Tuesday, August 30, 2011

As August Ends...

As August comes to a close, I realize that I need to get on uploading pictures. I don't know what my problem is when it comes to doing such a simple task...

Also, my tomatoes are finally starting to produce enough to make salads, pizzas, sauces, and have enough left over to freeze. My one recommendation when freezing tomatoes is to boil them for about a minute and slip the skins off FIRST before freezing. If you try to make sauce out of frozen tomatoes that you never took the skins off, you will have curly skins floating around your sauce as it cooks...you could do that and just pick the skins out as you see them, but I'm trying to be more proactive this year! It really was a pain to find them all...

zukes and most of the green beans are slowing down production so I will be pulling them up this week. I've started a few seeds - lettuce, broccoli, swiss chard, peas - and the rest I will direct seed - carrots, turnips and kohlrabi(first season for me), and maybe some collards. I have to remember to save some room for the garlic that I ordered from seedsavers!

Monday, August 15, 2011

Check on your corn!


Wow, after seeing my corn stalks turn red and the ears on my stalks feeling "empty", I decided to pick one yesterday morning, and I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it with my own eyes...There were yellow corn on them cobs!!!

Well, some of them were just pure starch then since I thought I wasn't picking any corn this year but some were out of this world sweet! I wish I picked most of them sooner! I don't know, but for some reason, I believed that due to unseasonable cool weather and the fact that my ears never had that "filled out" feel to them, I would be just chopping down my stalks and putting them in the compost.

To my delight, I picked 10 ears, boiled as much as was still rather edible, and cut them down to corn kernels. Yum! If you've never had fresh corn picked from your yard and eaten within seconds of harvest, you've never had real corn. I urge anyone to try it at least once!