The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

Its been a very mild (some would say non-existent) summer in the Northwest.  Add to this the fact that tomatoes are notoriously hard to grow here anyway and I am surprised we have anything to show from our tomato starts this year.  We had good luck last year growing our tomatoes in the hoop house.  This year, however, not much has grown out back, but we’ve had great luck with the cherry tomato plant in our front bed.  Who knows why it did so well.  We assumed it got a lot of radiant heat from the concrete stairs behind it, but what to we know?

Its great to be able to go outside grab a handful of tomatoes when a meal arrives.  I actually do not really like raw tomatoes (shudder, gasp – gardener treason!) but my kids love them.  Tonight for dinner I grabbed a cucumber, a handful of tomatoes and a bowl of blackberries (courtesy of our neighbor’s out of control bushes that are trailing over the fence) and had dinner.  Of course the protein of tonight’s dinner was frozen chicken nuggets, but no one’s perfect right?  Anyway it seems everyday there is another harvest of tomatoes to serve up and we may have permanently found a new place for our heat loving plants.

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Getting desperate for blueberry uses, I turned to the index of the trusty Bell Complete Book of Home Preserving that Alicia mentioned in the last post. Blueberry Bonanza? Spreadable Blueberries? Blueberry Nectarine Freezer Jam? I opted for the Blueberry-Basil Vinegar.

Just mash together equal parts white wine vinegar and fresh blueberries, add some basil, and put it in a jar for a couple weeks. The jury is still out on whether this is a good idea… Alicia is looking at the fruit flies buzzing around it disapprovingly.

Blueberry-Basil Vinegar

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In addition to tomatoes we picked blueberries as a family in Yakima.  It was the end of the season and the field wasn’t really even open, but one of the workers let us pick after warning us there was not much left.  We were impressed by his sense of “not much” since we had no problem filling two large buckets in about 30 minutes.  That doesn’t even include the dozens eaten by our kids.  The best part was that he only charged us $1 a pound.  We picked 10 lbs and have been eating them steadily, however it was clear we were going to need to do some preserving.

We approach canning for a practical standpoint.  Whatever will attract the most fruit flies is attacked first, hence the tomatoes canned on Sunday.  Blueberries are the next priority.  Yesterday I made a blueberry pie (with lard crust) and today it was syrup.  We are so overloaded with jams and jellies I am having to try different ideas for fruits.  Pancakes are a regular breakfast food around here so I figured syrup would get used up fairly quickly (like before next summer).  It’s also pretty easy.  Just crush and boil blueberries, run them through a food mill and then boil again with sugar water.

I used 8 cups of blueberries and got 5 pints worth, which seems pretty good. I used the proportions in the Ball canning book which I recommend.  We got it from the library last season and I added it to my Christmas list soon after.  Its a great book for coming up with ideas and it has all the basic info you’ll ever need as well.   Tomorrow I may make blueberry juice or I might  just freeze the rest for winter cobblers.

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We took our annual trip to Yakima this weekend to taste wine, stay in a hotel with a pool, and buy a bunch of produce. Our favorite place to buy veggies over the last few years has been Imperial’s, who have a new, larger location this year, right next to their fields. We picked tomatoes and paid 25 cents a pound… that’s over 40 lbs. of tomatoes for $11.00. Plus, as the pictures show, the kids got a kick out of the whole thing.

We got home, and knew that if we waited, the project would loom over us all week, so we dove right in, canning them less than 12 hours after we picked them. We cooked down a bunch into a thicker sauce for pizzas, and canned the rest of them raw. The only downside to that method was the 45 minute processing time required for uncooked tomatoes.

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We recently remodeled our kitchen, and the photos have been piling up and not getting posted. So here are a few shots of making strawberry freezer jam earlier this summer.

One of the most memorable flavors (and colors – that red is so vivid) from my childhood is this very jam, made not from a secret recipe but from the back of the pectin box. Funny how often I ask my mom for a recipe and she says, “Buy a packet of onion soup mix – it’s on the back.”

I can’t help but overload a peanut butter and jam sandwich with too much of this tasty jam, the peanut butter preventing it from finding purchase on one side of the bread, so instead it runs down my fingers and I’m forced to wolf it down in 4 bites. It’s safest to eat it over the sink if you don’t want to have jam all over your shirt as well.

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