They know what they’re doing!
Today’s pick. It’s starting to look a lot more like a typical summer harvest basket. I’m making dill pickles - a couple of quarts every few days.
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I will chime in here to say my Sungold just produced its 30th tomato. Which is very nice, but neither the Pruden’s Purple nor the Pink Berkeley Tie Dye is very far along, fruit wise. Plenty of peas and beans, though, at least.
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Lots of lovely tomatoes! 'Tis the season.
The greatly-reduced garden this year is mostly some tomatoes and a lot of peppers used to make hot sauces.
From the top left:
•Rocotillo-the true type, which has habanero flavor but almost zero heat.
•Grenada Seasoning-collected in Grenada, this one has a powerful habanero-type aroma, but is also extremely low in heat.
•Jamaican Red Goat- very, very hot, with a strong, habanero/muttony (hence “goat”) aroma.
•Grenada Hot Red-also collected in Grenada, at a small market. Super hot, thicker fleshed and a little less muttony aroma.
The hot and mild peppers get pickled separately, after coring, deseeding. Since they’re packed tightly in half gallon mason jars, about 100 mls of Essig Essenze, a 25% acid vinegar, gets added to each jar to prevent spoilage. After aging, they’re liquified in a Vitamix, blended to taste, and aged with toasted white oak added to each jar. The last step imparts a barrel-aged flavor to the most popular sauce.
Unfortunately, due to the aging requirements, this year’s batch won’t be ready for at least a year.
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I can wait! 
Or I guesss I could try my own. 
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Today’s pick. I need a break from The Pickle Factory, so currently harvesting the pickling cukes to give to a friend.
We’re getting some much needed luck in the weather department – the forecast for the next 10 days is very optimistic. Sunny with temps in the mid-to-high 70’s. This will give us some pockets of 80-degree temps on our property. If the nice weather would just hold through September (a girl can dream), we would recover much of what we lost in June and July to cold temps. I found a couple of Illinois squash out there that just set a few days ago - they’re going gangbusters and making up for lost time.
We’ll take what we can get, in any case. I find it incredible we’re still harvesting blueberries in any quantity. In a normal year, these would have been finished a month ago.
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I’m so impressed!
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It probably WAS looking to steal your shoes so you’ll think a human stole the produce. At night, who’s gonna know?
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I wish I could share my motion activated mountain lion sounds!
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Nice work!
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I’d be happy to mail you a bottle when the next batch is ready. Each batch is around 2 1/2 gallons; so, enough to share. If you like very hot, like Scotch Bonnet hot, I can bottle some straight Jamaican Goat w/ Grenada Hot. They all come with dripper-style caps, so you don’t accidentally pour an inedible quantity.
Part of the process is getting used to the tedium of coring, deseeding and the fumes. The Jamaican Goat is especially good at filling the air with irritating vapors. Washing off the utensils and cutting board is worse; the capsaicin aerosolizes, making tear gas! I hold my breath when washing those.
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Your generosity never ceases to amaze me!
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GOOOOORGEOUS! wow.
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No kidding, he’s a treasure
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The people I grew up with and current friends, family are all the same. One lady I mailed seeds to just sent me some fresh Super Red Pimentos! Since there were so many, they were handled in a delicious manner:
There were two skillets full, and a little left for salads. Since my garden needs to “rest” from Capsicum annuum (most peppers), due to soil disease, the peppers were very very welcome! Super Red is one of the best sweet peppers ever developed. It’s very hard to find seed. I think the last seeds I bought came from Croatia.
We’re all lucky that it’s possible to mail, ship items so easily! Our postal carrier is a great lady, and that’s not taken for granted.
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