Hellos!  My little newspaper-wrapped tomatoes are still ripening.  They are now varying shades of yellow and orange...getting close!  Hopefully by next week I'll have something more exciting to report. But!  A very exciting thing happened this past week:  I got a seed catalog in the mail!  Okay, I realize that doesn't sound all that exciting but it does mean thinking about warmer weather and how is that not exciting during this albeit-not-very-cold December?  Truthfully I usually make it to January or February before I start getting so sick of winter that I want to throw up but, hey, it's never too early.  With that in mind I'm going to share some of what I learned in this first year and what I will do differently next year. This past year I was all about vegetables and other things to eat.  I planted a few purely decorative flowers but I really didn't care that much about them.  That's why my backyard ended up looking like this: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="sea of tomatoes"][/caption] Now there's nothing wrong with, oh, 30-40 tomato plants in a small South Philly patio - unless you're a normal person - but I will admit that it was maybe overkill.  I originally planted all those tomato seeds because I assumed a lot wouldn't sprout or would die.  Well, pretty much all of them sprouted so I think I'll try not planting all 60 seeds at once next year.  Though it was kind of fun to pretend I lived in a forest of tomatoes, I would rather have a forest of all different kinds of plants. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="squash blossom"][/caption] The things that didn't work for me were the squash and eggplants.  They both grew fine (eggplants are still growing for some reason) and flowered but then produced no fruit.  I think the eggplants were just too slow or didn't have enough space or something but I have a sneaking suspicion that the squash did not get pollinated correctly.  Squash plants are supposed to have both male and female flowers - the females produce fruit but not without pollen from the males.  This is where bees come in, spreading the pollen from the male to the female (source.)  I definitely saw lots of bees around the flowers but no actual fruit.  Then again, space is a constant issue so maybe they just didn't have enough room, either. I enjoyed my sunflowers along the back fence but they actually got too tall: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="the only way to get a good picture was from the second story window"][/caption] I love sunflowers but maybe I won't choose the "mammoth huge gigantic" variety this time (for the record these are Mammoth Russians.)  Here I was all worried that my sunflowers would be small and puny and then they grew taller than the tree. I'm also going to plant my kale and chard earlier.  I've pretty much given up on them because of all this rain, but I really was looking forward to some nice leafy greens.  Here's what I got: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="sad kale"][/caption] And it's been downhill since then.  I may try to overwinter a few just so it's not a complete wash. And now that I know what I won't do, it's time to pick out what I want to plant!  But first I need to pore over these catalogs.  Come back next week!

Hellos!  My little newspaper-wrapped tomatoes are still ripening.  They are now varying shades of yellow and orange...getting close!  Hopefully by next week I'll have something more exciting to report.

But!  A very exciting thing happened this past week:  I got a seed catalog in the mail!  Okay, I realize that doesn't sound all that exciting but it does mean thinking about warmer weather and how is that not exciting during this albeit-not-very-cold December?  Truthfully I usually make it to January or February before I start getting so sick of winter that I want to throw up but, hey, it's never too early.  With that in mind I'm going to share some of what I learned in this first year and what I will do differently next year.


This past year I was all about vegetables and other things to eat.  I planted a few purely decorative flowers but I really didn't care that much about them.  That's why my backyard ended up looking like this:

Now there's nothing wrong with, oh, 30-40 tomato plants in a small South Philly patio - unless you're a normal person - but I will admit that it was maybe overkill.  I originally planted all those tomato seeds because I assumed a lot wouldn't sprout or would die.  Well, pretty much all of them sprouted so I think I'll try not planting all 60 seeds at once next year.  Though it was kind of fun to pretend I lived in a forest of tomatoes, I would rather have a forest of all different kinds of plants.

The things that didn't work for me were the squash and eggplants.  They both grew fine (eggplants are still growing for some reason) and flowered but then produced no fruit.  I think the eggplants were just too slow or didn't have enough space or something but I have a sneaking suspicion that the squash did not get pollinated correctly.  Squash plants are supposed to have both male and female flowers - the females produce fruit but not without pollen from the males.  This is where bees come in, spreading the pollen from the male to the female (source.)  I definitely saw lots of bees around the flowers but no actual fruit.  Then again, space is a constant issue so maybe they just didn't have enough room, either.

I enjoyed my sunflowers along the back fence but they actually got too tall:

I love sunflowers but maybe I won't choose the "mammoth huge gigantic" variety this time (for the record these are Mammoth Russians.)  Here I was all worried that my sunflowers would be small and puny and then they grew taller than the tree.

I'm also going to plant my kale and chard earlier.  I've pretty much given up on them because of all this rain, but I really was looking forward to some nice leafy greens.  Here's what I got:

And it's been downhill since then.  I may try to overwinter a few just so it's not a complete wash.

And now that I know what I won't do, it's time to pick out what I want to plant!  But first I need to pore over these catalogs.  Come back next week!

It feels strange to say that, especially because of what I found in my garden this past weekend: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="baby beefsteak"][/caption] Oh tomatoes, you just want to keep growing, don't you?  I don't blame you, the weather this past week has been unseasonably warm (but that didn't stop me from using my back patio as a back up "refrigerator" as we cooked for Thanksgiving.)  Now it seems we're actually moving toward cooler weather so this little baby sadly didn't make it. I am in the process of finally getting rid of all my tomato plants (sniff sniff) but I couldn't bring myself to throw out all the green tomatoes.  So here's my actual last harvest of green tomatoes: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="This is more than it looks like"][/caption] I didn't really know what to do with them and my fridge was already full of Thanksgiving leftovers so I decided to try ripening them.  Since I had so many I tried the wrapping-them-in-newspaper method: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="yes, that's philly weekly"][/caption] I had so many I had to use two roasting pans! [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="again with the PW"][/caption] I haven't seen much change yet, but we'll see what next week brings.  In the meantime, here are some handsome young tomatoes for you to admire: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="beefsteak"][/caption] And here's a last Beauty Queen, nice and yellow and striped: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="beauty"][/caption] Are people's gardens still growing?  I left my poor eggplant out there even though I've given up hope of ever getting any eggplant from it...I just can't bear to let it go quite yet.

It feels strange to say that, especially because of what I found in my garden this past weekend:

Oh tomatoes, you just want to keep growing, don't you?  I don't blame you, the weather this past week has been unseasonably warm (but that didn't stop me from using my back patio as a back up "refrigerator" as we cooked for Thanksgiving.)  Now it seems we're actually moving toward cooler weather so this little baby sadly didn't make it.

I am in the process of finally getting rid of all my tomato plants (sniff sniff) but I couldn't bring myself to throw out all the green tomatoes.  So here's my actual last harvest of green tomatoes:

I didn't really know what to do with them and my fridge was already full of Thanksgiving leftovers so I decided to try ripening them.  Since I had so many I tried the wrapping-them-in-newspaper method:

I had so many I had to use two roasting pans!

I haven't seen much change yet, but we'll see what next week brings.  In the meantime, here are some handsome young tomatoes for you to admire:

And here's a last Beauty Queen, nice and yellow and striped:

Are people's gardens still growing?  I left my poor eggplant out there even though I've given up hope of ever getting any eggplant from it...I just can't bear to let it go quite yet.

Hello!  I thought that since we got that surprise snow that things would be pretty dead out in the garden.  But there's still lots of these: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Green"][/caption] I think I've already documented here that I am not the biggest fan of green tomatoes.  I would really, really like to like them but they are just too hard and sour.  But I may try dredging a few in cornmeal and frying them to see how it goes.  I think the secret to good fried green tomatoes is a good remoulade... [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Ignore that tomato in the upper left-hand corner..."][/caption] Of course, there are lots of other things to do with green tomatoes.  Like pickling!  I love pretty much all pickles but I don't quite trust myself on the canning front yet.  That's moving a little too far into domesticity for me.  Maybe next year. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Little Beauty Queen"][/caption] What I'll likely do with most of these is try to ripen them inside.  I've experimented with this a little and here's the method that seems to work best for me: When you pick the tomatoes, be sure to leave some of the stem or vine attached.  I read somewhere to do this (I'm not sure on the reasoning) but it seems to help. If you only have a few tomatoes you can just put them all in a paper bag and set it in a darkish place.  You don't want to seal it completely but you do want to fold the bag closed or something to keep all those gases that ripen the tomato in.  Just check on your tomatoes every day or so to make sure they don't rot. If you have lots of tomatoes you can wrap each one loosely in newspaper and set them all in a box or something and put that in a dark place. Anyone have any luck with ripening tomatoes inside?  Any tips?  I'll let you know how my ripening experiment turns out next week! Sarah DeGiorgis has lived in Philly for five years and is finally starting to feel like a true Philadelphian, though she still detests cheesesteaks.  She enjoys reading, watching bad tv, eating and cooking good food and digging in the dirt. Catch up with her continuing efforts to grow food in South Philly by clicking here.

Hello!  I thought that since we got that surprise snow that things would be pretty dead out in the garden.  But there's still lots of these:

I think I've already documented here that I am not the biggest fan of green tomatoes.  I would really, really like to like them but they are just too hard and sour.  But I may try dredging a few in cornmeal and frying them to see how it goes.  I think the secret to good fried green tomatoes is a good remoulade...

Of course, there are lots of other things to do with green tomatoes.  Like pickling!  I love pretty much all pickles but I don't quite trust myself on the canning front yet.  That's moving a little too far into domesticity for me.  Maybe next year.

What I'll likely do with most of these is try to ripen them inside.  I've experimented with this a little and here's the method that seems to work best for me:

When you pick the tomatoes, be sure to leave some of the stem or vine attached.  I read somewhere to do this (I'm not sure on the reasoning) but it seems to help.

If you only have a few tomatoes you can just put them all in a paper bag and set it in a darkish place.  You don't want to seal it completely but you do want to fold the bag closed or something to keep all those gases that ripen the tomato in.  Just check on your tomatoes every day or so to make sure they don't rot.

If you have lots of tomatoes you can wrap each one loosely in newspaper and set them all in a box or something and put that in a dark place.

Anyone have any luck with ripening tomatoes inside?  Any tips?  I'll let you know how my ripening experiment turns out next week!

Sarah DeGiorgis has lived in Philly for five years and is finally starting to feel like a true Philadelphian, though she still detests cheesesteaks.  She enjoys reading, watching bad tv, eating and cooking good food and digging in the dirt. Catch up with her continuing efforts to grow food in South Philly by clicking here.

Editor's note: Sarah submitted this on Thursday before the temperatures dropped through the floor and we got that great pre-Halloween snow. We hope her fall crops are doing better than ours! I kind of knew that when I said that last week's harvest was the last I'd be eating my words...look at these beautiful tomatoes! [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="tomato rainbow"][/caption] The tomatoes are still going out there.  I'm loathe to trash tomato plants that still have lots of tomatoes on them but I also need to free up some sun space for my kale and chard, so I picked the tomatoes from the plants that only had one or two fruits on them and threw them out but left the ones with more fruit on them because I just couldn't get rid of all of them yet.  I love all the different colors of the tomatoes! [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="pretties"][/caption] But I think I cleared out enough space, so here's what my sunny corner looks like now: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="yellow fig, front and center"][/caption] On the left side of the photo you can see all the tomatoes still growing...those are the ones I just couldn't bear to part with.  I left the scraggly-looking plant in the center of the picture because it has lots of tomatoes on it (and they are not as red as they seem in this picture) - as soon as I pick those that one will be gone, too.   This picture also shows my two figs:  the taller one is still kind of yellow but the smaller one is doing great.  Lots of figs on it: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="374" caption="Four figs!"][/caption] I haven't decided yet if I'm going to put this fig (the non-yellow one) in the ground for winter or bring it inside.  We'll see! I also pulled out all the sunflowers along my back fence (I left them for the birds and little creatures to take the seeds and they took every single one!)  Man, I could have used a saw for that - these sunflower stems were tough!  I ended up either breaking them over my knee or holding them at an angle and stepping on them to break them - I wasn't strong enough to break them with just my arm strength.  When they finally broke they snapped with a very satisfying pop, though, and that was fun. I planted some things in the ground where the sunflowers had been (my raised bed):  a little rosemary plant I had inside and an heirloom strawberry plant.  I'm excited about the strawberry - it's from Bartram's Garden!  I heard that someone from Bartram's Garden would be at the Clark Park Farmer's Market (Thursdays 3-7 and Saturdays 10-2) with native plants from there to sell, so last Thursday I headed over after work.  I was hoping to get some raspberry plants and the ones they had were big and awesome but maybe not so great for carrying home on the trolley...but for $5 they had little strawberry plants and I've been wanting a strawberry for a long time so I grabbed one.  I still got weird looks for carrying a plant on the trolley but at least I wasn't in danger of scratching someone with a thorny raspberry plant (but it should be noted they had thornless black raspberries, too.  They were all just too big for me to carry on the trolley.)  Oh!  Here's little strawberry and rosemary in their new home: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="the ivy has gotten a little ridiculous"][/caption] Lastly, here's some kale enjoying its new sunny spot: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="cute"][/caption] My backyard definitely gets less sun now than it was getting in the summer but hopefully it's still enough.  I find it crazy that things are still growing...fall is such a nice season when it stays warm through October! Sarah DeGiorgis has lived in Philly for five years and is finally starting to feel like a true Philadelphian, though she still detests cheesesteaks.  She enjoys reading, watching bad tv, eating and cooking good food and digging in the dirt. Catch up with her continuing efforts to grow food in South Philly by clicking here.

Editor's note: Sarah submitted this on Thursday before the temperatures dropped through the floor and we got that great pre-Halloween snow. We hope her fall crops are doing better than ours!

I kind of knew that when I said that last week's harvest was the last I'd be eating my words...look at these beautiful tomatoes!

The tomatoes are still going out there.  I'm loathe to trash tomato plants that still have lots of tomatoes on them but I also need to free up some sun space for my kale and chard, so I picked the tomatoes from the plants that only had one or two fruits on them and threw them out but left the ones with more fruit on them because I just couldn't get rid of all of them yet.  I love all the different colors of the tomatoes!

But I think I cleared out enough space, so here's what my sunny corner looks like now:

On the left side of the photo you can see all the tomatoes still growing...those are the ones I just couldn't bear to part with.  I left the scraggly-looking plant in the center of the picture because it has lots of tomatoes on it (and they are not as red as they seem in this picture) - as soon as I pick those that one will be gone, too.   This picture also shows my two figs:  the taller one is still kind of yellow but the smaller one is doing great.  Lots of figs on it:

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to put this fig (the non-yellow one) in the ground for winter or bring it inside.  We'll see!

I also pulled out all the sunflowers along my back fence (I left them for the birds and little creatures to take the seeds and they took every single one!)  Man, I could have used a saw for that - these sunflower stems were tough!  I ended up either breaking them over my knee or holding them at an angle and stepping on them to break them - I wasn't strong enough to break them with just my arm strength.  When they finally broke they snapped with a very satisfying pop, though, and that was fun.

I planted some things in the ground where the sunflowers had been (my raised bed):  a little rosemary plant I had inside and an heirloom strawberry plant.  I'm excited about the strawberry - it's from Bartram's Garden!  I heard that someone from Bartram's Garden would be at the Clark Park Farmer's Market (Thursdays 3-7 and Saturdays 10-2) with native plants from there to sell, so last Thursday I headed over after work.  I was hoping to get some raspberry plants and the ones they had were big and awesome but maybe not so great for carrying home on the trolley...but for $5 they had little strawberry plants and I've been wanting a strawberry for a long time so I grabbed one.  I still got weird looks for carrying a plant on the trolley but at least I wasn't in danger of scratching someone with a thorny raspberry plant (but it should be noted they had thornless black raspberries, too.  They were all just too big for me to carry on the trolley.)  Oh!  Here's little strawberry and rosemary in their new home:

Lastly, here's some kale enjoying its new sunny spot:

My backyard definitely gets less sun now than it was getting in the summer but hopefully it's still enough.  I find it crazy that things are still growing...fall is such a nice season when it stays warm through October!

Sarah DeGiorgis has lived in Philly for five years and is finally starting to feel like a true Philadelphian, though she still detests cheesesteaks.  She enjoys reading, watching bad tv, eating and cooking good food and digging in the dirt. Catch up with her continuing efforts to grow food in South Philly by clicking here.

Well I think this is about it for the tomatoes!  Here's my last harvest: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Sorry, iphone + indoor lighting = crappy photo"][/caption] These were a little more mealy than my earlier tomatoes and I picked some a bit early because I was afraid of colder temperatures later in the week.  So I made them into tomato sauce!  After years of fiddling with sauce from fresh tomatoes (for some reason canned tomatoes are easier to make in to sauce for me - they have less of that bite that I love so much in fresh tomatoes but not so much in my tomato sauce) I think I have figured out the secret to good fresh tomato sauce.  Here's my non-recipe: First you need to skin your tomatoes, otherwise you'll have little pieces of tomato skin floating around in your sauce - obviously I've made this mistake before.  The easiest way to skin tomatoes is to parboil.  Just bring a big pot of water to a boil, cut a little X at the bottom of each tomato and submerge in the boiling water for a few seconds or until you can see the skin starting to loosen.  Then fish them out (there's probably a kitchen utensil for this but a large spoon does the trick for me) and throw them all in a large bowl of cold water to stop them from cooking.  Some people use ice water but I just use cold tap water because ice is too fancy for me.  Also you're going to be cooking these in a minute anyway so I don't think it's the worst thing in the world if they don't entirely stop cooking.  Then I just run the tomatoes under cold water while I peel the skins off and then roughly chop them - these were pretty small anyway so I cut them into quarters, making sure to get rid of the tough stem-end.  I don't take out the seeds - I like the flavor and the extra water means you don't have to add any extra liquid when cooking the sauce. Then just heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan and add either some minced onion or garlic.  I had garlic this time so I used that, but onion or shallots work too.  For this amount of tomatoes (probably 4-5 cups chopped?  I never measure) I used four small garlic cloves.  You don't want so much that it tastes like garlic or onion, you just want to add a little of the flavor in the background.  Before the garlic burns (a common problem of mine) throw in all the tomatoes and stir it all around.  Then add some salt and black pepper and simmer uncovered for a long time - I give it an hour but more is always better.  It'll look pretty weak and watery for the first 20-30 minutes or so but then it'll start to thicken up and actually look like tomato sauce.  Then you need to add tomato paste - this is definitely the thing that elevates it from tasting like fresh tomatoes to something you would actually put on pasta.  I start with about a tablespoon, stir it in well, and then taste it a few minutes later and add more if needed.  This time I used about two tablespoons but I was also trying to use up my tomato paste that had been sitting in the fridge for a while. Then I add soy sauce - just a little.  I usually under-salt things anyway so I add the soy sauce to help with that and also because I like the taste.  And then this time I did something that I would usually never do:  I added a few teaspoons of plain white sugar.  Weird, right?  But I had heard that it helped and it really did!  I was really afraid it would be too sweet but the tomatoes weren't all that sweet to begin with.  I think it was the sugar that really made this taste good and it kind of feels like cheating?  But it tasted good so I'm okay with that. So by now this has been simmering for about an hour and a lot of the liquid should have cooked off, leaving you with a thickish, chunky tomato sauce.  I mash up some of the larger pieces of tomato with my wooden spoon but I don't like it entirely smooth - though if you did you could certainly blend it (carefully!) in your blender or use one of those fancy kitchen utensils called an immersion blender to blend it right in the pan.  Right at the end I roll up a few leaves of basil from the garden and chiffonade them (that's a fancy word for cutting them into long strips) and then stir them in.  And that's it!  It may seem like it takes a while but most of the time you're just letting it simmer so you can do lots of other stuff, like wash all the dishes you've dirtied and boil some pasta. Making tomatoes into sauce is a good way to use up tomatoes that you may not want to eat fresh because of weird texture or cosmetic issues.  This sauce is very forgiving! A quick note on the garden:  I still have lots of green tomatoes and some of the tomato plants are still flowering so I'm going to let them keep going until we get our first frost.  Kale and chard are coming along, too but still not quite big enough to pick.  Soon!  Oh and yellow fig lost a few leaves and is now looking less yellow.  Such a fussy one, that fig.

Well I think this is about it for the tomatoes!  Here's my last harvest:

These were a little more mealy than my earlier tomatoes and I picked some a bit early because I was afraid of colder temperatures later in the week.  So I made them into tomato sauce!  After years of fiddling with sauce from fresh tomatoes (for some reason canned tomatoes are easier to make in to sauce for me - they have less of that bite that I love so much in fresh tomatoes but not so much in my tomato sauce) I think I have figured out the secret to good fresh tomato sauce.  Here's my non-recipe:

First you need to skin your tomatoes, otherwise you'll have little pieces of tomato skin floating around in your sauce - obviously I've made this mistake before.  The easiest way to skin tomatoes is to parboil.  Just bring a big pot of water to a boil, cut a little X at the bottom of each tomato and submerge in the boiling water for a few seconds or until you can see the skin starting to loosen.  Then fish them out (there's probably a kitchen utensil for this but a large spoon does the trick for me) and throw them all in a large bowl of cold water to stop them from cooking.  Some people use ice water but I just use cold tap water because ice is too fancy for me.  Also you're going to be cooking these in a minute anyway so I don't think it's the worst thing in the world if they don't entirely stop cooking.  Then I just run the tomatoes under cold water while I peel the skins off and then roughly chop them - these were pretty small anyway so I cut them into quarters, making sure to get rid of the tough stem-end.  I don't take out the seeds - I like the flavor and the extra water means you don't have to add any extra liquid when cooking the sauce.

Then just heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan and add either some minced onion or garlic.  I had garlic this time so I used that, but onion or shallots work too.  For this amount of tomatoes (probably 4-5 cups chopped?  I never measure) I used four small garlic cloves.  You don't want so much that it tastes like garlic or onion, you just want to add a little of the flavor in the background.  Before the garlic burns (a common problem of mine) throw in all the tomatoes and stir it all around.  Then add some salt and black pepper and simmer uncovered for a long time - I give it an hour but more is always better.  It'll look pretty weak and watery for the first 20-30 minutes or so but then it'll start to thicken up and actually look like tomato sauce.  Then you need to add tomato paste - this is definitely the thing that elevates it from tasting like fresh tomatoes to something you would actually put on pasta.  I start with about a tablespoon, stir it in well, and then taste it a few minutes later and add more if needed.  This time I used about two tablespoons but I was also trying to use up my tomato paste that had been sitting in the fridge for a while.

Then I add soy sauce - just a little.  I usually under-salt things anyway so I add the soy sauce to help with that and also because I like the taste.  And then this time I did something that I would usually never do:  I added a few teaspoons of plain white sugar.  Weird, right?  But I had heard that it helped and it really did!  I was really afraid it would be too sweet but the tomatoes weren't all that sweet to begin with.  I think it was the sugar that really made this taste good and it kind of feels like cheating?  But it tasted good so I'm okay with that.

So by now this has been simmering for about an hour and a lot of the liquid should have cooked off, leaving you with a thickish, chunky tomato sauce.  I mash up some of the larger pieces of tomato with my wooden spoon but I don't like it entirely smooth - though if you did you could certainly blend it (carefully!) in your blender or use one of those fancy kitchen utensils called an immersion blender to blend it right in the pan.  Right at the end I roll up a few leaves of basil from the garden and chiffonade them (that's a fancy word for cutting them into long strips) and then stir them in.  And that's it!  It may seem like it takes a while but most of the time you're just letting it simmer so you can do lots of other stuff, like wash all the dishes you've dirtied and boil some pasta.

Making tomatoes into sauce is a good way to use up tomatoes that you may not want to eat fresh because of weird texture or cosmetic issues.  This sauce is very forgiving!

A quick note on the garden:  I still have lots of green tomatoes and some of the tomato plants are still flowering so I'm going to let them keep going until we get our first frost.  Kale and chard are coming along, too but still not quite big enough to pick.  Soon!  Oh and yellow fig lost a few leaves and is now looking less yellow.  Such a fussy one, that fig.