Not kidding about that. It is how I dealt with what we needed to do.
Patti’s parents came over around 1 pm this afternoon to watch the kids for us. Patti and I needed to head over to the Minnetonka garden and pick tomatoes and green beans, then stop at the grocery store to buy juice boxes for the kids lunches (the one store bought thing I do stick in their lunches every day) and then out to the Ness farm to do harvesting out there.
This is Patti picking green beans. I had a really nice photo of her with the big orange bowl full of beans, but she got to the camera before I was able to download the photos and after seeing the pic, decided she did not like how she looked in the photo and deleted it. <sigh> She looked beautiful. She always does. Oh well. The beans she is picking in the photo above are Earlianna, which I planted where I had pulled garlic in July right before the vacation. They do grow fast. and we ended up with about 4 gallons of them. Not dealing with freezing them this year. We blanched them, and loaded them all onto the dehydrator. That is from a suggestion given me by my friend Michelle who grows a few hours west of me. She says that just like the sweet corn, you can just store these dry and use them in the winter while only needing minimal storage and no refrigeration.
THIS is Kelloggs Breakfast tomato. The plant which ripened fruits much earlier, which were pink, that I did not like, is just an off-type due to an errant seed or a cross that made its way into the packet. THIS tomato tasted very nice and I saved seeds from them which I will happily grow again next year (but not the off-type one).
These are Riesentraube tomatoes. Yesterday we had stopped by Frank’s house because he said he had some peppers for us. That he did. A couple of gallons of Jimmy Nardellos. Frank had picked tomatoes and peppers the other day, said there were a ton more there, and I should go out and pick. We ended up with a gallon of the Riesentraubs, another two gallons of Joe Lauerer, and a mixed bag of Black Trifelle, Kelloggs Breakfast, Cherokee Purple, Bison, Super Canabec, Czech Bush, Summertime Gold Rugose, and a few others I don’t remember.
Frank had only picked from half of the pepper plants. Silly me took a photo of them, but then forgot to pick them.
The early crooknecked mochata squashes are doing really well. One plant was done, and the 4 fruits it ripened were all about 6 pounds apiece. The other plants have larger fruits which have not matured yet, or are from later plantings and are not ready yet. Either way, they are doing great.
After the Minnetonka garden, and the stop at the grocery store, we drove out to the Ness farm. Literally, as soon as we got there, Patti had a call from her parents asking us to come home because the baby wanted her mom. We begged for a half hour so we could get something done out there, and we pulled all of the Hidatsa/Mandan Red Bean plants. That was the only way we could get them all done. We have 5 gallons of pods, and 6 grocery bags of plants we brought home. I put all of the plants needing to be stripped in a kiddie pool out on our deck. I will need to keep turning them so they dry but at least they are not going to rot out in the field. The plants really sprawl, and about half of them were done and mostly dry.
The last thing I did out there is where the photo at the beginning of the blog refers to. The half pill of narcotic painkiller I had taken before we headed out had ceased to overcome the discomfort I was experiencing. I am holding the melons which had ripened since we had last stopped out there which was on Wednesday. I have just been processing everything we don’t eat right away into fruit leather on the dehydrator. The melons taste wonderful, but they do not store for anything. If I want to have a long-storage melon I will have to try growing a different line of melons. Cannot complain about the taste though.
So Patti and I got home. Patti took the baby, I took another narcotic and muscle relaxant, then laid down on ice for a bit. Once everything numbed up I made a fresh red sauce and pasta dinner, processed the tomatoes we had picked into 5 gallons of puree, which, as I type, is now 2.5 gallons of finished sauce waiting to be canned (and it is going to wait until tomorrow). The beans are drying, and as soon as they are done I will get the melons onto the dehydrator. For me, it is the icepack again and then sleep. Early day tomorrow. First day of school for the kids, and poor Nell has to catch a bus an hour earlier than the other two. It will make for a very early, very long morning.
I’ll say this about overwintered container tomatoes: after late October, between the lower temperatures and the shorter daylength, any fruit that forms will take forever to enlarge and ripen, so I have the best look with cherry types and less luck with larger tomatoe which just take forever to ripen in cooler temps. The flavor also is not the same as it is when it develops in hotter weather. Still, I think the flavor and texture of fruit from my own overwintered plants is better than the flavor and texture of grocery store tomatoes. With peppers, there is a big drop in the heat content of hot peppers and I believe they really do need the heat to produce hot peppers. However, if you can keep them alive over the winter, they will flower and set fruit earlier in spring than brand new plants because of their larger, more mature size.
copefarms : i too agree.. i didnt cook a single one of my beans this year me and my 2 1/2 yr old stood there etiang them outta the garden instead there so much better that way. and why cut the small bean why not leave it to grow it would matured after picking some of the other plants and it gets more sun! oh what ever this was kinda boring to watch and not be doing my self instead! great comment post though