Monday's harvest: 36 pounds of tomatoes and 8 pounds of Hungarian Hot Wax peppers picked on last Monday became 25 gorgeous quarts of canned salsa (23.66 liters). Plus there's 2 more jars in the fridge for cooking and eating with chips. Yay! Salsa!
It took 2 days to can that much salsa. Whew, am I tired. There's still a ton of hot peppers in the freezer, so I might have to can more salsa in a few weeks. And there's even more growing on the plants which may just end up as pickles.
Tuesday's harvest: A zucchini that grew huge overnight. It must have swelled with the torrential rain, without the tomatoes it looks like a baby cradled in a basket. I also went through the garden looking for tomatoes that were missed on Monday, the greenish ones are Big Zebra and are actually nice and ripe.
Saturday's harvest: Cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, and a gigantic pile of okra! The green little orbs are actually round eggplants, which I've seen my great aunty use in Thai coconut curry soup.
On Sunday I started a 20 day sweet pickle recipe! It took every cucumber I've been collecting for 2 weeks to fill this gallon jar (3.8 liters), and yet there's still room. Next time I won't give away so many cucumbers.
I also picked some pole beans on Friday and Saturday but the husband immediately sauteed them for dinner with onion, garlic, chicken stock, and a little sugar till caramelized. Which he served with pork cooked with salsa one day and chicken cooked with salsa the next, served on rice. Delicious.
This week's harvest:
43.77 pounds tomatoes
8.02 pounds hot peppers
3.96 pounds zucchini
2.90 pounds eggplant
2.72 pounds cucumber
1.88 pounds okra
1.03 pounds sweet peppers
Totals: 64.28 pounds of vegetables
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Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions where wildly obsessive gardeners share their stories and weekly harvests.
22 comments:
Amazing stash of salsa and pretty baskets of produce. Well done!
Thanks Louise! It is such a pleasure to stash away so much food. I am going to give your tomato jam recipe a try in a couple weeks.
Everything looks beautiful! The pickles look yummy that's a big jar of pickles.
It's definitely looking like summer at your place. I wish I had your stamina to make 25 quarts of salsa. I wish I just had that many tomatoes.
Impressive amount of salsa there and it looks delicious. What do you use for the acid component? I'm still waiting on the tomatoes to ripen so I can make a few pints of salsa.
I made a little salsa. I would love to have 20 quarts! We would definitely eat it all, because we love it. Congrats. Great harvests.
Fantastic harvest and all that canning. I am still waiting for my slicing tomatoes to show a bit of color, hope soon.
That's a lot of salsa! I'm at that point where I have too many tomatoes to eat fresh, but not enough to can. I just keep making marinara sauce and freezing what doesn't get eaten.
Whoa, that's a lot of salsa, Phuong! Your aunt's Thai curry using those little green eggplants just gave me an idea for my green tomatoes. Plus I have a lot of Thai basil. Btw, I love all your ceramic creations!
Thank you! It's the first time I have ever made cucumber pickles and I'm very excited, hopefully they will taste delicious.
Oh my, I'm so glad that my zucchini don't grow that fast! And what a stash of salsa, very impressive, and so much work. I'm sure it will be a welcome taste of summer on a cold winter day.
It makes me so happy to have that much salsa stashed away! I actually use white vinegar in my salsa. It's a recipe from my sister in-law that also uses tomato paste as a thickening agent, the recipe is almost exactly like one I saw in a canning book at a library years ago which calls for anaheim, jalapeno, and a small amount of serrano peppers.
I love having jars and jars of it around! Salsa is so much more expensive than tomato sauce, so I think it is very cost effective for us to can our own.
This year's garden was planned specifically for salsa canning, so there are a lot of tomato plants probably between 50-60.
You have had some crazy weather and flooding rain, so I am sure that affects ripening.
Thank you! It did take a couple days to recover from the canning marathon. Tomatoes do seem to take forever to color up in the beginning, I spent weeks gently squeezing tomatoes to see how far along they were.
That in between place for tomato harvests when there's too much but not enough, is difficult because ripe tomatoes are so perishable. Your tomato plants are huge and they look loaded down with fruit, I'm sure your tomato flush is coming soon.
Holy moly...60+ pounds in one week in July! Oh, to have your climate just for a season would be so much fun! Congrats on all those tomatoes! Absolutely wonderful!
WOW! that's a lot of salsa! I'm sure this is going to be first large canning weekend for us as well, with tomatoes coming in very fast.
Thank you, we have a lot of fun making ceramic pottery.
Green tomatoes in curry sounds lovely! I would love to be able to get basil to reseed itself here.
I made the eggplant curry yesterday and it was excellent! The round green eggplants do need to be picked smaller, they were a bit seedy at the size I was picking them. But interestingly enough their texture is completely different than other eggplants, they don't get mushy like normal eggplant.
I had forgotten the amount of work that goes into canning salsa, but it is so worth it!
You have been getting a tremendous amount of zucchini since April, from just two plants!
Thank you! We do have long hot summers which are perfect for warm weather crops. Although it's difficult to grow spring crops unless they can be wintered over.
Congratulations on your garden being featured in the newspaper! Your garden looks beautiful!
Isn't it fantastic when vegetables start coming on strong, it's the start of the canning season! I have been thinking about what I should can next, but I'm leaning towards more salsa because we still have so many hot peppers.
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