Organic Gardening

Tomato Tales

~ McArtor ~ Leave a comment

Traveling Tomatoes

Some of our  tomato plants are still producing small amounts of grape and cherry tomatoes.  We planted indeterminant tomato plants this year. An indeterminate tomato variety will continue to set and ripen fruit until killed off by frost.  We collected thousands of these sweeties this season.  Picking them can be tedious, but tasty.  My husband and son would pop them right into their mouths as they picked.  I tried several ways to cook and preserve these little guys.  I roasted them (at 250 degrees for 2 hours)  until they became shriveled like a sun dried tomato, then froze them in little baggies.  I sauteed them with garlic and olive oil and tossed in penne pasta.  I gave them away to friends and family.  This week, the batch in the photo traveled to the Howard County Food Bank.  A much appreciative staff carried them away to a refrigerator.  I am sure they will be enjoyed.  I hope more produce from our garden will travel to the food bank this season and  future seasons. 

Fall Clean Up and Demolition

~ McArtor ~ 2 Comments

Welcome to the first entry on my garden blog!  Just in time for fall clean up of the garden.    Summer harvests are slowing down after a fabulous season.  All those tiny seeds planted in March produced hundreds of cherry, olivade roma, big boy and grape tomatoes and numerous zucchini and  cubanelle, bell, habanero, jalapeno and banana peppers.  The wonder of this marvelous bargain, one seed planted buys a crop of nourishment.  It is hard to say goodbye to my generous plants.  How is your garden clean up going?

This week in our garden plot,  I uprooted five brown shriveling  tomato plants and sixteen huge sagging sunflower plants.  The tomato plants folded and twisted nicely into my crowded compost bin.  But the  10 foot sunflower plants stood rigid.  Immovable posts stuck in the dry dirt.  I used a shovel to chop the 4 to 5 inch thick stalks and dig around the wide root balls.  When the first giant toppled to the ground, hundreds of bugs scattered.  I destroyed  the Sunflower Hotel for bugs!  Ugh!  stink bugs, wasps, bees, flies, caterpillars, butterflies, beetles and even a wolf spider evacuated in a flurry.   After my skin stopped crawling, I felt appreciation towards those stubborn sunflowers.   They brought  VIP bugs to our garden…..wasps, bees, flies and a wolf spider!  Unfortunately,  the Sunflower Hotel had to be condemned because the pesky stink bugs outnumbered all the VIPs.