vegetables
Archived Posts from this Category
Archived Posts from this Category
Posted by Lauren on 12 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: pictures, projects, tomatoes
We made a lot of progress on the expanded chicken coop this weekend! Its name is now Chicken Bunker, on account of how cozy and built-into-the-hill it is. All that’s left to do is get the roof on and wire up the sides, which is only a few more hours of work. The old coop will need mucked out and composted, and the whole thing re-lined with hay, and then we can deploy the chickens! We are well ahead of schedule to have it finished before we go to the Tilth conference; now I don’t feel bad about asking the neighbors to check on the critters, as they will all be in one place and will not need to be let out and put away.
Last weekend I broke my glasses, but I got new ones!
Posted by Lauren on 25 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: canning, harvest, pictures, putting by, tomatoes
We’ve been processing tomatoes, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.
… a little at a time. We don’t have a pot that holds more than four quart-jars anyway so it works out.
We have also slow-roasted and frozen a couple of pounds, and have dried some too.
Pictured: Green Zebra; Ananas Noire; Black Prince; Brandywine; more varieties whose names I don’t know; some basil; an apple.
Posted by Lauren on 07 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: comestibles, eating, tomatoes
I was sure it was just going to rain all through August (which it did) and into September and then for the rest of the winter, with no breaks. But it has warmed up and cleared up, and we have some tomatoes coming in after all. In fact, we harvested enough on Thursday to make two delicious pizzas.
Unfortunately, I don’t know all their names, but, left to right, #2 is Black Prince — VERY delicious!; yellow (#4, let’s say) is Limmony, also tasty; #6, a favorite for 3 years now, is Green Zebra. One of the red bumpy ones (either #1 or #3) is a Brandywine and delicious as always. #7 is, I think, an Ananas Noire (”black pineapple”).
Background pizza: Red Tomato Pizza, cooked.
Foreground pizza: Funny-Colored Tomato Pizza, yet uncooked. Yellow, green, and black/purple/brown tomatoes.
Both have fresh mozzarella from the grocery store, and for sauce they have chopped basil and garlic, mixed with olive oil and some grated parmigiano — a sort of loose pesto.
There has been much more preserving around here. But most of it was today and I am too tired to post more, so, further updates … in the future!
Posted by Lauren on 23 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: cabbage, comestibles, pictures, potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini
Stew meat (from our quarter cow) was braising in the oven. Garden potatoes boiled like normal. Garden zucchini and garden tomatoes grilled briefly. All combined in a delicious tortilla with a sauce of sour cream + goat yogurt (island grown!) plus garden basil. Garden cabbage on top. Yum.
Posted by Lauren on 14 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: pictures, tomatoes, vegetables
Colors that tomatoes might be: orange; yellow; red.*
See the whole set (reproduced here in its entirety).
Click on any picture to view it in Flickr.
Our first Big Tomato to turn colors!!
* We will also have several plants of green and purple/brownish fruits, too, but those don’t seem to be doing much yet.
Posted by Lauren on 10 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: comestibles, dropstone farms, farm updates, planting, vegetables
I had some chicken stories to tell, but there really are other things going on in our lives, which isn’t evident from the past few posts, so I will discuss those other things instead. So here is a list of things I meant to write about when they were current, and didn’t.
All my posts always have lists in them. I like lists, I guess. I’m going to try to have more frequent, shorter, non-listified posts.
Posted by Lauren on 03 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: pictures, vegetables
When Garth and I were first starting to learn to cook (which was conveniently right about the same time we were starting to be together), we ate a lot of mustard greens, which we both liked a great deal. Full of character and a little bit bitey, but easy to cook and good with any number of proteins and starches. But then we started to learn how to shop, too, and we stopped getting groceries at Fred Meyer and started getting them at the farmers’ markets and at Pike Place, (which is of course also a farmers’ market), or at Whole Foods as a last resort, and so we lost track of mustard greens. Apparently not many folks are growing them around here, and/or not many folks are growing them organically nation-wide.
So finding mustard green seeds in our preferred seed catalog, Territorial, was very exciting to both of us. I wasn’t very careful when I scattered them, and didn’t really scatter so much as pour directly onto the ground, apparently, as they represent the largest green lump here:

And tonight the green lump is smaller by at least 50-75 plants:

(Note our totally sweet wire harvest basket from the ever-awesome Path to Freedom and their new Urban Homestead journal! Note also the dirt still on the roots, which are still on the plants.)
My thinning accomplished approximately nothing, though, at least visually, though I failed to take a picture due to some pretty serious rain today. That will have to come later. But the end product was delicious sautéed greens with garlic, on brown rice, with quick pan-fried halibut cheeks from the market yesterday.