The forecast called for frost last night so I made sure to spend my day yesterday in the garden picking everything that I could. The first was to take every single squash big enough. I filled the tub one last time with all sizes, from foot long all the way to little 4 or 5 inch long ones. I ended up with 10 pounds of normal sized and over 7 pounds of the tiny ones. The squash have done amazing this year. This season I sold 1060 pounds which is 400 pounds more than I had ever sold before. The beans I have sold 600 pounds, 50 pounds more than my best year and I could still sell more as long as the plants don't freeze.
The vast majority of my day was spent picking as many of the green tomatoes as I could. I started off by getting wax boxes and lining hte bottom with the plastic burlap feed sacks from the most recent purchase. Even with was boxes I still don't need the tomatoes screwing them up. It took me over an hour to get all 4 of these boxes filled with on the vine tomatoes. I cut the stems off at the vine and put the whole bunch into the boxes.
All 4 boxes ended up weighing 69 pounds when I put them in the cooler.
They are all super green, like Ruby Rodd.
In Carla Emery's book she wrote that greens are best stored at 45F and ripen at 70F.
The 4 boxes came from just these 6 plantings in the 20 foot section of row in the pole bean garden.
After a break to eat something I headed out to the main garden and the pile of tomatoes. I started with the biggest ones first, the beefsteak and big jims. There are some with color but most are solid green.
The Tsunshingo tomatoes are stupid prolific. The things explode around my garden every year and I am pretty sure I will have them volunteering forever at this rate. I pulled 2 full 1/2 bushel boxes of them in the main garden. Every thing from the pole bean garden is the same type.
The bumblebee tomatoes are a nice small tomato or super large cherry and the volunteer plants produced pretty well. There were about 6 or 7 of them that grew this year and produced about 25 pounds.
The final amount that I pulled from the main garden.
167 pounds of green tomatoes are now chilling in the cooler. I know the boxes are huge and I risk trouble but for now this has to do. Hopefully I have another delivery or 2 for the co-op
so I can get more boxes of the shorter size, then I can sort these out.
34 pounds of squash is what we have for us after the season of solid sales.
Since I picked all the squash I didn't cover it for the night, I just put up row cover on the tomato row. The cucumbers are all done now so I didn't worry about covering them. It is not a perfect covering but it also didn't get that cold. It is still in the 30s F as the dawn breaks today.
My deck/house plants got moved inside. My 2 big avocados have to be out of the freezes as well as the dragon fruit so I brought them in. I can slide them back out on the deck as the temps allow.
The cactus and succulents along with the young citrus all have to be inside. This is their position for the winter, closest to the biggest windows in the house.
The latest audiobook I finished:
On writing - by Stephen King
(Holy shit did this book strike home with me the most so far. King is unapologetically himself and even though the book is a bit more of a memoir he gets into the guts of writing from his perspective. I had absolutely no clue that and was super surprised to hear him say that he does not rememeber writing Cujo, he was to drunk and high on cocaine at the time. Just listening to his writing and the amazing descriptions of parts of his childhood stuck in my craw. Interesting that he is a pure pantser and doesn't outline his stories at all, he just lets them flow out of him. He looks at stories as fossils that we are excavating, the story exists we are just observing it and writing it down as we see it.
I love his quoting Strunk in the beginning, "13. Omit needless words.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a
paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should
have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not
that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his
subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
So in the afternoon and evening we watched the UFC fights. I was surprised Reyes lost and didn't get the light heavyweight belt and not surprised that Adesanya kept his belt.
While the fights were on and after I kept at my story and got 2400 words down. I am a short way to 10k words and feeling the story stating to come into its own. My system so far has been post here in the mornings, work the day, then write in the evenings. That is when my creativity is flowing better and the mornings I am getting my creative self warmed up for the day.
Fleming Family Farm
FLEMING FAMILY FARM, LLC
Sustainable & Organic Methods | Heirloom Produce
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I always promote our copy of Carla Emery's book to any library patron who is exploring homesteading-related subjects.
I have 2 versions. My parent's which is tattered but still there and I am unsure the exact version but it is from the late 70's, then I have the most recent. I use the new one constantly and am always referencing it.
The Mother Thing has an old copy from the mid-80s or so. Green cover. Very tattered.
Same green cover except mine is missing the front. Has the index but not the print date page so I am not sure what date it was printed but sounds the same.
#proofofshare
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That's a lot of tomatoes. Are these all organic?
I am not certified organic but otherwise yes.
Wonderful. You have nice farm and great harvesting.
Thanks.
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Do not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:
That cooler is getting full! What happens to the green tomatoes next?
For now they are going to sit in the cooler. I am hoping that keeping them at 42F will help keep them longer. Not all of them are savers but it was easier to just pull bunches rather than individuals. The bulk of them will hopefully be processed into quart jars as I can ripen them.