It is over

Or mostly anyhow. Here in upstate NY, except for cleanup and planting garlic the garden season ended with a whimper when it got just cold enough to nip all the tomatoes even though they were covered. The whimper was mine. I love puttering in the garden and am already suffering deprivation.

Soon I will start some lettuce seed in flower pots. It won't be too long before it is time to start next year's geraniums. However for now I will just look out at the bare, too wet to work on earth and be grouchy. Bah humbug!

Tomatoes

Lots of them this summer. I am boiling them up into something that can either be finished as a red sauce or made into soup. They are about as good as I have ever grown.

The best variety this year is cluster grande. They produce five or six perfect tomatoes per stem and taste wonderful. They make up the main ingredient of my sauce as there are so many of them. I just add seasonings and simmer....then strain out the seeds and skins. We made pasta with some last week and loved it. Tastes a lot like Campbells tomato soup without all the salt and sugar.

Poor neglected blog

You would think from the number of posts here that nothing has been happening in the Northview Dairy farm garden. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This year we have had the best garden in years. It sure has been fun to take care of it.


We have had lots of potatoes with more to dig. A certain amount of potato scab and some hollow ones showed up, but they taste incredibly good. Lots of tomatoes, zucchini (although never enough) the best crop of sweet corn in a decade, carrots, herbs, hot peppers, giant sunflowers, a few beans and peas...man we have been eating like kings.




Liz and I have been putting up all we can. We need to get some paper bags for the rest of the potatoes. We would like to get out and pick some raspberries at the pick your own up the road, but time is an issue (there is the reason for no posts...time). Soon we will get a frost and the fall apples will ripen up. Then we will make some jelly I hope. I add cinnamon to my apple jelly, which makes it much more interesting in flavor. This year I am going to spice some with the seasonings you would normally put in apple pie...hopefully resulting in apple pie jelly......imagine apple pie on toast......yummmmmmm.


This summer I have been dabbling in saving seeds. I have always saved 4-o'clock seeds and a few other flowers, but this year I saved lettuce, giant sunflower, and hyssop seeds and am going to try to get some seeds from the vegetable marrows. It was such a great year for the garden that we even got a nice crop of acorn squash out of the compost bin.
I hate to see the season end!

Herbs for Soup

The 17th of June and I am making soup. For the past two weeks it has been miserably hot most of the time. Now it is downright cold and a warm, hearty supper sounds like a good idea. It is too early for much to be ready in the garden this far north, but there are plenty of herbs. I picked chives, walking onions, orange mint, creeping thyme, woolly thyme and lovage (nice since I am out of celery.) One thing nice about fall is making End of Garden soup, with the odds and ends of whatever is left in the garden. However, at this point the garden isn't even all planted.

Lovage, an herb, the leaves of which make a nice substitute for celery in soup

Rhubarb Season

Rhubarb always reminds me of my Grandpa Lachmayer. He had a big patch behind his house and all the grandkids loved to get a handful of sugar from Grandma and a stalk of rhubarb from him and then crunch away at the tangy treat. The less sugar you used the more macho you were (not that we had ever heard of macho at that point in time.) Later when I became a semi, sorta adult style person I took him pick-up truck loads of well composted horse manure to make it grow better. You would have thought I was bringing him solid gold by his reaction and I had plenty to spare.




Now the house, the patch, and the dear grandparents are all gone. (Although I have a picture of grandpa on my kitchen wall and I know he watches me from it...I can feel it. So I talk to him in my mind all the time.)




The rhubarb lives on, though, in family patches at several homes. All but one plant of my bed came from his stock and I know my mom has some.

Rhubarb Crisp

3 cups diced rhubarb
1 cup granular sugar
3 T flour
1 1/2 t cinnamon

*** combine and spread in lightly greased baking dish

Topping

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup oatmeal
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 t cinnamon

***combine until crumbly and spread over base

***Bake at 375 degrees for approximately 45 minutes. I have had this recipe for way over twenty years and I take great liberties with it as to amounts of ingredients. (It is very forgiving.) In fact I generally just cut up enough rhubarb to fill my biggest baking dish...certainly more than three cups and then cobble up enough topping to cover it. Cinnamon I just dump in. I like it...how can I go wrong with lots? I froze four cups for winter use too and I think I am going to try making rhubarb jam. I found a recipe that sounds good and we have a pretty good amount left so......