Harvest time

(And you thought this should be about Hallowe’en, didn’t you?!?)

Until recently, this fall has been lovely and warm. There have been spells of cooler, rainy weather lasting three or four days, interspersed with warm, sunny days, with temperatures up to 25 degrees C even in mid-October!! Just this past weekend – October 27th!! – we brought in the last of the tomatoes. Didn’t quite make it to November, but pretty darn close! The cucumbers, on the other hand, have been done for several weeks (though there was one last small one lingering on the vines that was brought in on the 27th as well).

Now the question is what to do with all these green tomatoes? Some of them will ripen eventually, but some are just too green (seeing as the vines were still flowering and setting new fruit in mid-October). After checking out a few cookbooks, Laolao decided to make four litres of green tomato dills, as well as some green tomato chutney/relish and some green tomato loaf. The chutney is yummy, the loaf is moist and delicious too, and I can hardly wait to try the green tomato dills once they’ve had time to pickle!

We have also taken advantage of the wild fruits growing in our area. It’s funny how when you live in a city most people don’t think to look beyond their back yard – and often that backyard contains nothing but grass. We live in a very urban setting, but despite that, there are pockets of forest that provide glimpses into how the wild flora and fauna adapt to an urban environment, if one simply opens one’s eyes.

The parkland that lies a stone’s throw from our house (if you have a good throwing arm!) includes a variety of crabapple and wild apple trees. Some are the small, sour red crabs; some are the larger green sweet crabs. We’ve also found wild grapes growing throughout the micro-forest and bordering the parkland by the train track. When Laolao and Laoye were here in August, they picked several large buckets of both crabs and wild grapes and made many jars of juice. When they first got back two weeks ago, what with the warm weather we found that the crabs and grapes were still very pickable; in fact the long fall has raised the sugar content in the grapes so they’re now much sweeter than before.

So Laolao has put up several batches of grape jelly, Laoye has made at least two dozen litres of apple and grape juice, we’ve got the green tomato preserves, about four jars of rhubarb sauce from my garden, and some carrot and beet pickles Laolao made (with bought veggies) – in addition to the beet pickles I made a month back.

Yum! I didn’t freeze any peaches or strawberries this year, so these other preserves will stand us in good stead, along with the pumpkin and dill pickles still left from last fall’s harvest.

P.S. I know this blog has been very devoid of pictures for the past two months, other than the update of Poppet pix. I promise to rectify the situation soon, with some orphanage shower photos and some harvest photos, as well as Hallowe'en pix. (But not pix of the Dalai Lama!)