Final Harvests

It is 36 degrees outside and snowing puffy flakes that won't stick. The tomato plants have all turned brown and flopped over. The giant shrub of parsley has finally succumbed to the cold and deflated into a flat circle in the flower bed. It's the third week of November and the last tomato was just picked ten days ago. The weather has gone from end of summer to winter with not much autumn in between.

But for the last two weeks I have been harvesting and putting up the end of the garden produce. I have dried countless batches of oregano, parsley, lavender, sage, and basil in the food dehydrator. I harvested twenty small to medium onions that are hanging in the basement, and dried several batches of leeks diced into small pieces. I also slit, seeded and dried eight jalapeno peppers--the crop was much larger than that but we ate a lot of them in salsas. I made many batches of tomato sauce for the freezer.

I harvested roughly two dozen stumpy carrots. They were on the side of the garden not washed out by the summer's flood, but still they seemed to suffer from stunted growth. I am enjoying them, but they taste a little too much like dirt for the rest of the family. They will be finished off as the Thanksgiving carrot salad next week.

And then there were the sweet potatoes.

I have never grown sweet potatoes before. I found the plants--a dozen for $2.27 at the hardware store greenhouse--and thought I would give them a try. I love sweet potatoes. I dug a bed for them, and spaced the plants out with about eight inches in between them. They grew. And they grew. Like last summers pumpkins, the vines spread out and tried to take over. But the potatoes were growing underground, and the vines were easily trimmed back with the mower when they encroached too far on the lawn, so they were not too invasive. They grew into the arbor vita shrubs behind the bed where they were planted and out the other side. When I finally pulled the vines up, some of them were more than twelve feet long.

I had put black plastic down around all my plants, with grass clippings over the top to keep it down. When I pulled up the vines and then the plastic, the potatoes were hiding just under the surface around the main stem into the ground. Each vine produced three to four potatoes. BIG potatoes. I gave some away and wrapped the rest in newspaper and put in the basement. They will be baked in the oven and mashed. I add a little butter and ginger and freeze them in one-cup containers. We will have mashed sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, as well as sweet potato rolls.

For these I use a potato bread recipe out of Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, and substitute mashed sweet potatoes for the mashed white potatoes the recipe calls for. This was done one Thanksgiving several years ago when I realized that I only had enough white potatoes to mash for dinner, and not enough to use for the rolls. I thawed some mashed sweet potatoes from the freezer and made the dough using those. Everyone raved about the rolls that year, and I have made them that way ever since. Last year my son walked through the kitchen and caught me mixing up the dough with the mashed sweet potatoes. He doesn't like them, and said that I was ruining the rolls and he wouldn't eat any at dinner. He ate nine. 

There is still a basket of Roma tomatoes on the table ranging from green to almost overripe. We are slicing them on pizza, adding them to salads, and trying to use them all up. There are many containers of tomato sauce in the freezer, onions, sweet potatoes, frozen packs of rhubarb and our first small strawberries, and lots of dried herbs waiting to be used as seasonings all winter--the dried sage will go nicely in the cornbread stuffing for the turkey. In spite of the flood and all the rain that took out the beans, cucumbers, and the beets, it was a good year for the garden. We will have a lot to be Thankful for next Thursday.

Comments

[Kate]

I know this is early, and I'll probably speak to you next Thursday, but Happy Thanksgiving and I am sad that, once again, I'm missing Thanksgiving with your family!

[shauna]

Hope you see this Annie - thank you so much for the kind words about my book! Hope you have a lovely 2009 :)