Tomatoes, Celery, Corn, Basil and Hot Peppers

Tomatoes! Death becomes you. The tomatoes are dead. The frost earlier this week did them in, and we are happy. A couple of people here still tried to salvage a few last tomatoes to extend the tomatoe sandwhich addictions they have developed over the last few weeks. And others yet were trying to nab a few for seed saving purposes. But for the most part, we are done with them. (Side note - to save tomato seeds you crush the seeds out of the flesh of the tomato, cover these vegetable innards and let them ferment which deactivates the compounds that would allow the seeds to sprout. So when you actually collect the seeds, you are getting them out of a goopy, foul smelling, fermented mess you have let sit for weeks.)

Now we are undoing all the work in the tomato field we spent seeks putting together, namely cutting down all the supporting strings, then we'll remove the metal poles and the plants and last the plastic mulch and irrigation system. This should all be done by next week.



On the only two crops that remain in the field that was assigned to me is celery and celeriac. This weekend was the last summer market in Vancouver, so we harvested most of the remaining celery to send off for sale. I am unsure if they will keep the rest for winter markets.


Back behing the tomato field was planted two rows of pop corn. After the frost, this too was ready to come off. We tore off the cobs, peeled them back right away and will let them cure for a few months in a dry and well ventilated location. Once they are dry you can pop the corn right off the cob in the microwave or if you would like to pan pop just peel back the kernels. The cobs sell for $1.50 each.

By the time the frost was strong enough to kill the other crops, it had devastated the basil. When it froze, the basil turned black-brown and looked like death. I didn't make any pesto or really use the basil too much this summer, though I thought about it, but working in the basil field was always a favourite. Some would say it makes a person smell delicious!

Last but not least are the hot peppers. I took a special interest in the hot peppers in recent weeks, a crop which sells for $15.00/lb, and got to know each of our varieties quite well. When dealing with hot peppers, a popular question is how hot are the peppers really? Well it turns out that there is a grading system for 'hotness' called the Scoville Scale and it is measure in Scoville heat units (SHU). For example, a sweet bell pepper has 0 SHU while a jalapeno has anywhere from 2,500- 8,000 SHU. On our farm we grow a wide variety of hot peppers, and our hottest is the habanero which is around 300,000 SHU. That's right, it is often 100 times hotter than a jalapeno.

The peppers we grow are pablano, padrone, habanero, jalapeno, hungarian hot, serrano, yellow cayenne, cherry bomb, joe's long cayenne, purple cayenne and thai dragon chile. I dehydrated a of these varieties for later use and also pickled a few varieties. Take a look!

Habanero pepper basket.