Picking Tomatoes Green
The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I are preparing to take down the tomato plants and reset that bed.
MANY of the tomatoes on these plants are still green.
And that’s okay.
We pick them and bring them inside the house to ripen.
In the past, we’ve placed them in a single layer in shallow cardboard boxes (from receiving books from Amazon – grins). We then stack these boxes and glance through them every few days, removing the ripe ones.
A couple years ago, however, the Dear Wonderful Hubby lucked into some discarded also stackable tomato display holders at a grocery store. So we have fancy ripening trays now. (grins)
In our experience, about 95% of the tomatoes, no matter the stage of green or the type, ripen within two months.
Which means we have fresh homegrown tomatoes for the rest of the year! Yes!
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The Hungry Gap
Gardeners often talk about the ‘hungry gap’, the duration between last harvests and first harvests.
Here in Toronto, Canada, that is often between December 1st and April 1st.
In the our household, the tomatoes picked green in November usually ripen over December.
(We also, of course, always have herbs growing indoors.)
Then we enjoy butternut squash for January, March, and April.
This year, we’ll have enough butternut squash to eat one a week during that time. (grins) One butternut squash lasts the two of us two days. That’s a LOT of butternut squash. And it’s a happy challenge to have.
We also have dried beans, of course. And our frozen tomatoes. And anything we buy or bought at the store.
In the Fall/Autumn, boxes of local produce are sold at grocery stores. The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I chop up (or otherwise process) vegetables and freeze them. We always have enough vegetables stored for the ‘hungry gap.’
In the UK and other places, gardeners can often ‘store’ vegetables like kale and beets outside (i.e. just leave those plants in the ground). We get so much snow it is a lot of work for us to do that. Being lazy, I prefer to have the vegetables in the freezer.
Laziness is also why we freeze stuff and don’t can it. Plus it is merely the two of us.
To shorten the ‘hungry gap’, we ensure we have vegetables (usually perennials or self seeders) ready to go in the garden as soon as possible. Peas, bok choy/pak choi, french sorrel, good king henry and other vegetables love the cooler Spring weather. They often emerge/are planted as soon as the ground thaws.
I grew up hungry, not eating every day. I like to have vegetables in the house or in the backyard garden. That makes me happy.
(smiles)
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Gardening – What Did You Not Eat?
When I’m completing a review of a gardening season, I pay special attention to the fruits and vegetables we had excess of and/or didn’t eat.
It makes little sense to devote precious gardening space to fruits and vegetables we don’t want.
This past season, for example, we had a LOT of kale.
Kale is awesome. It is both drought and cold resistant.
And we like kale.
In small quantities.
But we didn’t need to have thirty plants.
So next gardening season, we’ll reduce the amount of kale we plant. We’ll likely swap in swiss chard, which we didn’t have enough of.
What fruit or vegetables did you grow and didn’t eat?
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Gardening – What Could Have Gone Better This Season?
Last week, we talked about what went right this gardening season.
This week, let’s talk about the challenges.
What could have gone better? Which crops failed? What will we change during the next gardening season?
In the Sax garden, our eggplants failed. Many of the plants were immediately devoured by slugs and insects. The few plants that survived didn’t grow quickly enough to produce fruit.
In 2027, we plan to plant nasturtiums as a ground cover around the eggplants. We hope that these flowers will act as trap crops, distracting the slugs and insects away from the eggplants.
Our asparagus was also decimated, which was a challenging loss to accept as we had been waiting for years for that first asparagus harvest. Even the professional growers in our area lost their plants so I don’t think we could have done anything differently to save them.
We will be starting asparagus from seed in 2027. We’re hoping this will make them a bit tougher. And it is more economical in case we have another loss.
What were your gardening challenges this season?
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Gardening – What Went Right This Season?
It is nearing the end of the growing season here in Toronto, Canada, and one of the things I like to do at this time of year is think about everything that went right this season.
Some successes were planned.
The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I focused on adding perennials to the garden and most of them did very well. They are adding a base of plant life that will return every year, whether we tend to them or not. I can see how this will build to create a fuller and more resilient garden.
Some things were happy accidents, however.
A butternut squash volunteer grew in a place I hadn’t thought of adding one to. And it covered up a bare unsightly strip of ground that had been bothering me for years. We will definitely plant another butternut squash there purposefully next year!
What went right for you this gardening season?
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Gardens Build
The first year the Dear Wonderful Hubby and I had our backyard garden, it looked a bit…bare. It was mostly tomato plants and marigolds and nothing was planted between those tomato plants.
The second year, we had the tomato plants and the marigolds but we also added raspberries a perennial and some perennial flowers and a few more annual vegetables.
The third year, the raspberries and the perennial flowers returned. We didn’t have to plant them. So instead, we planted some more perennials, along with the tomatoes, marigolds, and other annuals.
The fourth year, those perennials came back also. So we added more perennials.
Years later, our garden is quite full. We have a base of perennials that come back whether we’re out in the garden or not. And we also have some plants that self seed. (We need to manage that a bit better which I will talk about in another post.)
Gardens build. They become fuller every year.
If this is your first year gardening, don’t get discouraged. Your garden will likely be fuller next year!
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Gardening – Collecting Leaves And Preparing For Drought
I heard somewhere that 1 molecule of organic matter in our soil has the ability to hold onto 4 molecules of water.
Which is VERY good information to have.
Because the possibility of drought increases every year as climate change progresses.
And it is super easy and often free to add organic matter to the soil.
In my corner of the world, for example, leaves are plentiful. The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I collect as many as we can (from our yard and from the school yards) and we cover our garden beds with them. We also store them in the chicken wire ‘bins’ we’ve set up on a dark never-walked-upon part of the yard. They break down into gorgeous leaf mold. And we add leaves to our compost bins.
Kitchen vegetable and fruit waste can be turned into compost either in a compost bin or simply in a hole dug and afterwards covered up in the garden. This is simple and easy to do.
Used coffee grounds, obtained for free from neighborhood coffee shops, can be spread over lawns and garden beds and put in compost bins.
There are a gazillion free ways to add organic matter to our soil. And this could very much make the difference between our plants surviving or perishing next growing season.
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Expect To Share The Harvest
It has been a challenging year…for every being, including insects and other little critters.
There has been fire and drought and floods and unstable temperatures and weather.
Insects and other creatures in the Northern Hemisphere know winter is coming. They worry, like us humans, that it will be challenging one.
So expect some of your harvest to be stolen or devoured or claimed as a winter home.
This is part of gardening and part of sharing this wonderful world with other lifeforms.
(smiles)
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Plant Salad Greens
It is not too late in many areas (including mine up here in Toronto, Canada) to plant another round of salad greens, specifically lettuce. Lettuce also loves the cooler temperatures so it should do well.
With all the salad green related outbreaks this year, growing our own is especially useful.
We know we’re not spreading feces over our garden beds. At least, I hope we know that. (big eyes) And we know we’re washing those already cleaner greens when we harvest them. We have more control over what we’re eating.
I suspect this will become more and more important as the world around us changes.
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Growing Grapes And Being The Best
The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I added grapes to the garden this year.
The Dear Wonderful Hubby has always wanted to grow them so we’re making that dream come true. (smiles)
There are a lot of guidelines and ‘rules’ around growing grapes. The grower must have a certain trellis. They must prune the vines a certain way. They must protect the grape plants from the cold or the heat or drought or too much rain or…
These rules were off-putting and they were why we delayed getting grapes for so long.
But then I watched a video in which the gardener said he basically allowed his grapes to run a bit wild. He said he grows them to have a few grapes to eat and doesn’t mind if they have variable flavor and/or sweetness.
This changed everything.
The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I also don’t care if our grapes have variable flavor and/or sweetness.
We’re not growing these grapes for wine.
We’re growing them for eating (eventually. It will be years before we get any grapes to do this.). Maybe if we have a lot of grapes, we might juice some, make a glass of grape juice for the Dear Wonderful Hubby.
We realized we didn’t need to be ‘perfect’ at growing grapes. We could merely do what we reasonably do
Being the best isn’t necessary. This applies to almost every field but especially gardening.
We do what we can reasonably do.
And we try to have some fun while doing it.
(smiles)
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