Late Fall Garden Update

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The weather is turning nippy and the winds are blowing the remnants of fall's brilliant leaves around into whirlwinds of color. My garden, which has been so productive, is beginning to slow down in preparation for winter. Nevertheless, it still has some bounty to share before the long sleep. Here are the last of the apples in my tree. These beauties are the inaccessible ones at the very top of the tree. Since they can't be reached, we have to wait for them to fall. The squirrels and birds haven't been very cooperative in this regard, helping themselves to more than half the apples on the tree.  Apparently they have had their fill as they have left these few alone. Fortunately these apples did not get mangled, beaten or bruised from the fall and fell onto the soft dirt instead of the hard concrete surrounding the garden. There's good eatin' here.

My monster tomato plant (yes, plant...singular) has all but obliterated the azalea bush that supports it. Only a little bit of the bush is visible on the extreme right side. The rest is all tomato. It is still producing flowers which I am ripping off as fast as they are being produced in the hope of redirecting the growth hormones to the developing fruit. There are still hundreds of little green tomatoes on the vine. Because of the shorter days and cooler weather the ripening process has slowed down drastically but I am still harvesting quite a bit. I was out of town for a week and upon my return the bowl of tomatoes you see here was waiting for me.


Now begins the long process of readying my garden for winter. Spent plants must be uprooted, Pots must be brought in, and plastic must be draped over the hoop house to shield it from the ravages of snow and ice. I'm tired just thinking about it but it inspires me to look forward to next season's garden. Now I have property upstate that I can plant also. More work. More fun. More food. I love my garden .

Always and All Ways,
#Gitana the Creative Diva

The Vine That Ate Troy Avenue

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View from the front of the garden

No, you're not looking at a scene from an agricultural horror flick. What you're seeing is a monster tomato plant that has all but consumed my ancient azalea bush and is using it as its own personal trellis. This vine spontaneously sprang up in the middle of my garden of its own accord. Had I intentionally planted it, I would have placed it in a container. I thought about pulling it up but then I got lazy and decided to leave it and allow it to take its course. OH MY, I got a whole lot  more than I bargained for. Turns out that this tomato was an indeterminate variety. That means that it is a sprawling vine that keeps on growing and growing and growing until weather or other conditions kill it off. Some of those tentacles are over eight feet long!! If I had known that when I saw that cute little plant spring out of the ground, I might have yanked it out without any mercy but I'm actually glad I didn't. Turns out that:

View from the back of the garden

Indeterminate Tomato Varieties Have Better Tomato Flavor*

“Determinate” and “indeterminate” are terms used to describe a tomato variety’s growth habit — but many gardeners don’t realize these categories relate to flavor, too. Most determinate tomato plants have fewer leaves per fruit than their sprawling indeterminate cousins. These compact determinate plants have the advantage of growing better in containers and producing all of their harvest at once, which makes them great for processing. But, don’t expect them to be as flavorful as the vining indeterminate varieties that have more leaves to convert sunlight into sugars and, thus, develop more intense, complex flavors (*Source).

The fruits of my labor

Who knew? Not me, but I can tell you this. Those little tomatoes, pictured here, are delicious. My son pops them in his mouth and eats them like candy. I've used them in salads, in stews, made tomato sauce with them and they are great. Best I've ever grown, really, and I never would have known this had I ripped it out of the ground. And it's still producing in October! I have dozens of green tomatoes on the vine waiting to ripen. 

Basil, Lettuce seeds, and more

These days I've been harvesting as much as I can because the days are shorter and the weather is cooler. Here you'll see a picture of Italian basil, red lettuce seed heads, some tiny potatoes that were hiding from me last time and a green pepper. Those leaves are going to be dehydrated, those seeds will be separated out from the heads for next year, and those potatoes and pepper are destined for my cooking pot. BONUS: the cooler weather benefits cilantro which has begun to grow in my garden now from seeds that dropped from the spring crop. More tasty herbs on the horizon. The cycle begins again.

This year's growing season is winding down but I'm still reaping the benefits and planning next year's garden. I'm smiling just at the thought of it.

#LoveMyGarden 



Ballo ergo sum - Gitana, the Creative Diva

Homemade Tomato Sauce

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This year I was blessed with an unexpectedly large crop of cherry tomatoes and a much smaller, yet no less respectable, crop of peppers. My basil exploded and literally took over the garden. With this abundance of produce, I had to do something or lose it to neglect. I decided to try my hand a making my own tomato base for spaghetti sauce.

In order to peel my tomatoes, I cut an "X" on all my tomatoes at one end and plunged them into boiling water for about a minute or less. Then I removed them and plunged them into an ice water bath. This causes the tomato skin lift away from the tomato flesh, making them easy to peel.I transferred them from pot to pot using a spaghetti colander made to fit inside the pot. All I had to do was load the strainer, dip it into the boiling pot, then pick it up and plunge it into ice water to stop them from overcooking.

After peeling all the tomatoes, I placed them all in a food processor and processed them, seeds and all, until they were smooth, after which I placed them in a large pot to simmer. As they simmered, I added homegrown peppers and basil to the sauce, as well as oregano, black pepper, onions, garlic, some fennel, rosemary, marjoram, a little salt, and pork sausage that had been pre-cooked to remove the excess fat.  I let the whole thing simmer for almost two hours until the sausages were cooked through. Processing tomatoes in this way creates a thin, dark pink liquid, quite unlike the thick, dark red sauce found on the grocer's shelf. I used a little corn starch to thicken it up a bit.

I am proud to say that the sauce was great. Even my son and husband, my biggest food critics, commented on how tasty it was.I froze the remainder and reheated it a few days later and it was still great tasting although the sauce thinned out a bit.

Garden fresh ingredients. Seriously, we are all spoiled rotten in this household.

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva

Garden Update, Take 2

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For the past couple of weeks I have been on a steady diet of weed. Weeding the garden, that is. We've been experiencing quite a bit of rain which has created an explosion of plant and flower growth but, alas, the weeds also benefit from Nature's largesse. Particularly bothersome are the morning glories. Last year's beautiful abundance of blooms resulted in hundreds upon HUNDREDS of seeds, all of which appear to be germinating simultaneously. Without any exaggeration, I can easily say I have pulled out several hundred seedlings in the past few days alone, only to have a new crop appear again in the same place the very next day. This is in addition to purslane, dandelion, bedstraw, chickweed and all the other usual characters found in the weed pantheon. Nevertheless, I press on, determined to pluck every last one lest they compete with my plants for nutrients.

Speaking of my plants, they are doing quite well although some of them are taking a very long time to germinate. I have quite a collection of flowers growing.

Here are some lovely four foot tall orange daylilies. They sit front and center in my front garden, greeting all passersby. They are so prolific that I've given most of them away and spread them through the garden and I still have a lot.  They tower over their pretty yellow cousins, the Stella D'Oro daylilies. They, too, are quite prolific and would easily take over the garden if given the chance.

 Here are a couple of snap dragons that popped up spontaneously without my help. (
There's a lot of that going on the garden this year.) These two are actually growing under the large leaves of two other plants that have mysteriously sprouted in my garden. You can see them below left, flanked by lavender in the raised bed. I have no idea what they are but they appear to be sunflowers on steroids. The leaves and flower buds are similar but there are differences in the growth habit. They are so thick and stocky, I'm almost afraid I'm cultivating another Audrey 2 (from Little Shop of Horrors fame). The raised bed is surrounded by sweet alyssum that self seeded from last year. They are already releasing their beautifully delicate fragrance and sweetening the air.

In the vegetable department, I've got some bush beans growing in plastic pails along the front of the house, They are joined by the yellow flowers of the cucumbers climbing through my old azalea and some bush variety cherry tomatoes blooming profusely in another pail. My onions, not to be outdone, are also in bloom. If  you've never seen an onion blossom, it looks like a fuzzy ping pong ball at the end of a stick. I'll soon  cut off the blooms and use the stems as scallions for cooking.

For a touch of whimsy I set up my tipsy pot of flowers. Every year it is in a different spot and sports different flowers. This year I decided severely limit my garden expenditures and chose to use whatever was already growing in my garden to fill the tipsy pots. This year it is filled with alyssum and creeping Jenny (moneywort) trailing over its side.

There is so much more going on in the garden but too much for now. Fodder for another post. Until then...


Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva

The Last Hurrah

The soft coolness of early fall has given way to the bitter chill of impending winter. Weather reports forecast temperatures dipping below the freezing mark and warned of possible overnight frost. That was the push I needed to evacuate my garden of the last of its crops and to finally see what was going on underground.

I had planted some sweet potatoes pieces that had sprouted in my cabinet because I left them in there too long and didn't eat them in time. Two years ago I had done the same thing with a piece a friend of mine was about to throw out. With my first attempt I was so excited and impatient to see the roots, I dug them up before they had fully matured. I didn't know I was supposed to allow the leaves to die back before harvesting them. This time I resolved to be patient and give the plants the time they needed to fully develop and I was rewarded with the roots you see above surrounded by the green tomatoes that were still growing on the vines. In all, I picked over three pounds of tomatoes and dug up nearly four pounds of sweet potatoes. The large one in the center of the photo weighed over a pound all by itself. Not bad for a vegetable garden that appeared to be nearly lifeless.

I haven't decided what to do with the roots yet. I'm toying with the idea of sweet potato pie, mashed sweet potatoes, sweet potato fries or sweet potato chips. Then again I may do nothing, preferring to hand them over to my mother or sister to prepare for the Thanksgiving feast. It would be the first Thanksgiving that I am able to contribute something from the garden that everyone can partake of. I expect that several of the tomatoes will be ripe by then as well and I'll be able to make a salad for the holiday feast. Some that I had picked green a couple of weeks ago finally ripened to a beautiful red this week and went into my dinner salad so some of these greenies should be ready by the end of the month.

It's moments like this that make all the hard work of gardening worthwhile.


Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva

I've been busy...

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It seems as though I was looking forward to summer barbecues just weeks ago and now it's the middle of September. Where has the time gone? I've been so busy this summer that time has flown by and I've barely posted anything on this blog. Where to begin?

My son and daughter each graduated from their respective community colleges this year and are deep in the throes of job hunting. They have a couple of prospects lined up so fingers and toes are crossed. My daughter came back home after graduation so we're all getting adjusted to having a full house again. My husband and I enjoyed a great second honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico in August and I was thrilled to return home to find that my children had not let my garden die of thirst in my absence nor had they trashed the house. Obviously they have either been well trained or feared for their lives upon my return. Either way, I liked the results.

As in every summer, I spent a lot of time in my garden but this year it was a mixed bag of results. Some things did very well, others did poorly. I tried my hand at growing some new things this year and was rewarded with some potatoes, one huge zucchini, broccoli, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes that are still coming in, carrots and peppers. I'm torn about planting next year. I'm thinking perhaps I should amend the garden and allow it to rest at least one year. At least it sounds good but I know I will miss the thrill of eating my own vegetables. Maybe I'll limit myself to containers next year so the garden can rest and rejuvenate. Perhaps.

I've also been doing some small home improvements and am still in the midst of them. During my week in Mexico my son painted his bedroom and did a pretty fair job considering he really didn't much experience at it. My daughter has also finally finished painting her room.  I foolishly suggested we try a gradient technique I saw on Pinterest. Silly me. Needless to say it was a lot more difficult than in appeared in the online tutorials. It took two weeks and enough paint to cover the Brooklyn Bridge to paint this tiny little room but I suppose that was due more in part to the fact that neither she nor her boyfriend really know what they were doing and because they spent as much time goofing around with each other as they did slapping paint on the walls.

I started stripping a small chest of drawers that a friend of mine gave me when she bought herself some new furniture. I got as far as taking off the old finish when my husband suggested that as long as I was stripping one thing, I might as well strip something else as well, whereupon he promptly brought me the bathroom radiator enclosure. Oh no! I'll leave the details of this project for another post. Still more stripping, painting and fixing up to be done around here. I haven't had much time to be creative but I'm hoping to take care of that very soon when I get around to refinishing the chest of drawers. I'm looking forward to it.

Oh, I almost forgot. My daughter decided to paint over her radiator to match the gradient wall. It's one of the prettiest parts of the room.
<----Looks pretty good, don'tcha think?

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva