Tomatoes and Salsa

The growing season is nearing it's end. We have had a great year, filled with learning experiences. We have made plans for the future on how to expand our growing space. We have had successes and failures, and look forward to the rest that winter will bring as we prepare for next spring. 

Rather than try to write a long post detailing all our crops, we are going to focus a post on each individual type. This way we can give a more detailed picture of our experiences. 

Today we would like to review one of our favorite crops, Tomatoes. 

We learned a lot about tomatoes this growing season, despite having grown them many times in years past. This is the first year that we have been able to successfully start our plants from seedlings. We also learned the substantial benefits of investing in a grow light. 

As we transferred our plants outside We discovered that it is possible for plants to come back from a late freeze, though this was quite a setback for our growing season. We also used a different method of support for our plants, a wooden frame with cecil twine strung down to hold the plants. 

We learned pruning techniques, and a lot about tomato horn worms and the moths they become. After finding several on our plants we brought some in and placed them in an old bee cage to observe their life cycle. We will document this in a later post. 

When it came time to start preserving our tomatoes we were concerned that our plants had not produced as many as we had planned. A local farmer, and family friend, helped us there. We were able to purchase several batches of tomatoes from Clyde Acres Farm. 

We skinned, diced, and froze them as we waited until we were ready to make salsa. It was a lot of work, but we enjoyed working together on this project. After prepareing about 5 gallons we decided to do the rest as simply jars of diced tomatoes. We put up two batches of diced tomatoes, and ended up with 25 quarts. 

After processing the diced tomatoes we finally were ready to make salsa. We were lucky enough to have family visiting, due to the birth of our 6th child, and they provided a great amount of help to us. We chopped onions and peppers, mixed in all the spices, cilantro and garlic, and ended up with two very large stockpots full of salsa. The salsa came out very well, and filled 47 pint jars.  We will post the salsa recipe separately. With all the tomatoes and salsa we have processed, we are hoping that they will last us until next year. 

Our Growing Family

As our garden has been growing, so has our family.  It has been a long summer, filled with family, gardening, and fun. We've kept busy documenting through photographs, even if the blogging has been slow. We are looking forward to sharing all of this with you as things slow down. 

We have a few things we have been working on over the last few weeks that we are excited to share. One is the tomatoes we have been preparing for salsa, but that is for another post. The project that we'd like to share now has everything to do with the birth of our new son four weeks ago. 

We are all very excited to welcome this sweet little guy to our family!  He is baby number six. With every child that has graced our home we have had a tradition. We are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. As part of our religious faith we have a ceremony to officially give each child a name and a blessing, it is like a christening without the baptism. Baptism is performed later, once the child reaches  the age of accountability, and can choose for themselves whether or not they want to make the commitment. 

Anyway, as part of this process we have provided individual homemade blessing clothing for each of our children. Some have been made by babies grandmothers, and others have been sewed by mom.  Each of the outfits are slightly different, and all are made with lots of love. 

This time I used a new pattern. It required several alterations, as it was very feminine. Here are some pictures of the pattern and the end product. 

Pattern:

End product:

Of the alterations made some are quite obvious, the addition of the vest and bow tie for instance. Some of the other alterations were not quite as noticeable. The removal of the pleats from the bodice front, and the conversion of the sleeve from a short puff sleeve to a long sleeve were the other major alterations from the pattern. 

To accomplish these changes, and avoid damaging the original pattern, I traced the pattern pieces onto tissue paper.  The sleeve required removing a few inches of width and some height from the original pattern piece. 

Tracing the pattern also gave me the opportunity to make it a specific size without having to cut around the extra sizing lines. 

When I finally got to the cutting and sewing I was blessed to have my lovely mother in law here to help and motivate me. She designed the vest. 

Much of the actual sewing goes to her credit, as baby frequently needed my attention and we were in a time crunch. 

It was finally finished at about 2am, as I sewed on the last of the buttons and snaps. Here is how our precious little one looks in the outfit. 

I really enjoy sewing, though I rarely give myself the time to do it. I love being able to provide tangible memories for my children that they will be able to take with them when they leave home and start their own families. 

Tomato Trellis

Our garden is growing!  We are excited to have harvested our first zucchini of the season this morning!  The kale is doing fantastic, we have had several harvests from our plants so far, and are ready for another.  Last week we were even able to get a little sweet corn, and learned why it is best to start these plants outside; the growth is stunted and only a few of the kernels formed on the plant. 

We are also excited that our first signs of tomatoes are showing up on the vines!  We have already decided on a few improvements we would like to make for our garden next year. Today, however, we want to share with you our tomato trellis. Henry spent a good portion of Tuesday constructing the framework. 

Through our research, as we are continually trying to increase our tomato production, we learned a few things about how tomato plants grow. 

First and foremost that many tomato plants can grow up to 10 feet or taller when cultivated properly.  These plants are called indeterminates, as there isn't a specific hight measurement of the full grown plant. They will continue to grow and bear fruit as long as they have space and support, or at least until a frost comes at the end of the season. This explains the height of the framework. The ropes that extend from the top are fastened to pvc pipes at the bottom near the plants roots. The plant is wrapped around the rope as its support system, this replaces the tomato cage.  The rope looped at the top is to provide slack when needed. 

As the plant grows it produces what are called suckers between each fork of the branches. These suckers are actually secondary plants forming on the original stem, and take much of the nutrients from fruit production. These can easily be removed to promote better growth in the original plants. In place of some of the plants we lost we are also cultivating some of the suckers that we pulled from the main stems to get root systems. We will then plant them in the openings with the rest. 

We love tomatoes, and have yet to be able to produce as many as we eat throughout the year.  We are hoping this year we will get a little closer to this goal. 

To add to the garden update, here are a few pictures of our back garden to show how much it has grown over the last few weeks. The weather has been great, and the plants are loving it!

Note: This is glass corn, a decorative hybrid that we planted in the backyard, the sweet corn is in the front. 

Our only surviving cucumber plant, we since trained it up onto the trellace, and sweet peas are growing along the other side. 

The green beans are growing along the back of the glass corn. 

We still have a little space to fill, and will be putting some more plants out in the next few weeks for a late start. We will get more pictures from the front next time. 

Yet Another Garden Update

It's been a while since we've posted about our garden. Despite letting the time slip away, we have had a few eventful moments with our veggies. Gardening, it seems, is full of difficulty and disappointment. Through all of the excitement of planting, inevitably things find a way of going wrong. We have had some discouragement in the last month, and yet we have discovered that life has a way of pushing through the difficulties. 

When we first got everything planted we were excited to finally have everything in the ground. The plants were healthy, and we were ready to see them grow. 

 

It looked great, but this was not to last. Before long the bugs and bunnies started eating our crops. Rabbits snuck under the fence to nibble our pepper plants, we hadn't realized they had such an affinity for peppers. Our squash and cucumbers soon were decimated by insects that attacked the stems. Strangely, though there was obvious damage to the stems near the roots, the squash continued to grow. Then we had a cold snap hit overnight, and by midday it was obvious that many of our plants were dying; it seemed we would have to start all over again... 

Disappointed, as all of our plants in the back apart from the kale needed replacing, we focused for a few weeks on the Microgreens indoors. After a couple of weeks, however, some of our original plants decided to make a comeback. Some of the seeds were also beginning to grow. 

And wow, the kale has been fantastic!  This picture is after harvesting and eating a good amount twice last week. 

Not everything has come back, but We are amazed at how much those that did fought to make it. We are also very grateful to our kind neighbors who provided us with a few of their extra tomato, pepper, and basil plants to replace those that didn't make it. 

We are learning so much this year. It is not always easy as we work toward our goals of becoming self sufficient and self sustaining. There are a lot of road blocks and barriers that we are learning to navigate, and many that our circumstances are not yet allowing for. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn and work toward these goals, and the encouragement we have received as we press forward. 

Thank you for reading. We hope sharing our experiments with you is helping encourage you to keep moving forward as you work on your own goals. 

Hydroponic System

As we have been starting our microgreens, we also have been preparing to begin with hydroponics.  Over the last few months we have slowly been piecing together components for our own homemade system, and today it is finally ready. 

 We started some lettuces and some spinach at the same time as our microgreens. We planted the seeds in organic potting soil to start them, and have had them beneath the grow light to strengthen them enough for transplanting. 

Here is day 1

On day 3 we saw the first signs of life. 

Day 4 most of the lettuce came up, but not much of the spinach. 

Here is day 5

And here are the plants today, after some have been transplanted into the Aquaponics system. 

Our system consists of a 27 gallon tote, with holes cut out of the lid in order to just fit our growing cups. 

The cups are filled with growing pebbles and rest on the surface of the water, which is constantly being airated with bars that are commonly used in fish tanks. 

To transplant the lettuce we carefully rinsed the soil from the roots and placed the plants in the growing containers with the pebbles for support. They were then inserted into the holes and fit quite snugly inside. 

The water is treated with a solution of fertilizer to help the plants grow.

We have been very excited to get this project done. We are looking forward to the fresh vegetables our new system will provide!