Archive for the 'Vegetables' Category

Love Apple Farm’s Tomato Seed Contest

Another gardening-related contest arrived in my inbox today!

5 people will win tomato seeds by leaving a “nice” comment on one of the posts on Cynthia Sandberg’s beautiful blog, Grow Better Veggies. Five people will be chosen at random to with a three-pack of rare tomato seeds from TomatoFest.com.

As Cynthia says in her latest e-mail newsletter, TomatoFest.com is

a fabulous on-line resource for over 600 different types of heirloom tomato seeds.

Sounds like a great contest to enter!

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Fruits for friends and family.

Oh, dear, it’s been over a MONTH since I posted here! I can’t believe it. My only excuse is that I’ve been busy gestating. Our baby is now officially three days overdue, actually.

There hasn’t been much action out in the garden since early autumn. My husband, Graham, helped me out a lot this year in getting things cleaned up out back. We actually managed to clip back all of the perennials and he helped me pull the finished plants from the vegetable garden after we harvested the tomatoes.

This year we didn’t keep all of our harvest to ourselves, preferring to keep things simple and give a lot of it away to friends and family members. (Although we did, of course, manage to roast several big baskets of tomatoes and froze four large ziplock bags of roasted tomato sauce.) Our next-door-neighbour traded us some nice little potatoes that he grew for some of our tomatoes, too.

For friends and neighbours.

Baskets of homegrown tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for our friends and family.

That little veggie trade had me thinking, actually, that since there are three of us now in a row on my street who grow vegetables, we should try to co-ordinate a little bit, and share our harvest.  We could collectively grow more food than we could individually.  I’ll have to give this some thought over the winter!

But now here it is, late November, and it’s been an unseasonably mild autumn this year, for which I’m grateful. Now there is the potential for snow flurries this coming week, the same week our new family member is expected to arrive (we have an induction scheduled for Monday).

I hope that although we’ll be busy with the new baby, I’ll have more time in general to devote to writing online over the coming year. We’ll be sure to post when the baby comes!

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A Visit to the Orono Fair

Graham and I went to the Orono Fall Fair yesterday afternoon with our friends, Andy and Kelly and their daughter Sophie.  It was a beautiful early autumn afternoon, and since it was Friday afternoon, there weren’t too many people on the fairgrounds, yet.  There were a lot of school groups there, though, with little kids learning about how to milk cows and all about tractors and growing crops.

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Pumpkins at the entrance to the agricultural exhibits.  The big white squash on the right was the winner!

One of my favourite things to do at any autumn fair is look at the agricultural displays, including the vegetables that are grown locally and entered for prizes.  There seems to be a real fascination with vegetables that are either freakishly large or just…freakish.

Look at the size of these beets!  They were each about a foot long.

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This tomato won a prize for Most Oddly Shaped Vegetable.  It looks a little like a purple calabash tomato to me, a variety that does grow in very strange, “lumpy” ways. (See my purple calabash harvest from a few years ago.)

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And finally, here is everyone’s very favourite large vegetable, the giant zucchinis.

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To give you some perspective, you can see the giant beets in the background.

I’ve always wanted to enter some home grown tomatoes into the fall fair, but have never committed to it.  Maybe next year!

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What’s ready to harvest? Hot banana peppers!

I bought several varieties of peppers for the garden this year, and of course when it came time to harvest them, I didn’t remember which ones I planted where. This isn’t usually a problem because although peppers are similar, at maturity they are different enough to be able to identify. However, I think I bought mild AND hot banana peppers which was just silly of me. You know what this means, don’t you? Yes, we had to taste the pepper in order to know which one was ready for harvesting first. I was the guinea pig. And yes, these are hot!

Graham and I threw one on the barbeque to roast it and mellow out its flavours, chopped it up and ate it on some nachos we had for dinner that night.

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Quick! Look at my weed-free vegetable garden.

On Saturday my dad and my step-mom came over to help me weed the vegetable garden.  The weeds were getting out of control and the job was getting to be way too much of me and my belly to get done ourselves.  I’ve finally learned one of the rules of pregnancy: It’s okay to ask for help!  This applies in the garden as much as anywhere else.  It took the three of us about two hours to get it done.

I wanted to show you the vegetable garden while it’s relatively weed-free.  It won’t stay like this for long, I’m sure.  (Click on photo to view large-sized image.)

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