green tomato bounty

September has snuck up on me and smacked me in the face with it's arrival. Tuesday, our boy starts back for his last year of preschool. A good thing. He's been a bit bored with daycare during August - he's missing his friends and needs some more structure and challenge to his days. And the earlier onset of darkness makes bedtime a bit less of a nightly tussle. But, my garden isn't ready for it to be September. Our late onset of summer has slowed things on the vegetable front. Everything has been slow and late this summer. By the end of July last year I was bringing handfuls of tomatoes in from the garden. This year my bush beans have just started to produce now. I have gobs of tomatoes but they are all still green with only a couple starting the slow colour change to red.

Being a relative newbie to gardening this has me worried. I thought it was me but lately conversations with other gardener's are all about green tomatoes. I printed out a few recipes the other day - for green tomato relish, fried green tomatoes and green tomato mincemeat. Just in case. My sister-in-law is talking to her tomatoes, begging them to change colour. Even the market vendors today were talking about green tomatoes. We are all hoping for a great September - so our green tomato bounty has a chance for red greatness. So this post by Willi made me laugh. But I'm going to be going back to check for recipes. In between going out into my garden, and whispering to my tomatoes - come on, turn.

grape harvest

We had about 20 lbs of concord grapes from Auntie K's tree. In the past I've made grape jelly from the juice but we're not really jam people so I googled recipes and decided to make grape juice concentrate.

First we stripped the grapes from the stems and washed them.

Then boiled the grapes and mashed them into pulp and juice. Then into cheesecloth to drip overnight.

D rigged this up (cheesecloth draped over a broom handle) slung between two drawers as he didn't think our faucet was up to holding the weight of the cheesecloth overnight.

After dripping overnight, I added sugar and water to the juice, boiled and poured into hot jars and sealed. I ended up with 10 1/2 jars of concentrate. I cut the concentrate with about 5 parts water for juice. It is sweet (the sugar will preserve the juice) and grapey.

Sunday I took T for a haircut. He sat quietly in the spiderman car and watched Diego look for dinosaurs - good as gold. He got to take a toy garbage truck home from the toy bag. And he played in the ballroom afterwards for a few minutes.

Here is T sleeping on his Thomas the Tank Engine sheets and duvet cover. Our sweet boy!

I harvested all the green tomatoes in the garden - ended up with this big bowl. Yum - tomato pie anyone?