Relish and drying

The end of summer ritual of making my mums relish happened a few days ago. I wish I could say that the tomatoes were from my garden. 

Unfortunately while much of the garden did great in its first year the tomatoes still look like this.

In this cool climate I am thinking there will be no ripe tomatoes with out a green house.

The relish got made and I've started harvesting seeds for next year.

I am currently drying seeds from fava beans, cilantro, field peas, arugala, pak choi, sno peas, beans and a variety of flowers.I have a corner in the house filled with various containers that contain the pods and flowers that I am drying. Every few days I go through them and sort the seeds that have dried off and separate them from the chaff. After a few more days of drying they then go into an envelope and stored for next season.

I have also been drying lemon balm and holy basil for tea. The holy basil has a lot of flowers on it but the plants didn't get very big before flowering. I'll see how that works out. Again a green house would help.
We are also trying to dry blackberries. We are using the oven for this as we don't have a food dryer.
It is a long process but seems to be working. It seems if the blackberries are frozen on a tray first then put in an oven at 140'F for 10-14 hours that will do it.
Our gas oven only goes down to 170'F. We put them in the oven for a few hours in the evening, turned the oven off over night and back on again in the morning.8 hours later the berries are almost dried.

I am making lots of notes this first season. Hopefully next year I'll know what to do different.

We have a month here before we leave for Thailand. My plans include moving plants around from nursery beds into more permanent sites.

Time seems to be running out.

Harvesting and preserving

Last week I noticed the apples were ripening. This week I ended up with a small bucketful.

 

The apple trees are laden, but I thought it would be another few weeks until they ripened.

But when I realised some critter was eating them I investigated further.
Suddenly it was time to do something with them. I now have quite a lot of apple sauce. Great for on the oatmeal on these continuing cold mornings.

Then while I was on a roll I did a batch of tomato relish- a recipe I inherited from my mum.

 

When I got back to Canada in July, I started a new batch of sour dough starter. It always seems to take a while for the starter to get lively. The first few loaves are always a little solid.

But the starter is great now, and it is making me some great bread.

I am experimenting with using 1/2 cup of oat flour to replace some of the whole wheat spelt flour I used previously. So far so good. I've also replaced some of the whole wheat spelt with rye flour with good results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lots and lots of tomatoes

The tomatoes are finally producing faster than we can eat them.

 

 It is time to make some relish. The rest get cooked up and mushed and preserved as passata to be used in future sauces.