, nothing like a fresh blackberry cobbler! If you’re interested, the recipe she used can be found here. The rest we froze for use later. And we get more blueberries almost daily, many of which go in our morning smoothies.

We continue to get a lot of side shoots on the broccoli, and I harvested two big heads of cabbage that weighed 4 pounds apiece. I donated them to the shelter when we took our church produce there on Saturday. I’m also pulling onions as I need them. It won’t be long now until many of them are ready to harvest. And the summer squash is still producing well (over 11 pounds this week), including a big zucchini that was lurking under the foliage. It went into some zucchini bread I baked. I love those flecks of green in the bread! I donated a lot of the squash too.

I made a stir fry with some of the broccoli, scallions, yellow squash and a little bit of sirloin steak. It’s so nice to have fresh veggies to throw into those spur of the moment dishes!

I also ‘harvested’ another possum in the trap and took it to the retirement village. I didn’t get a photo of it like I did the last one. Isn’t that the way it is – the first ones get all the attention!

All total we harvested 38 pounds of fruit and vegetables this week, bringing our yearly total to 230 pounds.

To see more harvests, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions

Tags: blackberries, blueberries, garlic, tomatoes, zucchini

Posted in Gardening | 31 Comments »

Tomato Supports

Jun 25th, 2010 by Villager

I’m using two different systems of supporting tomatoes here this year. For the majority of the plants I’m using cages I made from 5ft tall concrete reinforcing wire. The cages are all either 22 or 24 inches wide (72 inch or 78 inch diameter). The cost per cage in 2008 was about $5, and they should easily last 10 years or more.

The openings in these cages are 6 inches square, which makes it very easy to get even the biggest tomatoes out. Also, you can use any opening to get your hand/arm into the interior, which comes in handy for small fruited varieties like this Sungold that will have tomatoes everywhere.

In the photo below there are two cages shown, with Sweet Baby Girl on the left and Sungold on the right. They are growing out the top of the cages, and it is time to prune the ends of the vines. That is the only pruning I do on the caged tomatoes. Every few days I work the vines to make sure they are staying inside the cages. If a shoot escapes I try and work it back into the cage without breaking it. If I can’t, I pinch it off.

For me, growing them in cages is the easiest method I have found. The yields can be very high, and the fruits are protected from sunscald and cracking. However, the tomatoes will be somewhat later to ripen when grown this way, plus there is the need to store the cages somewhere. I usually just leave them in the garden spot all year. But it’s not good to use these cages on short determinate varieties, since they tend to not be supported very well and end up mostly on the ground. That led me to explore other training methods.

The other method I’m using this year is the stake and weave system. I’m using this on 7 paste tomato plants. These are a mix of both indeterminate growers like Big Mama, Amish Paste and San Marzano and determinate varieties like Health Kick and Viva Italia.

I’ve got three metal t-posts sunk in the ground at 8 foot intervals to hold the vines. Between the metal posts I have two 5/8″ diamater bamboo stakes. I’ve run plastic baler twine down the row three times so far, with the first run about 8-10 inches from the ground and the others about 6 inches apart. The bamboo stake isn’t supporting much weight, and the twine doesn’t grip it very well, but it’s what I had available. Wooden stakes or even lengths of concrete rebar driven into the ground are good choices for this method. I’ll probably buy a few pieces of rebar for next year.

This system results in earlier fruit, but sunscald can be a problem. Also, it will be difficult to remove the metal posts at the end of the season. I rotate the crops in the vegetable garden, so I can’t just leave it in place.

So, the jury is still out on how successful this system will be when all factors are taken into consideration. I’ve never really liked tying tomato vines to individual stakes, so the stake and weave method is an interesting alternative. We used this method successfully at our MG vegetable garden last year where it was used to support about half the tomatoes (the other half being caged). The proof is in the pudding as the saying goes, or in this case it will be in the tomato sauce!

Tags: Gardening, tomatoes

Posted in Gardening | 9 Comments »

Hot Harvest Monday

Jun 21st, 2010 by Villager

There’s only one way to describe the weather here lately, and that’s HOT-T-T! High temps are supposed to be in the mid 90s all week, hitting 96F today. That has meant gardening chores have to be done as early as possible in the day. It has to be bad on tomato pollination, but only time will tell how bad it really is.

And speaking of tomatoes, we got our first taste this week, a couple of Sungolds and a Sweet Baby Girl harvested on June 17th. There were others ready later in the week, but these first three were special. My wife and I shared them. These were from early plants I got in the ground on 4/14.

Here’s what the harvest bucket looked like last week with a cucumber joining Purple Queen beans, broccoli side shoots and yellow squash.

I harvested almost 3 pounds of Purple Queen bush beans. We cooked a batch of them to eat, and froze the rest. I put some of them in freezer bags along with zucchini, cabbage and onions and froze them for making minestrone soup later on.

Purple Queen bush beans

The onions were some of the Super Star plants I set out last fall. They weighed in at about 4 ounces each – not huge, but tasty and much appreciated in the kitchen where last year’s crop is long gone!

I also harvested some nice Fun Jen greens from the greenhouse, before they melted from the heat. We had them in an Oriental Chicken Salad, mixed with a little lettuce.

Fun Jen greens

We continue to get nice harvests of side shoots from the various broccoli varieties. These are from Piracicaba. I’ve been freezing all the broccoli we can’t eat.

I sauteed some of the yellow squash with a bit of olive oil and added some fresh basil from the herb garden. It made for a quick and easy side dish.

No critters were ‘harvested’ this week, but I did see a rabbit hiding out in the raspberry patch. It better behave, or I’ll do my Mr McGregor impersonation!

All total we harvested 21 pounds of veggies this week, making our yearly total 193 pounds. For more gardener’s harvests, visit Daphne’s Dandelions.

Tags: Asian greens, beans, broccoli, cucumber, onions, tomatoes

Posted in Gardening | 22 Comments »

Church Garden Update

Jun 20th, 2010 by Villager

Our church garden is coming along nicely now, producing our first harvests last week. We took squash and cukes to two different organizations. The harvests are still small, but they will grow in size as the plants get bigger. All of the produce from this garden will go to food pantries and meal programs in our area.

We are going to support these tomatoes with a stake and weave system. We are planning to drive the wooden stakes this afternoon and begin weaving the twine. We’ve already driven in metal t-posts at the ends of each row. We have about 100 tomato plants here. The first row is planted in Celebrity and Mountain Spring varieties (shorter vines) and the other two rows are a mix of Better Boy, Whopper, Early Girl, Ramapo and Jetsonic. The indeterminate varieties will have to be pruned more heavily.

The squash are looking good, a mix of yellow straightneck, crookneck, and zucchini. We have about 100 plants.

The squash plants are loaded with blooms and baby squashes.

In another plot (about 30ftx50ft) we have the cucumbers and green beans. These were planted a bit later because the ground was slower to dry out. We’ve got a nice stand of bush beans coming up.

We are hoping to plant some turnips and collard greens for a fall crop, after we pull the bean plants. Our goal is to partner with several agencies and try to tailor the crops we grow to fit their needs. There’s no point in growing a vegetable if no one is going to eat it! We’ve already had one good suggestion for a crop, and that’s okra. It’s easy enough to grow in our climate, though it does need regular harvesting. We will probably plant it next year if the garden continues.

Tags: cucumber, food, food pantry garden, squash, tomatoes, volunteering

Posted in Gardening | 6 Comments »

Bloom Day – June 2010

Jun 17th, 2010 by Villager

I’m a couple of days late for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, a long running meme started by Carol at May Dreams Gardens, but I still want to share some photos of what’s blooming around Happy Acres in mid-June.

This Gloriosa daisy is a favorite of many pollinators. We set out a few plants in the slope garden in 2008, and we’ve had daisies popping up ever since!

Inside the greenhouse I’ve got this Dwarf Singapore pink plumeria blooming. It’s the first of my small plumeria collection (4 plants) to reach the blooming stage. I’ve loved the sight and smell of plumerias ever since I visited Hawaii and saw the huge, fragrant ones they grow there.

This white Echinacea in the slope garden is also visited often by pollinators and butterflies.

Here’s a more familiar Echinacea color, with a bumblebee admirer.

The pink yarrow is a dependable bloomer for us, and the deer don’t bother it either.

In the vegetable garden, the blossoms on this Purple Queen green bean are very ornamental, but the beans are beautiful and tasty as well.

This Stokes’ Aster flower is just starting to open up, and already a bee is checking it out.

This frittilary butterfly was checking out all the coneflowers.

The Blue Angel hosta is blooming in the shade garden. This is one that has so far escaped the nibbling deer. I love the way it looks in the dappled light, growing at the base of the giant mulberry tree.