First Frost of the Season

Strawberries with a dusting of frost this morning.

This weekend we got our first two frosts. Our winter weather starts pretty late in this part of California, but eventually it does start. On Friday I did one final harvest of eggplants, peppers, and green tomatoes and with that we said farewell to summer. We've covered up many of our fall plants to protect them from the frost, and most of them are very cold hardy. The kale and broccoli did look sad early this morning under the frost, but a few hours later they have already recovered. Onward, to the fall veggies! We've got lots of cabbage, kale, beets, chard, broccoli, peas, and more.

Broccoli and kale weighed down with frost. Don't fret, they have already recovered.

Several awesome cabbages are ready for harvest!

Saving Tomato Seeds, part 2

Welcome back! Last week I began the process of saving tomato seeds (described in the "Saving Tomato Seeds, part 1" blog post). I left the seeds to ferment for about 3 days, and they developed a nice scummy surface indicating that they were ready.

Tomato seeds after 3 days of fermentation.

At this point, the seeds should have a somewhat stinky, fermented smell, but nothing too gross. The seeds were at the bottom, and the liquid on top, so I was able to carefully decant the liquid off. I then tapped the seeds into a strainer and rinsed them under fresh water. I use this handy little strainer that I bought years ago in Chinatown. I don't know what its original purpose was, but it's perfect for this. A tea strainer would work equally well.

Clean tomato seeds in a strainer.

Next I tapped the seeds out onto a piece of wax paper and labeled the paper with the variety of tomato.

Tomato seeds on wax paper ready to be dried.

I left the seeds to dry for about 3-4 days away from the light. Then I carefully peeled them up off the wax paper and put them in envelopes to store until spring. See you next year, tomatoes!

Saving Tomato Seeds, part 1

One of my favorite farming activities is saving seeds. I love seeing the full cycle of the seasons from seed to seed; I love the independence of not having to buy seed every year, and I love learning about the various mechanisms plants have developed for continuing themselves. Fall is a good time for saving the seeds of summer plants, and anyone growing heirloom tomatoes will probably want to save seeds from their favorites. An heirloom plant will make seeds that are genetically similar to the parent plant, unlike hybrids which make seeds that can have the traits of any of the ancestor plants. Tomato seed saving is a little more complex than other saving other seeds because it involves a brief fermentation process. The fermentation step helps kill any plant diseases.

There are great directions for saving tomato seed on gardenweb.com I thought it would be nice to have photo illustrations too, so here are the steps (This is the first part. Part 2 will be posted soon):

1.  Choose a slightly overripe tomato from your healthiest tomato plant(s). We grew 16 varieties of tomatoes this year, and I am saving seeds from many of them.

 

Several varieties of heirloom tomatoes ready to have their seeds saved.

2. Slice the tomato horizontally, across its "equator."

3. Squeeze the seeds, including their gel goo, out into a clean jar or other container. Add a couple tablespoons of water.

Tomato seeds in a clean, reused container with water.

 4. Cover the container with a lid or a piece of cellophane, and poke a few holes in it for ventilation. Label with the variety if you are saving more than one kind. Place in a warm, dark place for 2-3 days.

My full menagerie of tomato seeds in various reused containers.

Part 2 is coming soon! Stay tuned.

End-of-Summer Canning

Pickles, plums, tomato sauce, strawberry jam, and blackberry preserves

When we moved to Morgan Hill a few years ago, my parents gave me a canning kit as a gift to help us realize our homesteading dreams. Preserving food was all new to me. Both of my grandmothers were modern career women who were somewhat appalled when I took up knitting, so you can imagine that I don't have a lineage of home-ec types to draw upon in my canning endeavors. Fortunately we have the internet and some books to help us. I tend to rely on the Ball "Blue Book" and "Keeping the Harvest" by Chioffi and Mead. It's definitely been a messy learning process, but in my third season I'm finally getting the hang of it.

A bit of the summer bounty. Getting ready for the CSA members.

Whether you have a farm, a garden, or just an interest in eating locally, preserving food makes a lot of sense. By late summer we are giving our CSA members large amounts of tomatoes; we eat tomatoes with almost every meal, and we still have more than we can possibly use. By November, though, the tomato plants will be dead, and we won't have any more until next July. So, we do what we can to preserve some of the tomatoes for the cold months. I've been canning tomato sauce and making sun-dried tomatoes, and I'll probably freeze some too. It takes some extra effort, but I'm sure it'll pay off later. Even in California, where we have a year-round growing season, the cold months of only eating greens can get a bit tiresome. So, here's to one more step toward self-sufficiency, keeping it local, and infusing every meal with delicious home-grown produce!

The most satisfying moment, a full cabinet of goodies for the winter months.

New Chickens are Laying!

On Sunday we found our first egg from the new chickens. The chickens are just reaching their 5-month birthdays, and when I saw one of them in the nest box looking all uncomfortable I had a feeling today would be the day. This group of chickens are Barred Rocks, and their pretty dark brown eggs will add a nice color to our cartons which already have white, blue/green, and light brown eggs from our older hens (respectively: Andalusian, Arucana, and Naked Neck). The first eggs are tiny, about two-thirds the size of regular eggs, but they should grow to normal size over the course of the next month. It's good timing too, since our older hens have been laying less over the past month, probably due to either the very hot weather we had or to moulting.

Barred Rock hens munching on a row of old chard. We let the chickens graze on areas that are done for the season, which makes them happy, gives them extra nutrients, adds fertilizer, and supposedly reduces insect populations.

Harvesting Dried Hutterite Beans

One thing we've been interested in lately is whether we can grow a larger portion of our calories here on the farm by growing more things like grains and legumes. These also have the added benefit that they last a long time in storage, so we can eat them and give them to our CSA members over the winter when there are less veggies growing. Last year we grew a small plot of Hutterite beans, which are a white soup bean, somewhat like navy beans. They tasted fantastic and were easy to grow, so this year we planted a lot more.

Since we have very dry summers here, we just leave the plants in the ground until the bean pods are dry and rattle when shaken. Then we pull up the plants and begin the process of shelling the beans. This is where things become difficult. We don't have a machine for this, so we've come up with two old-fashioned methods:
1. Shelling (shucking) the beans one by one, splitting the pods open and dropping the beans into a bowl. It takes forever, but the beans come out nice and clean, and we can work on it while watching movies.
2. Threshing and winnowing (don't you just love the old-timey sound of it?)-- We put the bean plants in a box or bag and step on them until the pods open and release the beans (that's threshing). That's the easy part. Then we have to winnow them, which means separate the beans from the chaff, i.e. all the stuff, like dried leaves and broken pods, that is now mixed up with them. We accomplish this by pouring the beans from one box to into another on a windy day, so that the wind blows the chaff away, and the beans fall into the box. Someday we might modernize and buy an electric fan to help us along.

The harvest isn't done yet, but I think we'll end up with about 15 lbs. of beans from our 60 ft. row.

Eggplants of our Dreams

We love eggplants, and this is our first season that we are really having a successful crop of them. The process of getting this to happen has been a long one, but now as the harvest begins, it seems all worth it. The eggplants were seeded indoors on a heat mat back in January and February. Then they grew in the greenhouse until May when we transplanted them outside. We tried to really baby these plants, knowing how susceptible they are to both cold and flea beetle damage. So we planted them in black ground cloth (landscaping fabric), cutting a hole for each plant to grow through. Then we carefully covered the whole row with a sheet of floating row cover and weighed down the edges to keep out pests.

The plants are strong and much bigger than any we've grown before, about 3 ft. tall. Now, 8 months from planting those seeds, we are starting to get a huge amount of eggplants. They are mostly Asian long eggplants, and we also have some Italian-style called Rosa Bianca and some small round ones called Chu.

We started the season off with grilled eggplant and pepper sandwiches with tahini garlic sauce. Yum!