The Modern Victory Garden

I got a lot done this weekend.   On Saturday, I got up early and headed to the local farmers market getting there right when it opened at 9 am.   There I purchased 20 pounds of ripe Roma tomatoes to supplement for the loss of my Viva Italia tomatoes to blight.   I got back home around 10 am and from then until 10 pm - I worked pretty much non-stop doing some food preserving activities.   The ripe box of plums was tackled first.   I made a batch of plum jam (5 pints) which turned out beautiful and very tasty.    

I then sorted out some of the less ripe plums to keep on hand for fresh eating, discarded the too ripe ones, and then used all that remained (just a little over 4 lbs) to make plum butter.   The fruit was first pitted and then run through my Roma Strainer, which removed the skins and created a nice pulpy puree.   The plum puree was then placed in my crock pot slow cooker with 3 cups sugar, and ¼ cup of lemon juice mixed in.   This was allowed to then cook on high (uncovered) virtually all day while I worked on other projects.   About 7 pm, I finished it off by putting the much-reduced puree into a large stockpot and placed it on medium/low heat (stirring frequently) until it was thick enough that it did not run when a small amount was placed on a chilled plate.   This was then put in ½ cup jars and processed in a water bath canner for 10 minutes.   The end result is an intense plum flavored spread that is quite pretty to look at.                

After the plum butter was started in the crock pot, I got started on the Roma tomatoes.   The Roma Strainer was put to use with a salsa screen (provides larger chunks in the puree) to strain out the skin and large seeds.   Approximately 10 cups of puree was used for each batch of salsa (2 batches) and spaghetti sauce (1 batch).   Taking a cue from Annies Granny, I used Mrs. Wages seasoning mixes, which made the process go much faster, and the end products were very good.   I ended up with another 10 pints of salsa and 5 pints of spaghetti sauce.   After the tomato products were completed, I moved on to making a batch of dill pickle relish (8 pints).   This is the same recipe I described last year.   If you are interested you can follow a pictorial version of the recipe by starting HERE and moving through the photos in sequence.   The cucumber plants are really getting going and I accumulated over the past several days the required 8 lbs of pickling cukes to make this favorite recipe.   The cucumber plants are now producing many fruits daily plus have a flush of new flowers promising even more to come soon.         

I hope that I will be able to do some regular dill pickles soon too - now that the plants are producing so well.   So here is the total of the canning efforts on Saturday.                                    

In addition, I chopped up approximately 2 lbs each of sweet onions and mini-bell peppers and froze them.                                             

Today (Sunday) we went for a hike at the Buck Lake trails and enjoyed a nice summer morning walk.   On the way home, we stopped at CB Nuts and got some locally roasted and fresh ground peanut butter.   After a yummy lunch of peanut butter and plum jam sandwiches, I headed out to the garden to tackle the chore I was really dreading - removing the blight stricken Viva Italia tomatoes and any other plants that looked to be infected.   Here's how it looked before I got started.                              

And here it is after I was through.                                  

All of the Viva Italia plants had to go as well as one Legend and three Siletz plants.   Before I removed the plants, I did a harvest of every fruit that did not have apparent disease and looked to be breaking color sufficiently to ripen off the vine potentially.   These were then laid in flat boxes on some newspaper.                    

I estimate I have about 36 pounds that I pulled off the plants.   These went into the garage with a sheet of newspaper covering them.   I will check on them daily and remove any that begin rotting and watch for ones that go ripe.   These were far enough along that there is a good chance I will be able to salvage a large portion of these.   Sadly, there was three times as much that were on the plants that were either clearly diseased or just too young/green to be a candidate for off plant ripening.                 

I did a hard prune on the remaining Siletz plants and the one Celebrity plant.   However, the Stupice and the remaining three Legend plants look to be quite healthy.   In fact, other than the one plant, all of the Legend plants were quite healthy looking and appear to be living up to their "blight resistant" reputation.   The remaining plants are still producing well and this evenings harvest included 3.5 pounds of ripe tomatoes along with  2.5 pounds of Sunset runner beans and 6 ears of corn.               

I am worn out tired, but the tomato patch is cleaned up and the pantry and freezer is starting to fill up nicely.