Harvest Monday

It would be so, so simple to just kvetch about how badly gardening is going. First, there was the interference of Nursing school in 2017-2018, then there was the interference of NCLEX preparation and going to work as a nurse to wipe out the rest of 2018, and 2019’s summer garden was crushed by really wet, cold, terrible weather, illness, and stress.

But nevertheless, I persisted.

I got some help with my garden from friends and family, who surely recognized that I was going to be Immensely Irritated If There Were No Good Tomatoes For Yet Another Year. The weather is impediment enough; everything is behind, and I am spending these last few days of July trying to get the last of the summer seeds planted for the possibility of a fall crop. I expect the rest of the garden wankery should be spent on another post, and I will just talk about what I harvested last week!

Gooseberries

A perfect , glowing berry of sweet-tart deliciousness.

I finished harvesting the last of the gooseberries. They don’t have an exceptionally long season, so it’s not like I’ve been picking them for months. Instead, I harvested them over two sessions, spending about three hours each time, and getting a total of about 2.5 gallons of berries. I’ve been looking for awesome new ways to save my gooseberries, and there is bound to be a lot of chutneys and so forth coming out of the canner in the near future.  I  made more gooseberry jam than we could eat the last time I made it, so it’ll be a while before I make it again. I am, however, saving one portion out for fresh eating, because I love the puckery goodness of these things.  I’ve canned some pints so far, plain things, just the berries in a light syrup, but the jars are still cooling as I type. This is the first time I canned them just as berries in syrup, and I learned a lesson; I should really hot pack them.  These 8 cold-packed pints I just finished? They need to reabsorb their liquid and settle back to their plump sizes; right now, they just look like squished up beach balls floating around in red stuff.

That won’t matter one whit when we are enjoying gooseberry cobbler this winter, but it isn’t very photogenic now.

Tomatoes

Yes, that tomato is supposed to be the color of a clay pot.

I’ve been pulling off cherry tomatoes a little bit at a time for the past couple of weeks, mostly the Sweet Millions and Sunsugars. I noticed my Sweet Million (a hybrid cherry that I tried specifically because it was supposed to produce a-mega-mazing amounts of tomatoes) just was not very productive, and I was disappointed.

Well, disappointed until I learned that my neighbor was eating them as soon as they ripened. I don’t begrudge him, he helps me out a lot. Unfortunately, I noticed that whiteflies have shown up, which is just another problem in a growing season that has been really awful. Once they show up, it is all a struggle to kill them before they kill my ‘maters. Most years, I have had some tomato success by the time they show up, but this year was terrible–as I have already emphasized, and will probably emphasize again. Did I tell you it was terrible this spring and early summer? No? Well, let me tell you, it was terrible. 

Anyway, I have at last had my first full sized tomato, a unique heirloom called Thorburn’s Terra-Cotta, which was tasty without being remarkable. I’d certainly grow it again, whereas I am unlikely to grow Sweet Million again, because it tastes like a hybrid, which is to say, I suppose, that it tastes like anything I can get at the store. The Thorburn’s Terra-Cotta tastes like something I can’t get at the store without being exceptionally sweet or exceptionally tomato-y. Just good.

Lovage

Even the humble umbel can be gloriously photogenic. I’d hang that on my wall. 

Lovage is one of the most dependable of my perennial foods. I’ve been harvesting the leaves for months now (unlike those gooseberries), and when the seed heads are finished, I will cut it back and get more leaves and tender stalks. I hardly buy celery any more. Lovage takes its place. I use the seeds in place of celery seed, and every year I harvest more than I can use. It’s a generous plant.

See other Harvest Monday posts via Happy Acres!