Pears, Potatoes, Peppers and Pesto! I have been wrangling with tons of all of this for weeks now and I cannot wait until the harvest is over. This may happen sooner than I thought. Today the high was only in the 60's and we are expecting our first possible frost tonight.
The store I work for ordered too many pears and decided to sell them at rock bottom price and I picked up 72 pounds of ripe Bartlett pears for a little over $7. For three days, I turned them into canned pear slices and pear sauce. In the end I had 18 quarts of sliced pears, and 5 pints of pear sauce. I didn't do the math, but I am pretty sure I came out ahead! By the last box, I was so tired of cutting and peeling pears that I threw the rest out to the chickens. They seemed to enjoy it.
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| sliced pears |
For the last three years, I have been buying large sacks of potatoes locally from some guys in a neighboring town. It seems like a good price as I get 30 lbs for $5. Right now I can get a 10 lb. bag at the store for $1, but these potatoes surpass them in quality. They are HUGE! with very little blemishes and most still are caked with dirt they are so fresh. Did you know when you buy a sack of potatoes from the grocery store, they are usually from the harvest the year before?
Peppers! Where do I begin? I do know that next year I am only planing ONE jalapeno plant. I threw out so many peppers because I didn't get them in the freezer or eaten in time and my chickens hate peppers. My bell pepper plants produced pretty well but they will definitely need more support next time as I lost several to broken branches. My orange ones are just now turning. I hope they can hang on a few more days through the frost. As for the chilies, I looked online and learned to string them up to dry. I will know in a few weeks if that was successful, but they do look pretty hanging in my kitchen!
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| ripe chilies hanging to dry |
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| orange bell peppers |
Pesto.. so delicious in its garlicky flavor. In the middle of summer when my lettuce was all finished, I decided to throw down some basil seeds. Those seeds really thrived in our summer heat! I finally got around to turning some of it into pesto but it didn't make a dent in the crop. If my plants survive the night I plan on finishing them off tomorrow. Pesto has to be frozen and not canned unless you have a pressure canner in which I do not. These plants are nearly 2.5 feet tall and I probably wont get to a fraction of what is on there but I am sure I will appreciate it in the dead of winter.
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| Basil |
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