Harvest Time

As I have mentioned before, there is a lot of farming and cultivation going on around and in my Small Town. Some have planted crops, some have planted flowers, and some are just feeding animals. At our house, we have flowers that were planted by a previous occupant, so this summer I mostly just planted veggies.

I planted tomatoes (regular round variety), peppers (sweet and hot varieties), pole beans, chives, basil, and a new-to-me item: ground cherries. All are maturing in abundance. We have so many tomatoes on the plants, that they actually bent the metal of the cages, and are now leaning over drunkenly whilst being propped up by the neighbor's fence.

Luckily for us, the neighbors on the other side of the fence are friendly neighbors. They are the kind of neighbors that do not complain when one's pole beans try to become the tallest bean plants in the history of mankind by eschewing their 6-foot poles in favor of the neighbor's tree branches. I did not know that bean plants could get so tall. They are so tall that we now have beans hanging over 10ft in the air! So far up that the only possible way to harvest them (at least from our own side of the fence) is to get out the ladder and climb.

The ground cherries are strange looking plants. They started out small, and only had 1 or 2 cherries each on the plant. They were tasty though. This is a plant that likes surprising you. For months we only had 1 or 2 cherries on each plant. Now we have tons. One day when pulling weeds, I happened to glance at the plants to see what was what, and to my surprise, there were cherries in glorious abundance.

The plants are enormous and have grown long branches. Even with regular harvesting, they don't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. These cherries are not like the red cherries you are used to. They come in little greenish yellow wrappers, ala tomatillos. They are yellowish, and kind of sweet and tart all at once.

When they are ripe, they fall off the plant and onto the ground - hence the name. I just started picking them up and keeping them in a bowl on the counter until I had enough to do something with. What, I didn't know exactly, but figured I could peruse the internet and my cookbooks until I found something. I did even better than that - I found someone at the local Farmer's Market who grows them in abundance. Here I learned that as long as the outer husk is not peeled off, they can be kept on the counter until you have enough for a pie.

The tomatoes, however, cannot be kept as such. They must be used fairly quickly. As all of our tomatoes are of the normal variety, I have been making salsa of those. To make pasta sauce, I visited a local Pick-Your-Own farm where I ended up picking almost 40lb of tomatoes in under 3omin! I was having such fun, I didn't even notice how much I'd gathered until the buckets were weighed. I got mostly red paste tomatoes, but the farm had something I'd never seen before - yellow paste tomatoes. I am going to try and make those into sauce as well for something different.