The entire week before the weekend involved harvesting. Tomatoes are finally coming in quantity so for dinner I would pick tomatoes out of the home garden, make a pot of red sauce, we would all eat as much as we could, and then I would pack the rest into freezer containers. Doing this throughout the week (yeah, we had different pastas and red sauces 4 days in a row) I put up 10 more meals over and above what we ate.
Friday I worked late at the office, and then headed down to Red Wing. Not a ton I had to do down there, just harvesting of tomatoes, corn & beans. Daylight is waning every day. I changed as soon as I got there and picked until close to 8 pm. It was all corn, primarily Dakota Rainbow Flint corn which is an old Oscar Will variety he selected out of Mandan blue and white flint, which I am growing back together. I did not have much of the unselected Mandan, so I simply interplanted it with the Oscar Will variety. There was no discernable differences in tasseling dates, ear sizes or colors. What I am finding is some odd variations of ears, which though interesting, are going to be excluded from saved seeds for future plantings. Overall it is producing very well though.
There are a number of plants which have set two ears from the same node on the plant. The ears themselves are less than half the size of the ears on the other plants, so together they do not give you as much corn as a single, large, well-shaped ear.
There were a number of ears like the one shown above as well, where they looked quite fat in the husk, but once peeled back revealed up to 5 additional ears growing along the sides of the main ear. Some of them even had a few kernels that appeared to be viable, but these ears too will simply be converted to corn meal and kept out of the future plantings.
Thankfully, this is what the majority of them look like. The cobs are tightly packed with glassy flint seeds, mostly white with some purples and purple speckled kernels. Ear length is 7-9 inches per cob and insect damage (ear worms and the like) is truly minimal. Ear set on the stalks is pretty high and animal damage so far does not exist except for a few stalks which were knocked down either by wind, deer, or me and did not right themselves. Those stalks whose ears are then left close to the ground are being eaten by mice which in and of itself selects against those susceptible to lodging for any reason.
The next morning I picked tomatoes, beans, then headed back towards home. The dwarf tomato plants there are giving up a good number of tomatoes, and I am quite pleased with New Big Dwarf.
The tomatoes are 8 to 14 ounces, the plants resisted the blights and wilt well enough that they produced, and have quite a few more tomatoes to give up. The Czech Bush tomatoes gave up another grocery bag of tomatoes as well.
On the way home I stopped by the garden in Minnetonka I am doing with Frank. He had stopped by much earlier in the week, and now there are a ton of ripe tomatoes in there. I harvested Terhune and San Marzano, for about another 4 gallons of tomatoes, then left Frank a voicemail telling him that I was leaving Joe Lauerer, Reisentraube, and a bunch of larger heirlooms for him to pick and make red sauce. He is gone for the weekend but the tomatoes there should be fine for a few more days. The Purple Podded Pole and Golden of Bacau beans gave up a grocery bag full as well.
Once home I dropped off the tomatoes and beans picked so far, grabbed some more bags, and headed out to the Ness farm garden. The Mandan White Flour corn there, which I had been picking as it dried down, gave up there rest of the harvest. I am quite pleased with it and have quite a bit both for eating and for seed for the next year. The old native reference to it’s name is simply “Soft White” and they vary from 7 to 10 inches long, and 8 rows of nice white kernels.
The tomato plants there have the Ness family swamped in tomatoes now, which is good. I picked from only two plants of Black Trifelle, and from those two found nearly 20 pounds of tomatoes. They add a nice dark red color to red sauces, and taste quite good this year.
Then it was time to head home and start processing.
That evening, and well into Sunday the tomatoes became nearly 4 gallons of finished red sauce, all packed into freezer containers and saved for the winter. Beans were blanched and packed into pint freezer bags for another 20 meals, and the Gnadenfeld cross Michele Lachaume sent me seeds of was cut and happily consumed by my kids out on the deck. I am not great at determining when they are ripe apparently and it was not as sweet as I would prefer, but the 3 kids ate the whole thing at one sitting, so it passed their approval.
I suppose I could have done more this weekend, but other than some puttering in my own yard, picking herbs and digging potatoes, that was as productive as I got.
I took Labor day off. Had not meant to take the whole day off, just the morning. Patti and I went to the Minnesota State Fair, toured all of the agricultural buildings, tried all of the foods we wanted to try and sat by the all-you-can-drink milk stand (for $1) where I consumed in excess of 80 ounces of milk, and Patti had over 40 along with about a pound of chocolate chip cookies. The rest of the day we spent with the kids and neighbors, just playing around and enjoying the last day of the kid’s summer break. Tomorrow is the first day of school, and I need to get the kids up, dressed, fed, lunches made, hair combed, and on the bus by 815 am. We will see how that goes.
