Hello? Anyone?

Yikes, a whole month has gone by and narry an upate about our garden.  Remember that whole post I wrote about wanting to be accountable?  Still do.  Finding time to upload the photos and write the posts has been a bit of a problem with my work schedule.

The garden is mostly dead at this point.  Over Labor Day weekend I harvested the potatoes and was delighted that six plants produced a generous mixing bowl’s worth. 

I was so gleeful digging those up – I did almost nothing while they were growing, and they produced beautifully.  We gave some away and ate the rest.  They were delicious.  We will be planting many, many more potatoes next year, likely in a much bigger space than the raised beds allow.

Our experiment in attempting to ripen the tomatoes in a cardboard box with a banana?  Totally worked.  Which is excellent, because we had a lot of underripe tomatoes at the time of the hurricane. 

My attempt at sauce, before cooking

We’ve had the most amazing crops of tomatoes this year.  In previous years, we did well with the cherry tomatoes, but full-sized tomatoes were always a problem.  This year, bunches of Early Girls and Brandywines.  In fact, we ate what might be the best specimen just the other week for dinner:

Ironically, we picked this one before our late-September trip to the Finger Lakes when it wasn’t quite ripe.  Figuring it might ripen while we were away, we brought it with us.  In it’s own special storage bowl, packed carefully with other groceries that we were transporting to our cabin in New York.  And then we brought it home.  Aparently, Brandywines enjoy travel and respond accordingly:

Next year, more Brandywines.  Especially since they are not readily available at the local grocery store, which is one of the major reasons we grow vegetables – finding heirloom varieties of anything at grocery stores is next to impossible.  The guy who wrote “The $64 Tomato” was right about how good Brandywines taste.