Mid-Year Garden Tally.

I thought I would do something different with this posting since my recent posts have been tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. I thought I would do a tally of what I have harvested from my garden this calendar year. Several vegetables continued to grow into springtime from last fall's plantings, so to keep track of all of it, my spreadsheet data goes from January 1st to December 31st of each year. Expenditures come out of the value of the crops for each year. I don't carry expenses from year to year. That makes it too much like work, and for me that takes the fun out of the whole experience.

Vegetable or Fruit Item                 Pounds
Willow Leaf Lima Beans                 20.31
Blueberries                                         5.02
Black Beauty Eggplant                     6.53
Butter Crunch Lettuce                     6.06
Golden Sweet Bell Peppers              1.75
Sweet Banana Peppers                     0.59
Cherry Belle Radishes                      1.31
Heritage Red Raspberries               2.78
Sorrel                                                 1.75
Tomatoberry                                     2.58
Yellow Pear Tomatoes                     1.64
Celebrity Tomatoes                        95.42
Roma Tomatoes                           144.38
Park's Whopper Tomatoes          135.36
Fortex Green Beans                       70.13
Premium Crop Broccoli                23.19
Rainbow Swiss Chard                     4.94
Vates Collards                               60.69
Total Pounds Thus Far               584.43

In my next post, I'll have some pics of the current harvests at that time. The last two or three weeks have been hectic here, leaving me no time to post my harvests. I apologize for that, as I am humbled by your visits to my blog.

I hope everyone gets some rain for their gardens and you have wonderful harvests!

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

My Organic Garden Harvest

The garden has been doing really great in the last few weeks! I've had to recruit helpers in order to keep up with the harvest rate.

Celie and Eleanor help Poppa by picking the yellow pear (or balloon) tomatoes.

We picked 36 of these that weighed a total of 1 pound 1 ounce. There were also 18 tomato berries that weighed 4 ounces. (Not all were in this pic.)

The butter beans weighed 6 pounds 7 ounces in the pods.

Shelled they weighed 2  1/4 pounds.

I picked 10 ounces of Cherry Belle radishes.

The blueberries continue to be a major delight in providing me with a full 1 pound harvest this week!

The golden Bell Peppers were harvested for the first time in my garden half-barrel. I picked 13 of them for 1  3/4 pounds.

There were 9 banana peppers at 6  3/4 ounces.

One black beauty eggplant at 11 1/2 ounces.

The Celebrity tomatoes gave us 17 1/4 pounds at this last picking.

The Park's Whoppers gave us 13 1/2 pounds.

and the Roma's gave us 18 1/2 pounds!

When I was making my wife's lunch and sliced this Park's Whopper tomato, I just knew I had to take a picture of it. They are on a dinner plate for size comparison purposes.

Here is my first batch of homemade organic tomato juice! Fourteen quarts! Needless to say, I am spending a lot of time in the kitchen putting up the veggies.

I thought I'd share a short video on the results of my gently squeezing the tomatoes before sending them through the food strainer. It really worked out great!

That completes another garden harvest report from Back Yard Organic Vegetables. I thank you for caring enough to visit my blog so I may share information with you on the successes as well as the failures of my gardening experiences.

Please forgive me, but I've been late on getting out my replies to comments that have been shared with me due to kitchen activity, but I will answer all within the next couple of days since it is raining again today.

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

It's Tomato Time!

The tomatoes are coming in pretty good this week, and even better than last week! I have two tubs of tomatoes from a few days ago in our kitchen waiting to be processed into canned goods. When contemplating cooking them and then having to run them through my hand food mill to remove the skins and seeds, the thought of it was just too much to bear! I searched until I found the right tool for the job. I bought a Back To Basics Food Strainer!

This was a little pricey at almost $60 I thought, but I very much needed it in order to process the tomatoes. When I took it out of the box I was immediately impressed with the construction of it. It has a strong metal body and a handle that is made from flat metal stock, which allows for easy turning that provides a lot of torque to the screw auger.

The strainer has a large hopper to receive the food product. I learned to not make it too full because I had to use the push stick to make the tomato chunks go into the auger. With it this full, a couple of chunks tried to escape the hopper.

This is the first puree that came out of the strainer. There is not a single bit of seed in the receiving bowl! What looks like seeds is the reflection of the incandescent lights over the table. Look in the waste receiving bowl under the clear cone. That material is so dry that there is no juice in the bowl! This device is very thorough!

In only two hours time, I turned 45 pounds of tomatoes into 14 quarts of absolutely seedless tomato puree!

Fortunately for me, I have a large commercial-duty stainless steel stock pot that has the number of quarts marked on the inside of the pot. You can see the number "18" in the very top center of the picture, and the number "14" is partially submerged in the puree. Although this pot had those graduations marked, I needed something that suited my needs perfectly. We all know that a full canner load is 7 quarts. The lowest number of quarts marked in this pot was "10". So I remedied that. Before I started my cooking, I took the pot and poured 7 full-to-the-top quarts of water into it and let it settle while on a flat surface. When that was accomplished, I reached into the pot with a black crayon and slowly dipped it into the waterline at the side of the pot and slowly drew a short heavy line, about an inch long on the wall of the pot. This marked where 7 full quarts would be in this pot. Next, I poured the water out and dried the inside of the pot. Then I took my electric carbide-tipped engraver and duplicated the font and style of numbering and marked a "7" including the lines to the left and the right of the number on the inside of the pot. Now there is no more guesswork or wondering if there is enough product for a full canner load of 7 quarts! I was always perturbed when I was left with a 3/4 full quart jar after all that work. Not any more.

I had to cook this puree on a low heat over the course of two days to reduce it down from 14 to 7 quarts! (I let it cool in between and put it in the fridge overnight.) I should have remembered what I learned last year when working with tomatoes. After you cut out the stem part, turn it upside down and gently squeeze it and most of the clear liquid will come out, thereby requiring far less cooking time to reduce it down to 7 quarts. I'll remember that for the next batch.

I must say that this food strainer is one of the most incredible inventions for the kitchen I have ever seen as far as saving time goes. It's worth twice the price.

I picked 21 yellow pear tomatoes that weighed 8 ounces. There were 9 tomatoberries that weighed 2 1/2 ounces. Then there were the butter beans that weighed 3 pounds 5 ounces, with a shelled weight of 14 ounces.

I picked tomatoes yesterday and did pretty well.  I'm not sure what's up with the tomato vines this year, but when you're reaching in to get one and you bump another, it doesn't take too much to knock it off the vine. Now when that happens, I'm sure to pick that one up and put it in the tub as well. Also, if they get too ripe before they're picked they'll spoil within a couple of days in the house. Fortunately for me, tomatoes continue to ripen after they've been picked. So this is how they look when I go picking. With a haul as large as this one, there's sure to be canned tomato juice in my future.

Celebrity Tomatoes - 70 each @ 36 1/2 pounds

Park's Whopper Tomatoes - 85 each @ 44 1/2 pounds

Roma Tomatoes - 337 each @ 49 pounds.

If you can see it in the previous picture, a lot of the Roma's seem to be getting half-red while the other half is still light green. If it's half red, I'm picking it rather than take a chance on it going bad before I get to it again. The Roma's in this picture used to look like the ones in the previous picture. In just a few days, they turned to this pretty tomato red. Many of these will go into a taco salad, while the rest will be made into juice.

We haven't given up on the Swiss chard seeds, but they sure take a long time. At this rate, they'll still be occupying this garden space at the end of August! That's okay. Just look at the density of the seeds on those branches!

Happy Fourth of July to everyone! don't forget that this country was founded by individual citizens, not corporations. Stay informed and protect your rights!

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

Our Second Harvest of Willow Leaf Lima Beans, and More!

The harvests are in full swing right now and we are enjoying picking every pound of it! The Willow Leaf pole beans we harvested a few days ago were ready to be picked again this quickly, so that's what I did.

After picking three pounds just the other day, we got three pounds nine ounces more! They shelled out to be thirteen and one-half ounces of beautiful butter beans.

This is the bag of shelled beans from the second picking.

Here are the first two shelled bags of butter beans we have from our new type of vining butter bean.

Here is how they look after they have been cooked with some butter and salt.  Delicious!

The first harvest period for the red raspberries appears to be over. This 1/2 ounce of berries is all we got after letting them grow for a few days. They provided us with a good supply of raspberries while they lasted!

The blueberries on the other hand, surprised me with another very nice harvest of fifteen and one-quarter ounces. The bird netting is functioning better than I ever expected.

I don't have pictures of the tomato harvest I got today, but it was a great one and it took quite a while to accomplish! Here is the tomato status from just today's picking:

     Park's Whopper Tomatoes  -  18 Pounds

     Celebrity Tomatoes  -  10 Pounds

     Roma Tomatoes  -  36 1/2 Pounds

This weekend I'm using a recipe for making 7 quarts of seasoned tomato sauce using 45 pounds of tomatoes. I found the recipe in the Ball Blue Book. 

That concludes this late-week post. Thanks for visiting and sharing your comments.

Have a great vegetable gardening day.
Veggie PAK

Our First Harvest of Willow Leaf Butter Beans, and More Tomatoes!

Garden harvests from your own garden are wonderful!      We are benefitting a great deal from having a back yard vegetable garden! I wish everyone would start one for their own benefit. It really isn't hard to do in order to get some harvests from it!

I pressure canned the last ten quarts of snap beans for this year. These jars will be going to our storage area. I won't be canning any more snap beans this year because I'm letting the vines produce the pods of seeds of future plantings.

I went out Monday and picked all these veggies from our garden. These Park's Whoppers weighed in at seven pounds three ounces.

These twenty-two Celebrity tomatoes weighed nine pounds fourteen ounces.

These sixty-one Roma tomatoes weighed ten pounds thirteen ounces.

This represents the yield from the last picking of snap beans for this year. These beans weighed four pounds nine ounces and will be cooked up with a nice piece of country ham seasoning meat.

The tomato berry plant is not producing anywhere near what a plant did in a previous year for us, but we'll take these seven tasty little ones that weighed one and three quarter ounces.

Finally, the yellow pear tomatoes are beginning to come in like they should. These six weighed one and three quarter ounces.

Butter Beans!

This three pound harvest of butter beans represents our first picking ever of Willow Leaf Pole Lima Beans. They are a smaller variety of Limas, similar to a baby butter bean.

Those three pounds came out to be twelve ounces of shelled butter beans! A very nice yield! The type of beans we are growing are reported to be able to produce through to the first frost. That would be spectacular!

After including the weights of some harvests that I had not added from my previous post, the total garden weight produced this calendar year comes to two hundred fofty-five pounds.

That concludes this impromptu mid-week report for our back yard organic vegetable garden. Thanks for visiting and please feel free to share a comment if you would like to.

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

Our Garden Harvest Report for June 25th.

Our harvests from our back yard organic garden are doing great this week! We couldn't ask for more without being greedy.

Our first picking of red raspberries this week brought in three and one quarter ounces that are shown in this pic. Five days later, I picked one and one-half ounces for a total of four and three quarter ounces of red raspberries this week. I'm freezing the raspberries so I can accumulate enough to make jelly or jam.

On Wednesday I picked thirteen and a half pounds of green beans and canned them the next day. I needed a little more to fill a couple of canning jars to have another full canner load, so I picked an additional one pound thirteen ounces of green beans.

On Saturday I went and picked twelve and one quarter pounds of green beans. Today I'll be canning them.

I picked twelve Park's Whopper tomatoes that weighed five pounds twelve ounces.

I picked twenty-two romas that weighed four pounds six ounces.

I picked fifteen Celebrity tomatoes that weighed in at seven pounds fourteen ounces.

Here is my first blueberry harvest since installing the bird netting. It weighed in at fifteen and three-quarter ounces! On Sunday I picked an additional four and one half ounces, for a weekly total of over one and one-quarter pounds of blueberries! Realistically though, I'm not expecting near that weight for next week's report.

Here is a side view of the over fifteen ounce bag of blueberries. 

This is the end result of all those green beans from last week being pressure canned: 33 Quarts! Now I have to pressure can the twelve pounds of beans that were just picked.

Granddaughter Celie helper her Poppa pick these fine organic vegetables. Four and one-half ounces of sweet banana peppers; three black beauty eggplant @ thirteen ounces; seven Park's Whopper tomatoes @ three pounds twelve ounces; and four Yellow Pear tomatoes @ one ounce. Celie told me they weren't pears. She turned one upside down and said it was a balloon! She was right. It looks just like one!

The harvest from this week brings the total harvest weight for this calendar year to 201 pounds so far.

I'll close now so I can get the pressure canner heating up for all those beans.

Thanks for visiting and sharing your comments with me.

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

Our Harvest Monday and Other Garden Info for June 18th, 2012.

This week has been a very good one for harvests. We are getting into full swing and we're enjoying it!

This is our first yellow pear tomato from our six plants that I have growing in a half-barrel on our driveway in the back yard. It weighed in at a whopping 1/4 ounce, but it had a half-pound of delicious in it!

You can see that there are many more little pears just waiting to turn yellow and get picked.

Here is a mixture of tomatoes I picked earlier in the week. There were eighteen Roma's weighing four pounds. The five larger ones are Park's Whoppers that weighed two pounds five ounces.

Mid-week  there were twelve Roma's weighing two pounds eleven ounces and four Park's Whoppers weighing one and three quarter pounds.

Later in the week we got four Park's Whoppers @ one pound six ounces, and seven Roma's @ one pound nine ounces.

I picked one and one half  pounds of sorrel that I have growing in a half barrel. I'll be making soup with that this week.

Snap Beans!

On Tuesday I picked four pounds of snap beans.

On Thursday I picked three pounds of snap beans.

But on Sunday, I picked ELEVEN AND ONE QUARTER POUNDS!

From three of my protected blueberry bushes I picked eleven ounces of them for the first picking of this year.

After having put the bird netting over my raspberry patch, I picked them on Thursday and got three quarters of a pound!

I came back on Sunday and picked five more ounces of them! The total raspberry harvest for this week was one pound one ounce!




Now for non-harvest garden info:

On the far left in the pic you can see the bases of my Swiss chard that is going to seed. I have found that seed saving involves a lot of time and space,but I believe it's worth it. Just to the left of center are  my seven Beauregard sweet potato plants. This is my first time growing them but it's worth a try. The little green row between the sweet 'taters and the marigolds is cherry belle radishes. They germinated in three days!

There are three sweet banana peppers hiding in this bush. Can you see them?

Here are some Celebrity tomatoes just waiting to turn red. They are a very nice size for sandwiches.

 Here are a couple more shots of them so you can see how plentiful they are.

There's one almost ready for picking!

The black beauty eggplants are doing great! There are several purple nubs that are actually the eggplant already!



Willow Leaf pole Lima's, or butter beans as we call them, are really producing hundreds of pods.

I have three 20 foot rows of them and they are filling out like crazy!

Fortex Snap Beans

These are heavy producers again this year.  We have picked over 37 pounds this year.

You can see that the beans are everywhere you look.

I prefer to pick them before the seeds swell up inside the pods. I think they're much more flavorful at that time.

These plants were grown from the seeds I saved from last year's crop. I'll be doing the same thing this year. It's a really big investment of time and space in the garden footprint, but it will be worth it.

Park's Whopper Tomatoes

Here are a few shots of the plants that are full of big round tomatoes. The shape of these tomatoes is perfect for tomato sandwiches!

La Roma Tomatoes for Sauces

The plants are loaded this year! I expect a really high total harvest weight at the end of this season.

Sweet Golden Bell Peppers

These plants are also growing in a half-barrel, but seem to be very happy there. Here are a couple of peppers already forming.

There are about thirteen plants in this 3.14 square foot surface area.

I soaked a packet of Detroit Dark Red beets in warm water overnight and planted them the next day. In about five days they had begun to sprout... along with weeds. I have had dismal luck with root crops in the past, so this year before I planted, I broadcast four pounds of greensand over a 1,400 square foot area and tilled it in. According to what I have read on the subject of poor root crop yields, greensand is supposed to provide some special nutrient for root crops. So I'm giving it a chance to work for our garden. We'll see what happens.

Finally, here is our asparagus patch. These were two year old Jersey Giant crowns when they were planted. Possibly next year I can get a few spears. The composted material is about six inches deep. The instructions that came with the crowns warned of seriously impaired growth if you let weeds crowd the plants. Hopefully, they will do just fine.

I'm trying to grow Chayote again this year. It tastes like a cross between a cucumber and a cantaloupe. It is refreshing when sliced very thin and chilled. Last year I started too late and the cold weather killed the vines. I'm growing them in containers so we'll see how long they take to crack the surface of the ground. They went right from the grocery store shelf to the flower pot. Now we wait...

That concludes this week's harvest report and our stroll through the back yard organic vegetable garden. I hope folks found it interesting and inspirational and want to try new gardening methods and or plant varieties.

Have a great vegetable gardening day and thanks for visiting!
Veggie PAK