The second half of summer is all about the tomatoes, in my garden! This year I have 2 varieties. One is the smaller Sweet 100, great for snacking!
And the other is Amish Paste, delicious on sandwhiches, and perfect for making sauce (marinara, pasta sauce, pizza sauce, etc).
Let's slice one open...
Amish Paste tomatoes have less juice than some varieties, and more flesh.
The flavour was intensely tomatoey! Delicious. You can taste the sunshine almost literally, and you can tell it's packed full of nutrition, not like those perfectly-round creepy genetic monstrosities at the store, grown in warehouse operations without soil.
Oh, look! It's the 2021 crop, ready to be dried out and stored away safely for the winter. :)
All my plants are heirloom, which means they grow from seeds into plants that produce seeds for the next year. I don't buy seedlings from a store. I don't even buy SEEDS from a store. Every seed I plant came from a plant I grew. I've carefully built up a seed collection, and they even came with me (in my backpack) when I was very sick and homeless in 2016/7. They were with me when I found a little apartment in Vancouver and stabilized my finances and health in 2018. I grew a few on the patio there, but most had to wait until I had a real garden.
It was my first year back at it, and I'm not the same person I was in 2015 when I last had a garden to work with, but it's going fairly well!
I've done a full cycle of garlic here, now that these bulbs have been harvested and dried. They're ready to use in cooking, sauces, and of course some will be planted again shortly before the first frost (about October).
As you can see, the tomato plants are still growing, and still healthy. There are plenty more tomatoes yet to harvest, and some new flowers that will probably grow into more fruit in the next month or two.
Canada's winters can be pretty long and harsh, but we DO have a summer season, believe it or not! I've proved that by successfully growing 200% organic and heirloom tomatoes, from seed to soil and back to seed, every year I wasn't homeless for a long time.
The bean harvest has continued for weeks. My 11-month-old son loves them (steamed and ground up). He's getting nice and strong on all the clean organic produce coming in out of the garden, and from local farmers via the little produce shop around the corner.
The gardener is ALWAYS thinking at least one season ahead! I pulled out the tired bean plants, turned the soil over, and gathered up some dried out beans from the pods that got missed.
Into the ground they went. I'll see green shoots in the next couple days, and I'll be eating another crop in a few weeks! They should produce until about Halloween.
If you have somewhere to do it, you can start anytime, if you've been thinking about getting into gardening. It's interesting and rewarding in MANY different ways, and you can enjoy it no matter your skill level. Your ancestors for the most part were farmers - we've been scratching out a living from the soil for hundreds of generations! So even if it's your first time, it's really like getting back into gardening.
There's one of those ordinary "bird berry" trees in my yard. As the last year has passed, I've noticed how aesthetic it is, and how it changes dramatically with the seasons. When the mid-summer heat arrived recently, the berries went from white to striking orange.
I'm going to take a photo of the tree once every month, for the next year, and put them all together. Oooh, I could make a calendar! Or just a cool post. :))
The berry tree's yearly changes are another reminder that life is actually a cycle, not something with a start and a finish. Nothing lasts forever - not the good, and not the bad. Change is the only constant. Even death is only another part of that natural cycle. We gardeners find ourselves a little more in tune with those aspects of existance than the average person. Thanks for reading my thoughts, and I hope you enjoyed the photos.
Grow in peace.
DRutter
