Picking and pickling a peck of peppers (or two)

I had to look it up, but a peck of peppers is a quarter of a bushel, or around 10 pounds. The word "frost" has been bandied about in the weather forecast, so I thought it might be a good idea to pick the peppers. The warm September has made up for a coolish summer and the plants were heavy with fruit. 

I picked the jalapeños yesterday (3.5kg) and the sweet peppers today (6.5kg). A grand total of 10kg, or 22 pounds. 

 I sliced all the jalapeños and pickled about half of them using brine and the hot-water canning method...

... and open froze the rest.  Once frozen, I packed them into a single large plastic freezer bag, so I can just remove handfuls as and when I need some.

The sweet peppers were a mix of Antohi, Golden Marconi and Cubanelles.

I* washed them, cut off the tops, halved and deseeded them, then cooked them with the cut side down under the broiler/grill for seven minutes, until the skins were blackened. I found doing around twelve peppers in each batch worked well.

 Then I put them in a covered plastic tub to cool down, before removing the skins and packing them into glass jars. Then I added water with a little salt in it to the jars and pressure canned them for 35 minutes.

 Six kilos of fresh peppers ended up as three one-kilo/quart jars of processed fruit.

*Child#2 took over this job half way through and this speeded up the process dramatically. I definitely recommend getting a friend or family member involved with jobs like this!

Garlic harvest

It's been a while, but I thought I'd better blow off a few cobwebs and start posting here again. A lot has happened since I last wrote a post, in late 2020, a lot of it rather sad. We lost my mother-in-law on her late husband's birthday in 2021 and then last year, on his wife's birthday, my dad died as a result of a stroke he suffered during the exceptional heatwave in July.

The last time I spoke to Dad was the day I harvested the garlic in 2022 and I generally plant the garlic around the time of his birthday in October, so the plant is going to be forever linked to memories of Dad in my mind.

I harvested the crop a little later this year: it's been a cooler, wetter summer than the average, and the bulbs weren't ready to pull until early August.

I plant around 40 cloves in one of the raised beds. The garlic keeps fairly well in the basement for about six months, but after that, it gets inedible, so this year I decided to try pickling some of the crop to keep it a bit longer.

After it had been curing for a couple of weeks, I reserved ten garlic heads for replanting in October, and chose another ten heads for storing and use over the next few months.

Then it was just a small matter of peeling the cloves of the remaining 20 heads of garlic. Mike gave me a hand, so this didn't take too long.

This quantity of garlic cloves weighed just over a kilogram before we peeled them. They filled one quart jar and one pint one and needed about 600ml of vinegar (yep, still using a hopeless mixture of Imperial and metric measures). I warmed the vinegar up enough to dissolve a couple of teaspoons of pickling salt, then poured it over the garlic. These should keep well in the fridge.

 

Garlic is pretty much the only crop I grow where I can claim any measure of self-sufficiency. I enjoy growing it, cooking with it, and eating it. Now all those things are going to be tinged with a little sadness, but I don't see that as a bad thing.

Tomato Last Hurrah

I'm still picking tomatoes from the greenhouse, but they are ripening very slowly now and I know it won't be long before a killing frost gets to them.

This week I have been making the most of them by making panzanella for my work lunches. I often make a Dutch oven loaf at the weekend (I follow Tara O'Brady's recipe for Seeded Boule from her book Seven Spoons but don't always bother with the seeds. So these days it's just Boule, really...). If I'm lucky, there will be some of the loaf left over for Monday. This week I was extra fortunate, with enough bread left for Tuesday, too.

Both days I made panzanella with a torn-up slice of the bread, a few tomatoes, and a few olives. Then I drizzled over some red wine vinegar and olive oil, mixed it all together and let it sit until lunchtime. It's such a simple dish, but tastes lovely and is a great way of appreciating these late-season harvests. On Tuesday I made the same thing, but this time added a few of the pickled peppers I made last week, just to give the meal a bit of a kick.

Resurrection with Pickled Peppers

It's been a while since I've been here (over two years, wow), but I want to get back in the habit of writing regularly, and this seems like a sensible place to start. I thought I'd write up my recipe for pickled jalapeño peppers. It's an adaptation of a few different recipes I found online. And, unlike one of those, it does not begin with "Clean your kitchen" as the first instruction. 😒

I grow two kinds of hot peppers: a cayenne type and tam jalapeños. The cayennes are easy to deal with: I just put those straight into the freezer and take them out when I need them. They are thin-skinned and defrost quickly. I probably have enough for the next ten years...

The jalapeños are a bit more work: they can be frozen for a short period of time, but their thicker skins mean that they suffer from freezer burn if you keep them like that for too long. I like to slice and pickle them, but as I only grow four to six plants, it takes a while to harvest enough to make it worth pickling a batch.

My solution is to freeze the jalapeños as they ripen to red, and leave them frozen for a month or two until I have a sufficient quantity to pickle.

Today I harvested the remaining (mostly green) jalapeños from the greenhouse and let the frozen ones defrost before slicing them all up and discarding the stems.

I use my pressure canner to process the pepper slices. The recipe is pretty simple: for each pound of sliced peppers, you need 330ml of water and 110ml of white vinegar (roughly 1 cup and ⅓ cup) and half a teaspoon of salt. Bring the water, vinegar and salt to a boil to make a brine, then blanch the sliced peppers in the brine for two minutes. Pack the peppers into a two pint jar, then pour the brine over, seal with a lid, and pressure can the jar for ten minutes.

These are nice as a pizza topping, or to add a bit of heat to quesadillas or salads. Once opened, they will keep for several months in the fridge. In theory, anyway...

First and last

...harvest, that is. The first of 2016 and the last of last year's crops, I think.

With winter finally putting in an appearance, and the temperature due to drop drastically tonight, I dug up my remaining swedes/rutabagas and harvested the cabbages, sprouts, purple cauliflower and kale which were still bravely clinging on in my two brassica beds. There were over ten pounds of swedes!

The cabbages were still very small, so I decided to use them up by making kimchi out of them. They're not napa cabbages, which is the usual kimchi one, but I will experiment with what I have, approximately following this recipe, and if it works out, I'll buy the proper cabbage next time I go shopping. I found some baby leeks, carrots and one lone Chioggia beet in the greenhouse, so I've sliced those up and added them to the kimchi mix.

Now I just need to find a way of using up all those swedes...

Christmas Eve harvest

I know it can't last, but the exceptional weather has continued, with temperatures hitting 15°C/59°F today. I was able to harvest quite a few green things from the garden for our Christmas dinner:

broccoli

kale

small but perfectly formed purple cauliflowers

and both sprouts and Brussels tops

I pulled up a swede/rutabaga, too.

We are promised a storm next week and I'm sure winter proper will be upon us soon, but I am thoroughly enjoying this reprieve, however temporary!

Bringing the garden indoors

Still mild here (hope writing that doesn't jinx things) - the greenhouse herbs are still going strong. Here's the dill:

The parsley is still going, too. I mentioned the herbs to a colleague who asked if I bring some in for the winter. I don't normally (apart from the rosemary), but this struck me as an excellent idea, so this winter I have done just that, bringing some in from the garden, others from the greenhouse. The cat is having to share her windowsill with rosemary, dill, sage, thyme, oregano, parsley and coriander/cilantro. You can't see it in this photo, but the rosemary is actually flowering at the moment!

There were still some root crops to harvest: I pulled the last of the parsnips, most of the carrots and a couple of parsnips from the greenhouse and dug up a couple of pounds of sunchokes from the garden, as the soil is still soft enough to dig.

I also got a cabbage from the brassica patch, which is still doing well - there will be swedes/rutabagas to pull and more kale there. I think we might even get some Brussels sprouts, although they won't be as big as the ones happening in the UK this year. They even made the front page of the Weather Network's site (I think they are having to drum up stories about sprouts because the weather is being so un-newsworthy here!).

Winter on the way

November has been so mild, I'm still picking kale from the garden. Which is lucky, because the ones in the greenhouse are being comprehensively nibbled by caterpillars.

This morning was the coldest yet, -8C/17F but gorgeously sparkly. Just a taste of winter.

Or maybe a warning...

Pre-frost harvest

Yesterday evening I was running round the greenhouse in a variation on Supermarket Sweep, gathering up vegetables that I thought might be damaged beyond edibility by the coming frost.

The frost certainly arrived: touching my marigolds

and my outside vegetables. Not that this kale will mind: there's a fair bit of broccoli, cabbage, sprouts and cabbage still to harvest outside and this level of cold won't do them any harm.

And having done all that harvesting, the plants in the greenhouse survived the frost undamaged, so with any luck there will still be more tomatoes and peppers to gather in the next week or two.

Thanksgiving harvest

There was a slight frost this morning: not enough to kill anything, or spoil the tomatoes, but enough to turn the roof white and create a crispy feeling underfoot.

The Thanksgiving weekend is upon us, and Child1 has come home from university to share it with us. We've been talking on Skype most days, probably for longer than when we were under the same roof, but it's nice to have everyone under the same roof for a while (even if it is covered with frost).

I did a sweep of the garden and greenhouse to gather up food for the weekend. Pulled a huge cabbage, three pie pumpkins, some tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini and peppers. Bottom left are what I at first thought should be purple cauliflower, but then gradually worked out are in fact purple sprouting broccoli. This is the first year I've successfully grown these. There are some mini purple cauliflower coming too, but the leaves, now I look at them, are different from the broccoli ones.

Plenty to give thanks for, anyway!

All shapes and sizes

I've got three different eggplant varieties growing this year, and so far I've had one fruit from each, with quite a few more to come if it stays warm for a while.

This one, applegreen, is new to me:

Korean early long:

And my favourite, as far as looks go, rosa bianca:

Peppers (again!)

The hot weather in the last couple of weeks has really been ripening the peppers. I spent a happy ten minutes this morning, picking them.

I roasted the sweet peppers and then pulled the skins off them, once they'd cooled down a bit.

Then I packed them into a jar and pressure canned them for half an hour. This should preserve them over the winter.

I also tried a new trick with the pressure cooker - using it to cook eggs. Fresh eggs are always a pain to peel, but if you cook them in the pressure cooker, they turn out to be extremely easy. I cooked them at the lower pressure setting for six minutes. I think next time I'll do it for four or five, as the yolks were a bit dry for my taste, but this was definitely an experiment that was worth repeating.

Pepper pots

The peppers remained green for a long time, but are just starting to ripen. I picked two large flower-pots' worth this morning. The bright red ones in the middle are Cayennes and the ones to the bottom are Hungarian Hot Wax. The dark red peppers were supposed to be California Wonder,  but they look more like the Chocolate pepper I've grown in other years. The pretty yellow ones are Antohi peppers - they have an orange blush to them as they ripen. And the green ones are Tam Jalapeño peppers, which I have sliced and pickled for winter use, together with the Hot Wax ones. They're nice on pizzas or in salads or sandwiches, to add a bit of extra flavour.

Lentil harvest (part 2)

The pillowcase-and-baseball-bat threshing technique worked well to release the lentils from their pods. Then I removed the stems of the plants and tipped the remaining material from one plastic container to another, in a light breeze, to winnow out the last bits of straw and seed-pods.

From about 20 lentil plants, I recovered about half a cup of lentils (80g). Enough for one meal, perhaps, which perhaps doesn't sound too impressive. There are around 160 lentils in 5g, which gives a total yield of around 2,650 lentils in my batch.  I probably only sowed about 20 lentils to begin with, so that's a return of 13,150% on my initial investment, which is nothing to sniff at.

I'll keep a lot of these seeds for next year and grow a bigger patch outside, if I can devise a way of protecting the seedlings from rabbits!

New harvests

I'm growing lentils this year and the time has come to harvest my first crop. Last year I tried growing them outside and every last plant was eaten by rabbits. This year I grew them in the greenhouse for a bit more protection.

I've been doing some research to find out the best way of processing the crop, and it seems that pulling the entire plant and leaving it to dry for a few days is the best approach. Then I should be able to thresh the plants by putting them in a pillowcase and bashing them about a bit, before separating the lentils from the straw.

Out of curiosity, I broke open a few of the pods to see what the lentils look like. The variety is Le Puy, which is the famous lentil grown in that region of France. There, they grow in a volcanic soil which gives them a unique flavour and in the European Union you can only call a lentil a Le Puy lentil if it is grown in that region. I suppose those types of rules don't apply outside the EU, but I don't know what you're supposed to call a Le Puy lentil if you grow it somewhere else! They are an interesting colour: basically green, but with blue marbling on them.

The other crops I've been researching harvesting techniques for are those in my 'grain patch' for this year. These are also new for me. From right to left in the picture below are: hull-less oats, Sangatsuga barley and Red Fife wheat. There's quite a bit of hop-clover growing underneath them, which I've left there, as it adds nitrogen to the soil and I don't think is doing the grains any harm.

These aren't ready to harvest yet, but they are definitely changing colour. Here they are in more detail - the oats:

The barley:

And the wheat:

My plan for these so far is to save the grain and sow a bigger patch next year, with the eventual aim of using it as feed for the chickens. Or maybe even eating it ourselves!

December harvest

The temperature is forecast to drop to -11°C/12°F tonight, so I seized the opportunity of digging up some Jerusalem artichokes while I still could!

There isn't much left growing in the greenhouse, but I did get three bok choi plants and some coriander for our evening meal. The chickens are finally getting their act together, with a respectable clutch of six eggs today. We have eight nest boxes but for some reason they only lay in two of them - and they aren't adjacent. Who knows how a chicken's mind works?

I've spent the last couple of weeks taking advantage of some of the milder days by digging over the beds in the lower vegetable garden and adding chicken manure to two of them. This year, for the first time, I'm covering the beds with a winter mulch.

I had some leaves bagged up from 2013 and there is still a fair bit of old hay in the big barn, so I've used both on different beds, as a mini experiment to see how it goes. I'm hoping it will suppress at least some of the early weed growth in the spring.