Garden Victory

As autumn in Indiana comes to an end I thought I'd pen a quick post about how our garden did this year. As you may recall, we expanded to two raised beds this time around and integrated the new drip irrigation system into both. Not surprisingly, automatic watering combined with twice the real estate yielded a lot more than our previous efforts. Well, at least overall.

Let's start with what worked. Our tomatoes, especially the Roma, did really well. We had bruschetta multiple times, made a batch or two of tomato and basil pasta sauce, and gave a bunch away to neighbors and friends. One of the varieties we grew was Cherokee Purple - an odd heirloom variety that's prized for its delicious, sweet taste. To really experience these we sliced a few up and made BLTs with Smoking Goose jowl bacon. While I'm not a BLT connoisseur, this was by far the best BLT I've ever had. These tomatoes were heavenly and the jowl bacon complimented it just the way I wanted it to.

We also planted the herbs in the beds this year. The regular watering and sunshine really allowed them to take off. Our little basil plants thrived most of all and kept us in fresh basil all summer. We put it on pizza, in pasta sauce, in cocktails, and even made two big batches of pesto (which we freeze in ice cube trays before transferring to plastic bags, so now we can use small portions all winter). The mint and rosemary also did well, which resulted mainly in some mint juleps and a smoked pork loin covered in olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and fresh rosemary. You just can't beat having fresh herbs on hand like this.

Another success was the large number of chilies we got out of our little guys this year. At one point I took a bag of them to give away at work because we had too many. I incorporated jalapenos into guacamole, red chilies into stir-fry, and various others into everything from omelettes to sauces. One of the biggest successes we had was creating some more hot sauce. One of my coworkers had a huge batch of red jalapenos ripen at once, so he passed 20 or so on to me. And, as luck would have it, I had a few habaneros ready to be picked at that same time. So, since I obviously couldn't let these go to waste, I had a hot sauce making day and produced two batches - one batch of jalapeno hot sauce (jalapenos, garlic, onion, water, vinegar, salt, and sugar) and a batch of "Caribbean" habanero hot sauce (habaneros, pineapple, mango, water, lime juice, cider vinegar, brown sugar, allspice, cloves, and salt). Both really turned out well. The jalapeno sauce is very in-your-face spicy as it's almost a pure chili taste, while the habanero sauce hits you with the heat in the back of your mouth since the sweetness from the fruit balances it out. I recommend serving them like I did - as accompaniments to smoked chicken wings. A+ on those for sure.

Now, what didn't work so well this year? Well, this summer had some brutally hot days. Those hot days managed to basically destroy all of our squash plants. I think we managed to get maybe two zucchini and a one or two summer squash before the vines shriveled up. We've also decided this was the last year of planting cilantro. So far we've had no luck with it and can't seem to get enough out of our plants to make it worth it. We also had issues with our tomatoes late in the season. Just before they would be ripe enough to pick bugs would be all over them. I'm sure there's something we can do to mitigate that, so I'll have to do some research before planting next year. But, other than these issues, it was a good garden year. We've still got a lot to learn, but it's been fun experimenting and enjoying our results.

And that's all for now, folks. Thanks for reading and we'll see you next time!