The Edible Garden Project: September 2013 Update

This year, my high travel season seems to have coincided almost exactly with the most productive time of year for our garden. When we returned from our Canadian Rockies road trip, our garden was brimming with red, orange, and green. Unfortunately, I only had about a week at home before heading out on the road all over again for another two weeks. So in that short week, we harvested as much as possible. 

As I had planned, this year I started experimenting with making sauce out of our tomatoes. The Sun Sugar tomatoes were cooked into a fresh puttanesca sauce and a combination of Amish Paste and Brandywine varieties were cooked into a basic sauce using this recipe from the Kitchn as a guideline. The Walla Walla onions, which by the way I plan to grow every year from now on (so easy!), were caramelized for French Onion Soup, eaten on top of pizza, and cooked into chili. Lastly, those beautiful carrots were slow cooked with chicken breasts and shredded for our pup (I know, she's spoiled).

At this point, we still have oodles of huge green Amish Paste and Brandywine tomatoes, it's a bit ridiculous how many there are. So as a last ditch effort, we've pruned both plants way back to get lots of energy going to those fruits. Although, the way the weather is going here in Seattle - we'll be lucky if we get any un-split tomatoes with all this rain.

Our pumpkin patch is turning out rather miniature sized in comparison to last year. Especially in the case of the Cinderella varieties which are a brilliant orange but just aren't growing quite as big. 

All of the leafy greens in our newly relocated bed are growing fantastically. We've got ample amounts of kale, lettuce, beet greens, and chives. Our snap peas are growing quickly, but can't seem to be bothered to climb their trellis. Funny peas.

In the back of the house, our peppers are doing outstanding. These Thai Chili's are the real stars, brilliant red in color with a whole lot of kick and flavor, at least according to my husband. Even though I explained to him that these were HOT peppers, he bit straight into one and well, he didn't do that again. As I write this, he is explaining to me that it was hotter and more flavorful than the Habañero (which we grew in our California container garden) he bit into about five years ago.