G is for Garden

***I’m going to try to post something every day in the month of November. I definitely may not- it’s just a goal and I’m not going to be upset about missing it! Hopefully in my spare time, I can come up with a post per day. My prompts are going to be the letters of the alphabet. I will write about something that starts with the day’s letter- think Sesame Street meets the blogsphere. Of course there are more days in the month of November than there are letters in the alphabet. I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it!***

Well, I've refrained from talking about tomatoes/ marinara sauce for a while, so I figured I was due. Actually, da da da.... I've stopped making marinara sauce and have moved on to making tomato sauce. Zany, right? I realized that I use tomato sauce more than marina sauce. I use tomato sauce as a base for several soups. I found a sauce recipe that I like and have made sauce several times. All the rest of the tomatoes will go towards making sauce.

Here's a run-down of the 2023 garden- successes and failures 

1. The biggest failure were the peas but it was not my fault! I did not eat the plants before pea pods had formed. That was the result of critters. Losing the peas was disappointing. Peas are a unique plant to grow because they are frost and even snow tolerant. You plant pea seeds way before you plant other seeds and seedlings in the garden. Pea plants dislike the heat of summer. That is why you plant them early and generally harvest all the peas by June. That is, if you get to harvest them. My plants became garden salad before they had a chance to form any peas. This was the first year that critters ate my pea plants. Very disappointing but I will try again next year and hope for the best. At the most, I will be out the price of the seed packet and all my hopes and dreams of eating fresh garden peas. (So not that big of a deal...)

2. The next biggest failure was planting rhubarb only because no one in the family likes rhubarb. I bought the plant last year on a whim. Rhubarb sounded so quaint and old fashioned. My mom used to grow rhubarb and made rhubarb pie with it which I really liked. This year the rhubarb plant produced a ton of rhubarb, but I didn't do anything with it ;(. Pie didn't sound good to anyone except for me. And all the other recipes I looked up that had rhubarb in them, called for a lot of sugar to combat the tartness of the rhubarb. Bottom line is that I shouldn't have grown a plant the fruit of which no one is crazy about.

The rhubarb plant

3. Not planting squash or cucumber- this was a failure- sort of. I purposely didn't plant squash or cucumber seeds. The reason is that by May, I knew there was going to be a good chance that I would be gone the entire month of June with Abby in New Jersey. I knew that Donnie would have to water the garden to keep plants alive and I wanted to make things as easy on him as possible. If I planted seeds in May, by June they wouldn't be very big. I didn't want Donnie to have to spend a lot of time looking for plants to water. I decided to wait until the following year to have cucumber and squash in the garden.

4. My bell pepper plant- it appears that I cannot grow bell peppers though I stubbornly ignore that reality and each year try to grow some. This year, the culprit was the bunny whose salad bar fixins´ included most of the leaves on my bell pepper plant in addition to the pea plants. I nursed that plant back to life only to see one pepper grow all summer and then a large hole emerge in the pepper when it was almost ripe. I need to let go of the dream of bell peppers in my garden...

5. That brings us to the one plant type that I planted which thrived and then some: tomatoes. I would call the harvest a success but even in success I learned some lessons. Mainly, that I planted too many tomatoes plants. Last year, I planted four tomato plants and that didn't seem like it was enough so this year I planted twelve, eleven of which survived. That resulted in quite frankly, too many tomatoes. Lesson learned. Next year, I will plan to plant eight or nine plants. That should give me a decent harvest without too many. That's one of the things that I like about gardening- there are always learning opportunities!! (Optional is applying the lessons learned a la bell pepper plants :))

 I made fresh tomato sauce for the chili that I made on Saturday

On or about October 30, a hard frost was predicted for overnight. I decided to take all the unripe tomatoes off the vines, bring them inside, and plan to have them ripen inside. Here are the tomatoes that I collected. Inadvertently, I left about twenty or so still on the vines. I didn't realize it until the next day.

 

The sight of the plants the next day after the frost was jarring....

I had seen them look like this for months...

And then one cold night, this happens...

All good things must come to an end; the plants were good all summer long :)

I felt bad that I left so many tomatoes on the vines

I also learned something about tomato cages- you do get what you pay for. The green ones (yikes, the color is hideous- it was all that was left when I bought these at a hardware store last year) were quite expensive- $7.99 I think. I was happy to find cheaper ones this year. I think they were $2.99 but they were super flimsy and did not function as well as their green counterparts. 

The green ones held their shape enough to stand on their own. The other ones could not do that. 

The compost bin runneth over with tomato plant detritus. 

Back to the earth they go!