Donating produce to the food bank

After feeling pretty overwhelmed this weekend (and really the last few weeks) with our plentiful tomato harvest, I decided to quit moping about what I couldn't do, and do something I've always wanted to do. Share our garden with people who need fresh produce.

Last year, we intended to give the contents of one entire raised bed to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank through its Community Harvest Program. Well, nature got the best of us and we basically had nothing to donate because nothing did well enough.

Not this year!

These two boxes are full of ripe and almost ripe tomatoes, complete with notes about the types included, ready to go to our local food pantry yesterday. 

It was simple. I visited the GPCFB's Community Harvest page, and looked at the donation options. Because of other commitments, I couldn't get to a Saturday drop-off, and I can't make it to the actual food bank during their open hours because I'm at work the entire time and it's too far to go during lunch.

So I looked up my neighborhood's local pantry through their online tool and made a simple phone call. Within 15 minutes, I got a call back that they'd love to take them! I also contacted a friend who does a lot of work with a local women's shelter, and they are willing to take the next batch.

I don't tell you this because I'm an awesome person for donating tomatoes to a food pantry. But because if you've already preserved all you can and the alternative is for the produce to go bad, consider making a donation through Community Harvest. All it took for me was 5 minutes on the phone and a two second trip, basically across the street, to drop off the boxes. If you're not in the greater Pittsburgh area, call your local food bank. You never know what resources they'd have to help you get the produce to people who need it.

I hope next year to plan a little better when it comes to the produce donation so we can make this happen more regularly, instead of waiting until I'm about ready to rip my hair out with frustration. Maybe that dream of the Community Harvest bed will be a reality!

canning and preserving: tomatoes and salsa

As you might have read, we're sort of inundated with tomatoes right now. A friend called it an infestation, and she's not far off.

We planted several different varieties from seedlings we got through Penn's Corner's Online Farm Stand. San Marzanos and Romas, plus a few heirlooms like Black Cherry, Garden Peach and Cherokee Purple. 

We've never had a really good tomato harvest since we started gardening. Last year late blight got pretty much all of them, so when we wanted to can tomatoes or salsa, we had to buy a case of ripe ones from our CSA. 

This year, the infestation.

The photo above represents a small fraction of what was LEFT after our fourth picking, and a day of canning whole, quartered tomatoes and salsa. So far, we have frozen close to 20 pounds, and made quarts of fresh sauce to freeze. We'e also given away at least 15 pounds, when we had ripe ones that needed a home before they ended up in the compost. And now I write this at a large table full of more tomatoes.

This is what we picked yesterday.

I'll talk about the giant bag of corn and the big bag of green beans hiding behind it later this week. But ALL those tomatoes came inside and now live on my dining room table.

I didn't take a ton of photos of the canning process, because I've already done larger, more in-depth posts on whole tomato canning and salsa canning. Plus, it was a long day in a hot kitchen on tired legs (after a bad half marathon on Saturday - don't even get me started, ugh).

And, I was feeling frustrated.

I always like to talk here about how there's room in your life for some DIY and homesteading activities if you have a full-time job and a city commute, like both of us do. We manage to keep a garden and do some canning and freezing, and it might seem like we're able to do a lot. But we absolutely can't do everything we want to do. Not even a fraction. There are just not enough hours in the week. 

And tomatoes don't stop ripening just to accommodate your marathon training, your 7 hours a week of commuting, or your 45 hours a week of being an office drone. They just keep coming. The relentless, delicious buggers.

Yes, I do envy people who have some arrangement that lets them do major gardening and food harvesting and preserving, whatever that may be. Not because I begrudge them the time, but because it's one of my passions. I really do love it. The long, hot day in the kitchen on my calloused feet wouldn't be so hard if I knew I could keep going in the morning instead of getting in my car at 6 a.m. and not returning until at least 5.

It's not even easy to donate to food pantries when you work full time. I missed the one weekend donation window because of my race, and the daytime drop-offs are during my work day. I have one potential place left that might be able to take some. Fingers crossed. 

It's such a great satisfaction, filling up that canning cabinet in our basement, with food that grew in our backyard, that we picked out in the sun. I love being able to get "our" tomatoes and salsa through the winter. And I know that in the dead of the winter, I'll be wistfully remembering the days of the tomato infestation and wanting a good, fresh heirloom tomato. (Maybe.) 

But for now, who wants some tomatoes? 

garden update: early september

Really, this post should be subtitled "The Tomato Jungle" because that's pretty much what we have going on right now. It's kind of a hot mess in our backyard right now.

But let's start with a few things that aren't tomatoes. After the great chard harvest of 2014, the plants are rebounding and we're getting another batch. I hope this lasts into the fall.

It seems like our bell pepper plant is slowing down, but this poblano one? It has exploded with tiny peppers, just recently. Where the heck were all these guys in August?

Storms have collapsed some of our corn stalks, but we were able to salvage the ears of corn from them so really this just looks worse than it is.

Now if I can just get the broken stalks out of there so it stops looking so much like a scene from the Wizard of Oz.

Beans need a final pick, but I haven't been able to get to them because of this situation.

Those pictures are from two different pickings, within 4 days of each other. Our tomato plants have been heavy with green tomatoes for more than a month, and recently they finally decided to start to ripen. Like gangbusters.

I pick some of them slightly early, as soon as they turn a little bit red, because of this situation.

The plants are so big they are collapsing over their too-small cages (that was our big fail with these things this year) and falling out to where the chickens can reach them. So I try to grab them as soon as they go slightly red, to bring them inside to ripen, outside of the reach of the tomato hungry ladies in the backyard.

Some of the stalks are breaking and dying off, which is probably due to their weight. Not pretty or garden blog worthy, surely, but I can't complain about how much these plants have produced.

Though seriously, we have to do better with caging and trellising next year. This one is just begging to be set free.

So far, we've been freezing tomatoes to keep up with them. I'll do a post on that at some point, too, but from just a fraction of the tomatoes in that first photo of the on our island, I got 15 pounds of frozen tomatoes, ready for sauce and chili.

I hope to can at least a batch of them this year, if not two, and possibly do some salsa as well, depending on how the peppers look. We've done more freezing than canning this year, which is weird, but at the same time, we've had less available weekend time due to triathlon and marathon training.

We've been able to preserve most of the tomatoes from the garden thus far. I just hope I can keep up as we get the final deluge!

How's your garden doing? Are you still harvesting or ready for fall? 

canning and preserving: freezing swiss chard

Our garden's swiss chard has thrived so much this year that it actually got away from us. We eat a lot of vegetables, but two people can only eat so much in a given week. We hadn't picked any chard in probably three weeks, and in that time the plants got huge, to the point where they were starting to be attacked by pests. 

I decided to harvest it all, in the hopes that we'll get another round later. But this is what I picked from the 5 or 6 plants we have. (OK, plus the peppers, few tomatoes and bag of green beans.) Knowing that you can obviously buy frozen spinach, I decided to try something new and freeze greens at home.

After I took out some chard to make tacos, this is what was left. I separated the leaves and the stems for ease of chopping. Those are decent sized bowls, too.

And then I chopped and I chopped and I chopped.

While I was chopping, I was bringing a large pot of water to boil. Once it was up to temp, I would take batches of leaves and stems and blanch them for about 3 minutes.

Blanching is a quick dunk in boiling water - you can do it with beans and tomatoes, too. It kills the enzymes that make vegetables decay, so they will stop "going bad" in the freezer and retain their color and flavor. I hear you can buy blanchers that are strainer type things that go inside the pots for ease of removal. That would probably be helpful if you're blanching greens like I was, because man those stems and leaves were hard to fish out.

Once they were out, they were dunked straight into a bowl of ice cold water, to bring down the temperature and abruptly stop the blanching process.

Then it was time to squeeze. The soggy chard hung out in a colander until I added another batch and then another, and so on.

After all of the chard was blanched, rinsed and cooled, I picked up handfuls at a time and squeezed as much moisture out as possible. Each ball was placed on a cookie sheet with parchment paper, for the freezer. 

After about 4 hours, the balls were solid and frosty.

Just like the peppers, the swiss chard balls went in a Ziploc bag, with the date as well as a reminder that each ball is about a serving.

Now they'll be ready to defrost and saute when we need them. I'm not sure how well other greens freeze, like collards or kale. But I know that for the recipes and side dishes where we need chard, the frozen balls will be sufficient. 

Theoretically you could remove the stems and only freeze the leaves. I've seen recipes for pickled chard stems, but since I'm not interested in pickling every single vegetable on the planet, and because I love the stems of chard just as much as the leaves, I included them. I just chopped off the most fibrous portions from the bottom and threw them in the compost.

What's going gangbusters in your garden right now? Any preservation plans?

garden update: early August

Really the subtitle of this post should be "all the green tomatoes" because primarily, that's what we've got going on in our garden right now.

Yep. And there's more.

These ones look almost like pears or peppers.

This is just a tiny snapshot of the tomatoes we have going on right now. You can imagine the scope of the tomato issue when I show you that this is what the tomato beds look like right now.

Yeah... It's kind of a jungle. We don't win awards in this house for aesthetics, that's for sure. But in just a few weeks we will likely be up to our eyeballs canning tomatoes and making salsa. I'm not complaining because they taste pretty great. The few that have ripened so far were made into the first batch of fresh tomato sauce (which we freeze) and it filled the house with the best smell - like the best of summer.

Beyond the tomatoes, the beans have been producing like mad. This was not even all of what I picked the other night. I had about another two bags of that size.

So the netting we have to keep the chickens out is still askew from me ripping it apart to get in there and pick. I was racing a thunderstorm that night so I was moving as fast as possible. Again, not winning any awards for aesthetics.

None of our cucumber plants made it, but we have had so many cucumbers from our CSA and my grandparents' garden that I'm honestly kind of happy we don't have any more.

One really cool thing though, is this bed of sweet corn. 

It's so tall - and we're seeing some silk. Here come the ears!

It will be pretty awesome to have a few ears of corn from our own backyard. Crazy to think just a couple months ago these were just seeds. 

The chard is also still doing well. Big huge leaves and vibrantly colored stalks.

Last but not least we have peppers. Lots of those coming, of different types. Hopefully right around the time for salsa.

Late August is the peak time for us for gardening and canning, so I'm trying to stay ahead of the game with what veggies we're eating and preserving with a little white board on our fridge. 

How's your garden doing?

other people's gardens: having a garden with an HOA

Having a garden in an urban environment isn't a cookie-cutter endeavor. There are often rules and limitations to work around. In the interest of promoting the idea that you can still garden in an urban environment, despite space or rule limitations, I bring you "other people's gardens" - which is meant to highlight ways that people garden in the space they are in. If you want to share information about your garden, email me at nextgenhouse at gmail dot com.

First up is a garden in a development of townhomes with an HOA. How do you garden when you only have access to one side of the actual building and have rules about what you can do on your property? Meet Amber (my best friend), living and gardening in a townhouse in Cranberry Township with her husband Anthony and two cats, Bruce and Malcolm.   

We love having a garden, but had to be a bit creative with where to have it, making sure to utilize the limited space that we have and are allowed to plant in, thanks to having an HOA. Because we're on an end unit we decided to make a raised garden bed on the side of the house. I started the project, but I'm a bit impatient and might have hammered some screws into place when the electric screwdriver wasn't cooperating with me (I assure you that user error wasn't part of the issue. At all). That's when Anthony stepped in and made it pretty with his mad skills. Here is the garden:

This is the third year that we've had a garden, and we tried this year to plant vegetables that we tend to use the most. We belong to Kretschmann's CSA and wanted to grow vegetables that would compliment our CSA boxes. Over the years we have planted watermelon, zucchini and eggplant along with our staples of tomatoes, peppers and basil. One year we planted pumpkins, but they took over the entire garden and spilled out of the raised bed. Basically that year we ended up with 2 pumpkins out of everything we planted.

This year we decided to plant bell peppers, wax peppers (which are HOT, in a good way), jalapeños, a plethora of tomatoes, kale, cilantro (which is exploding), chives and basil. We did have a rosemary plant that didn't make it much past the transplant to the ground phase. We purchased all of our plants this year instead of starting them from seeds. We purchased the majority of our seedlings from Brenckle's farm on Glen Eden Road (if you are in the area, check them out and support them).

As far as what to plant, because our space is limited, we have learned not to put vine plants in with everything else (those pumpkins sure taught us a lesson). Last year we planted zucchini in their own little space out back so they could grow and spread out as needed.

Ideally, it'd be nice to have our garden in the backyard where there's full sun, but we would have to get permission for it and there is too much adult/kid/dog traffic back there as it borders the common area.  I'd have to spend my days manning the garden and I think my boss would get annoyed by that.

Because of the angle of the sun on the side of our house, we've learned through trial and error that the tomatoes should go towards the back of the house. Last year we planted them near the front of the house and they grew tall and wide and blocked the sun from reaching some of our smaller plants.  This caused the poor basil to reach out to the sunlight.

We also have a small cherry tree and a blackberry bush, but they are still both very young and don't produce much yet. We just got the first 2 blackberries this summer!

I love watching our plants grow and there is a great feeling when you can walk outside and pick a vegetable or an herb that you need for dinner.

Before we had a garden, I sort of thought it would be overwhelming. There's the watering (this year we bought a weeping hose from Home Depot that really cuts down on the watering time), the weeding (mulch helps keep the weeds to a minimum as well as keeping the ground wet), the pruning and the harvesting. I wasn't sure what to expect on how much time it would take to tend to it. 

So far, it's been totally worth the time put in. I'm sure this is because I enjoy working in the garden and find it relaxing to do the upkeep (and I love that my hands smell like the plants after I've been in the garden). If you're thinking about having a garden but feeling overwhelmed, start by planting one or two things that you enjoy (strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers) and see how it goes. Once that isn't so bad, you can add more.

canning and preserving: green beans

Weeknight canning is a tricky thing. Primarily because canning always, 100% without fail takes longer than you think it will. You look in the Ball Blue Book and see "20 minute processing time" and think, hooray! I can do three batches in one evening!

No, you can't. At least not if you have to get up at 5 a.m. 

But you can usually handle one. So Tuesday night, we canned 9 pints of green beans.

You see, my grandparents have a large garden, and this year we're helping to process and preserve what we can (no pun intended). We aren't around to do the heavy lifting with the picking and maintenance, so we are helping on the back end, since we have the supplies and desire to can.

But the unpredictable thing about nature is that stuff is ready on its own timetable, not ours. So that's how we ended up with enough green beans that we needed to can on a weeknight.

Much of the work is cleaning and prepping the beans, which is why it's so time consuming. But we're old hat at prepping beans for canning, since we've done beans each year since we started canning in the first place.

Beans have to be pressure canned, since the acidity level of the beans isn't high enough to have botulism killed off by a boiling water bath. We do a raw pack, meaning we heat the jars and pack in raw beans and canning salt, plus boiling water. 

We can fit 9 pint jars comfortably in our canner, having decided to do pints instead of quarts so we'd have more jars to split up.

Even though the processing time is only 20 minutes for pints of beans, once that portion is done, the pressure has to come down on its own. Which is another reason that this is harder to do on a weeknight than it seems!

Man, our canner lid has water spots something fierce.

Anyway, we managed to fit in the entire process. I'm sure we'll repeat it again this summer with more beans, but this is a good first start!

garden update: mid-July

This is the time of year where the garden seems to explode overnight and all of the sudden it's time to pick something. Like this, our first tomato of the season.

We've got a million green tomatoes and tiny peppers not far from ripening, too. 

Look at these tiny bell peppers. They look like peppers for a dollhouse kitchen.

Hot peppers are coming along nicely too. Just need a few more tomatoes ready to make some fresh salsa.

If the size of these tomato plants is any indicator, we should have a good harvest this year.

One thing we've already been able to harvest is swiss chard. We usually just eat the chard on its own, sauteed in garlic and chicken broth. It's one of my favorite vegetables, so I typically don't have to find ways to eat it or use it up! 

Cucumber plants are also going gangbusters, and Mark's been waging the war of attrition against cucumber beetles by smooshing them when he is out attending to the chickens.

The sweet corn was just about knee-high by the Fourth of July, and it's looking strong. It rebounded nicely from a nasty storm we had awhile ago where it looked like the stalks were keeled over.

The beans have also taken over their bed. At my last garden update, we were noticing the gaps where the chickens had disrupted the seeds when they got into the bed and messed around. But here you can barely see the gaps - it looks like solid beans from border to border! 

I don't have good photos of my herbs, because actually several of them died. They didn't get watered while I was on vacation and we had several scorcher days in a row (an accidental oversight, but still that's what killed them). I think I've been able to salvage the basil, rosemary and chives at the very least. Working on bringing the dill back to life, as well as the sunflowers. Hopefully by my next garden post, I'll have good news to report on that front!

How's your garden doing? Any harvests yet?