Tag: Gardening

Garden Up-Date: Only a short tomato harvest this year

The rain and hail killed my tomatoes and more from the garden

All of a sudden I noticed that all of the tomato plants behind the greenhouse roof are dying and a lot of the tomatoes have Braun spots. I decided to clear these tomatoes out and try to save the still green but ok looking tomatoes. I put these tomatoes on a table at a window in the tiny house, hoping these would ripen. Unfortunately after a few days I noticed that most of the tomatoes turned Braun also, so I trough them in the compost. There are only 2 handfuls left. Luckily I did harvest some red tomatoes to when I cleared out the tomatoes, so I was able to make some tomato ketchup. The process of making the ketchup also gave me some tomato juice. The tomato plants inside the greenhouse roof are still ok, but the tomatoes mostly split before they are ripe.

The, everything overtaking, pumpkin is slowly dying back, but there are several ripping pumpkins on the plant. I am looking forward to try cooking new things beside soup with these.

The red beets are still looking good, but I need to get harvesting and preserving these.

The carrots are looking good, but since I have sown these ratter late they are some what small. Next year I will have to sow a lot of carrots early in the season, because the children keep snacking on them in the garden so none of the carrots I have sown had the change to grow to a descent size.

The chilli plants are doing well and have lots of chillis. I hope these will still turn red. I will have to keep an eye on the wetter. When night frost is expected I will have to harvest these even when they are still green. The paprika on the other hand is going from green to black, what I find very odd.

I will be doing my last green bean harvest of the year and harvest seeds for next year.

The leeks are doing great and the strawberry runners are ready to be planted.

The bush basil did splendid. I had these the first time this year. I just love the smell and taste of basil, but this bush basil tastes very different. Unfortunately I did not like the taste at all, so the bees where very happy with the flowers and they just look pretty and smell nice.

The cabbage outgrew the cover I had over them, so I had to loosen the cover for them to grow on.

We had some visitors lately. This beautiful caterpillar, a hedgehog and two fire belly newts.

To finish of some impressions and flowers from the garden. I even found lavender with some flowers.

Making apple juice and the birds ate my elderberries

Finally the time came to harvest our apples. We hat just finished our last apple juice from for 2 years, so it came just right. Unfortunately the birds ate most of my elderberries, so there are too little left to squeeze for the juice.

We did manage to harvest a crate of elderberries which where combined with apples to reach the volume needed to squeeze for the juice and this juice tastes amazing. It has a nice colour to.

We have so many apples this year that we divided the harvest over 3 times of picking, bringing away and picking up our juice, but finally we have finished this year’s harvest of apples. We have 231 litres of apple juice, which is a lot and will last us longer than the 2 years we need to store for. (These 3 older trees on our property only have a useful amount of apples every 2 years. The other year there are hardly any apples on these trees)

The apple elderberry juice we have 39 litres and I am very happy for that, since it is very good for your health. Next year we have to try to harvest the elderberries before the birds eat all of them.

The juice we get in these 3 Litre bags with a little tap for which we have a box to put them in. I usually do not like to put food or drinks in plastic, but the advantage of these bags is that the juice, after opening a bag, does not turn bad. While using the bag falls together and no air gets in. This way the juice lasts a very long time without fermenting. The apple juice has a bit lighter colour as it did last year and the apple elderberry juice has a very beautiful colour.