Garden Update and putting up fresh tomatoes for the winter

Putting up my tomatoes for the winter. (I know its currently February but being surrounded by cold and snow made me want to post something to brighten my day!) It was so wonderful to finally have a garden again. I don’t even seem to care if I get any produce – just planting and growing things makes me happy. Eating out of the garden though is my excuse to have it lol. All in I got around 5 pounds of green beans, 3 pounds of peas and a few rather stunted beats, carrots and radishes. As usual I always regret growing radishes but they’re super easy to grow here. It’s just that… well I’m not a huge fan. One year I cooked with them, throwing them in with a beef roast along with potatoes etc. and they were… odd but edible.

My zucchini and yellow squash did well. I even managed to keep a close enough eye on them that they never got out of hand lol. Though my mom would have gladly taken a baseball bat sized zucchini to shred for baking.

They’re two of my favorite vegetables for my kabob recipe which I made many times this last summer.

My cucumbers were a bummer which was super odd as usually I have them coming out of my ears by September. This year I got two and they weren’t very good!

I had some things that didn’t come up at all: Rosemary, onions and bell peppers and I was too late to try to replant.

I’ve never tried planting onion seeds before so I was neither surprised or not at that outcome. I’m never trying to grow bell peppers from seed again. Five different years trying with almost no results is enough disappointment for me.

And that really is a bummer because I don’t keep a lot of fresh produce around except for bell peppers and onions… Of course the two things I apparently can’t grow to save my life!

I love rosemary so that was a bummer and a surprise because all of my other herbs did very well. So well, in fact, that I did a little math comparing the fresh herb prices at Walmart and determined I grew over $50 worth of herbs!

(I cooked with them fresh all summer and even made some herb infused oils that were amazing.)

I chalk a lot of my failures this year up to my planting two weeks later than I wanted to.

Its also a new garden and my soil settled and collapsed AFTER planting so that left a lot my seeds all over the place. I filled my raised beds first with huge logs to fill in a lot of the extra space because my raised beds are really tall. So, the dirt slowly settling down around those logs was totally expected.

Obviously I wanted to plant AFTER that happened so I could refill my beds but this spring getting my garden built took a lot of extra time due to the weather so I just planted as soon as I could… which was still pretty late.

This is the first year I took growing tomatoes seriously. I’m not actually a fan of raw tomatoes but I cook with a ton of canned tomatoes. I planted roma, cherry and beef steak tomatoes.

The thing you run into while cooking with fresh tomatoes (unless you’re just flashing them) is the skins end up littering your sauce like little bits of curled up paper. Not everyone cares. They’re perfectly edible. I’m not a fan. Just about every way you can preserve a vegetable you can preserve a tomato and everyone has their own method. I am a BIG fan of freezing. That’s literally what I did with all of my fresh herbs – they’re in my freezer all chopped up so I can grab a handful whenever.

I know a lot of folks (including my amazing sister-in-law) that can gallons of tomato sauce and salsa in the fall.

IT IS A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF WORK.

I am in awe of them.

I’m lazy, have the freezer space and discovered a way of putting up tomatoes with a minimum amount of effort.

So you wash them, cut their little cores out and then freeze them whole. Then, when you want to use them, you just wash your frozen tomatoes in warm water and the skins come right off in your hands.

That’s it.

I didn’t believe a friend of mine when she told me this trick but it is fool proof. Of course you don’t want to keep them under the water longer than to just get their skins off so I usually do each one individually over a strainer. Being a northern Minnesota gardener (who also planted late) I always put up my green tomatoes too.

They’re a little tangy! Chili, enchilada or pasta sauce, they work in all of them.

I broke up how I built my raised bed vegetable garden into four “days” and posts though I’m sure you can all imagine that it was a lot more than just four actual working days lol.

We put up the fence and lined it with plastic. I built the first of the raised beds lining the East and West sides of the fence. Then I built my big raised bed island in the center of the whole garden. Finally we filled the beds with big logs and firewood before filling them the rest of the way with dirt.

I also added mulch which I think really “completed” my garden but me hauling twelve bags of mulch didn’t seem like enough to justify writing a whole blog post about it…

Its winter and thinking of my garden really helps get me through these dark days. I can’t wait for this spring!

This year I’ll be planting as early as possible and I’m hoping to build flower beds all along either side of my garden so I can start transplanting all of my perennials. Not to mention, its time to give my Grandma’s Hydrangea bush a brand new home up here too!