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.

First frost!

Almost two months to the day of my last successful blog post. Earlier in the season the owners of the farm on which I work were skeptical if I would be able to keep up with my blog once the harvest months hit - it turns out they were right. But today was the first frost, which means the summer is coming to an end and I will soon have time to write detailed updates on how each product has matured in the last two months.

I had mixed feelings about the frost this morning. Though we have been joking and looking forward to the day when we can stop harvesting tomatoes, I was not ready for that day to be today. I was sad at the prospect of everything dying. Everything I have worked so hard to grow and maintain. I will admit I was a little teary when I thought of all our ground crops being dead. But then I picked almost frozen cherry tomatoes for an hour-and-a-half while barely being able to feel my fingers and I decided I was in fact ready for the tomatoes to be dead after all.

Luckily the frost was a spot frost which means it only damaged some of the plants. I still have a few days or maybe even a couple of weeks to harvest and preseve some more of the healthy and clean food I have worked so hard to help grow this summer.

I feel I must accept that summer is gone.

Tomatoes: Part II

It has been a few weeks since we finished planting the tomatoes. The next step in growing and harvesting them successfully was to install a series of metal poles to which we will be building a support system for the tomatoes to grow up (vertically) instead of out (horizontally). Luckily, Steve took care of this quite laborious task on our behalf.


Then this past week, we went about desuckering all of the tomatoe plants - which I estimate to be about 5000. By preventing the plants from pouring its energy into growing out along the ground, we are ensuring that the plants grow upwards which will allow for an easier harvest.



To further encourage the upward growth, we have even started tying the tomato plants to provide lateral support while they grow. To do this, we use cord and run a figure eight around each of the plants. This cord is tied taught between the metal poles so that it provides ample support to the tomato plants while growing as well as when we will be harvesting the tomatoes themselves. When you return down a row, you wrap the cord around the plants in the opposite figure eight configuration so that the plants are supported from both sides. From what I can see, I understand we will be doing this again once the plants grow a little taller.

In the green house, a different system is used where we have hung cords from the ceiling and wrap the plants around these cords as they grow. The interior tomato plants have had an ample head start, and we have already started to send little orange cherry tomatoes to the market. I am eager to try one, however we still have a freezer full of tomatoes below our appartment which my roomates and I are trying to eat our way through before this years harvest ripens. Tomato soup and tomato puree have become a staple in our fridge.