So how was your Thanksgiving? Did you stay raw? Attempt a certain percentage? I took a raw mincemeat pie, stuffed celery, cranberry/orange relish and olives to my sister's house, and ate about 65% raw. Not too bad, considering I had 2 Thanksgiving functions to attend, and I thought I'd be tempted to eat more cooked things, but they just don't appeal to me the way they used to. We are gearing up for a totally raw Christmas, and I'm about to break out the chocolate molds, the frozen berries, and the cookie cutters! We intend to have all our favorite Christmas treats this year, just raw style.So onto the Harvest Photos that were promised. First, here are 2 views of my GI-NORMOUS Sungold Cherry Tomato plant. This thing grew to be about 7' x 5'. Yes, I said FEET!
Sungold Tomato plant taking over the flippin' YARD! You literally almost couldn't get to the cukes against the fence! And yes, I wrote that correctly ... PLANT! Singular. Craziness. I've never grown anything before, much less an enormous tomato plant. Beginners luck? I think it's actually the Grow Greens Thalassa Mix that did it.
Notice the yellow bowl sitting in the front of the picture. That's a good sized cereal bowl. The teensy yellow dots all over the plant were new flowers. I probably could've had another 1,000 tomatoes if I'd gotten another 2 months of good heat. But no one can expect that in the Pacific NW. I'm just glad for what we got. :o) Below are about half of the Sungolds I picked. We turned them into a puree in our Vita-Mix, and then dehydrated the puree, then put it back into the Vita-Mix to powder it. This is WONDERFUL in the winter to use with herbs and water to make a delicious tomato soup! Just pop it in the Vita-Mix (yet again), and blend all ingredients on high until warm (about 110 degrees), then pour into a warmed cup and serve. Wonderfully warming on a chilly winter day! And tastes just like a tomato base for any vegetable soup.
Above: Half the Sungold harvest.
Clockwise from top: large heirloom tomatoes, honeydew melons, first pick of the apples, Sungold tomatoes, medium sized tomatoes (something like a roma, but smaller), and hazelnuts in the center. We got all our tomato plants from our friends, Laurie and Ryan this year, with the exception of our Sungold plant, so I don't know what we grew. I just know they were good, and because I had to pick them so green, we had tomatoes for over a month!
This is what I found just before I began to harvest: a Golden Delicious apple hanging about 6" off the ground, half eaten, but still on the tree. Teensie little sharp teeth marks all over it. I've only seen cats near our house, and some of the neighbor's cats live under there, but this could've been a racoon, too (although I've never seen any out this far - they tend to like the woods better than the flat farmland).
This is a peek through the fence looking back into the yard. My little apples just looked so pretty in this shot, I wanted to share it.
Look at THIS red beauty! Don't know the variety, we suspect possibly a Jonathan, but it's a beauty. And they were SO sweet!
A lovely branch hanging over the back of the fence.
More free spirits jumping the fence.
A closer look at some red apples.
One last close-up of the Golden Delicious lovlies.
The branch, just heavy with apples.
Family portrait. ;o)
So I picked everything (except the apples) in about 6 hours, and it was excruciatingly cold. But I'm glad I grew the stuff, I'm glad I've still got dandelions and clover growing wild, I've got more kale than I know what to do with, we eat kale chips all the time and stay in our greens between that and green smoothies, and the apples are almost gone, now. We got more Golden Delicious from a lady down the street who had a bumper crop this year. Not kidding when I say it looked like there were several thousand on the tree! Lucky us. We got so lucky with "free" food this year. Hopefully next year, in addition to all that I've listed here for this year, we'll get more pears and plums from neighbors, and maybe our frost peach, honeycrisp apple trees, sweet and pie cherry trees, blueberry bushes and strawberry plants will do as well as the Sungolds did this year.
So I'm starting to feel like Crazy Aunt Lori who went to Florida and is now making you sit too long watching the slides of my vacation. So I will wish you a good night, and get my tookus to bed. Tomorrow I put the finishing touches on my upcoming e-book, The Great Raw Cacao Debate, scheduled for release on December 11th. To get it for free, just sign up for it on any page of my website. Thanks for reading, and we'll see each other in the blog ethers soon.
Well, well, well! It HAS been a long time, hasn't it? 2 1/2 months of nothin' but FUN, and that's why I've been away. Ok, I'm being sarcastic. While there have certainly been some very fun moments, life has been interesting, to say the least.Our wee one was sick on & off for 2 months, beginning the 2nd week of school, and that was on high raw! We think he just had a big detox, plus a child who sits next to him at school had the swine flu. We don't know if Jahn got the specific H1N1 virus, but he usually is sick for 24 hours (if he even gets sick) and 72 hours if he's REALLY sick. At one point, 2 in 3 kids at his school were out, and there wasn't a dry nose at the bus stop. Eek! But alas, everyone seems to either be on the mend or mended. No deaths. Whew!!! I've never seen so many sick kids as this school year, and so early too.Another thing that kept me busy was the end-of-summer harvest. It jumped me rather suddenly, as we had an early and unexpected freeze. Good thing I listened to the weather forecast. I spent a day in September harvesting cherry tomatoes in 37 degree weather. Yes, I said 37 in September. It was absolutely crazy! Then that night it got down to 32 degrees. This, after having nearly 100 degree heat just a month prior. Bizarre. I also harvested what turned out to be honeydew melons (the blossoms looked just like cukes, so we were surprised to find melons growing happily in our Pacific Northwest garden box), as well as my red basil, large heirloom tomatoes, and the last gallon of wild blackberries. A month later, we got pears and hazelnuts from the neighbors, and now we're full into apple season. The little beauties we grew (well, that nature gave us and we tended) made me so proud I actually cried on harvest day in October. I'll be posting pics of everything I harvested, complete with captions, later this week so stay tuned.Jahn turned 8 in September, too, and we had a little party for him with a few friends and family members. Transformers was the theme, and I made him a Raw-lmond Joy raw candy-cake, raw snickerdoodles and raw lemon cookies for his party. We also served fresh-squeezed apple/pear juice. I thought it was cool that he requested an all-raw party. We almost made kale chips, but decided against them at the last minute. A fun time was had by all, and he made a little kitchen out of the Legos he got. Put all of us (plus David Wolfe) into it, and had us making stuff in the Vita Mix. And all out of Legos. Too funny.And speaking of kale (or not), to look at my little patch o' greenery, you'd never know it was November. It's just thrivin' away out there in the sub-freezing, wet, windy conditions. Tim Van Orden was right ... "This stuff is TOUGH!" It really is a great green to grow because it is so frickin' hardy. Also, we're finding that we like dandelion and clover greens in our green smoothies these days. I thought the winter dandelion leaves would be too bitter, but they are quite nice, blending especially well with the fresh apple juice. I've been adding 1/2 water and 1/2 apple juice for the liquid in our green smoothies, and it's REALLY tasty! We're so lucky to have a local company, Bellwood Acres, who uses UV "pasteurization" practices, which actually means the juice is not heated. It's just exposed to UV light to kill e-coli, etc. So that means we get raw apple cider that we don't have to juice, and it is out of this world!To wrap up, last night we went to see 2012. Again, I say eek! Really makes you prioritize when you see something like that. Makes you wonder, too. Are all these cultures and predictions right? Seeing it last night made me think, and I've come up with the idea of having a Question of the Week ... something that will make this blog more interactive for you. I'll also be posting it on my twitter and facebook pages. So here's this week's question:What do you make a priority in your life? (And what do you wish you made more of a priority? How can you bump it up?) My answers: Kissing and listening to my Love. And more of a priority? Family time. To bump it up, I play games like Boggle with them and/or have a family meal together at the table that we all help prepare (instead of watching TV or playing on the computer). Share what you've been making your priority and what you want to bump up. I'd love to hear.Until later this week ...
Sungold Tomato plant taking over the flippin' YARD! You literally almost couldn't get to the cukes against the fence! And yes, I wrote that correctly ... PLANT! Singular. Craziness. I've never grown anything before, much less an enormous tomato plant. Beginners luck? I think it's actually the Grow Greens Thalassa Mix that did it.
Notice the yellow bowl sitting in the front of the picture. That's a good sized cereal bowl. The teensy yellow dots all over the plant were new flowers. I probably could've had another 1,000 tomatoes if I'd gotten another 2 months of good heat. But no one can expect that in the Pacific NW. I'm just glad for what we got. :o) Below are about half of the Sungolds I picked. We turned them into a puree in our Vita-Mix, and then dehydrated the puree, then put it back into the Vita-Mix to powder it. This is WONDERFUL in the winter to use with herbs and water to make a delicious tomato soup! Just pop it in the Vita-Mix (yet again), and blend all ingredients on high until warm (about 110 degrees), then pour into a warmed cup and serve. Wonderfully warming on a chilly winter day! And tastes just like a tomato base for any vegetable soup.
Above: Half the Sungold harvest.
Clockwise from top: large heirloom tomatoes, honeydew melons, first pick of the apples, Sungold tomatoes, medium sized tomatoes (something like a roma, but smaller), and hazelnuts in the center. We got all our tomato plants from our friends, Laurie and Ryan this year, with the exception of our Sungold plant, so I don't know what we grew. I just know they were good, and because I had to pick them so green, we had tomatoes for over a month!
This is what I found just before I began to harvest: a Golden Delicious apple hanging about 6" off the ground, half eaten, but still on the tree. Teensie little sharp teeth marks all over it. I've only seen cats near our house, and some of the neighbor's cats live under there, but this could've been a racoon, too (although I've never seen any out this far - they tend to like the woods better than the flat farmland).
This is a peek through the fence looking back into the yard. My little apples just looked so pretty in this shot, I wanted to share it.
Look at THIS red beauty! Don't know the variety, we suspect possibly a Jonathan, but it's a beauty. And they were SO sweet!
A lovely branch hanging over the back of the fence.
More free spirits jumping the fence.
A closer look at some red apples.
One last close-up of the Golden Delicious lovlies.
The branch, just heavy with apples.
Family portrait. ;o)
Kale after a rainstorm in September.
More Red Russian kale.
Lettuce, just before it started to bolt.
Red Rubin basil, after it flowered and went to seed. I've saved tons of seeds for next year and intend to grow a small field of the stuff. It makes a tremendous raw pesto.
The last of the cukes on harvest day. Several were no bigger than gherkins.
A honeydew hiding in the leaves and vines.
Some large, green tomatoes just before harvest.
