Sun-Dried Tomatoes

Tomatoes are in their full, messy abundance at this time of year

Our climate; with its dry, late summers; is perfect for drying all sorts of vegetables and fruits, especially sun-dried tomatoes. Sun drying is definitely the most energy-efficient way to preserve foods. In the case of tomatoes, we simply wash them, slice them in quarters, and set them on a clean screen in the sun for 1-2 weeks. Our little greenhouse is an ideal place to do this, as it provides shelter from nighttime moisture, and it heats up like an oven during the day. We could eat the sun-dried tomatoes now, but they are going to be such a nice treat for our CSA members on a cold winter day, after the fresh tomato season is long past.

Farm volunteers, Krista and Laura, setting tomato slices out to dry.

Tomatoes on Day 1 drying in the greenhouse

Tomatoes on Day 10 ready for storage

Seed Saving Time

Broccoli plant with flowers (not yet gone to seed)

Fall is seed saving time. I love saving seeds because I'm fascinated by their variety of forms and strategies, and I love seeing the plants through the full cycle from planting a seed to collecting seeds for next year. Typically a single plant will produce hundreds (maybe thousands) of seeds. We can collect seeds from the most successful plants and use them to replant next season.

There are some drawbacks to seed saving. For one thing, it requires letting the plants get messy looking. Seeds are the last thing a plant makes before dying, so the plants are often tall, dry, and mangy looking by the time the seeds are ready. Also, we are not too vigilant on separating plants in the same botanical family, so we may end up with some interesting cross-breeds next year. We'll plant some of them as an experiment and also continue to use some store-bought seed.

So far this year we've saved seed from kale, lettuce, endive, radishes, coriander, chard, mustard greens, and broccoli. Soon we'll be saving our tomato seeds, okra, peppers, and more. Last week I collected broccoli seed:

Messy looking broccoli plants full of seed pods

Close-up of broccoli seed pods

Inside the dry seed pods are a row of brown broccoli seeds ready to be collected and saved for next year's planting

There's Pumpkins in the Air

Sugar pumpkins hanging on their trellis. Almost ready for harvest!

Did you know you can grow pumpkins on a trellis to save space? I probably wouldn't recommend this for the giant carving pumpkins (though it is possible), but for smaller sugar pumpkins it works just fine. Pumpkins are renowned for spreading quickly over large areas, so training them to grow up trellises is one way to grow pumpkins in a smaller space, or in our case, to keep them from covering up the adjacent rows.

This trellis was constructed by our WWOOF farm volunteers. It consists of scrap wood tied together into tripods, with a long pole/branch set on top as a crossbeam. If you trellis pumpkins, it's important to start hanging them on the trellis early, when the pumpkins are still tiny and green. That way the plant naturally grows a strong enough stem to hold up its fruit.