Harvesting Green Tomatoes and Pumpkins

I apologise in advance that this post has turned out to be more of a "kitchen blog", but we have reached that time of year when I have been frantically trying to make use of the remaining few fruit and vegetables in the garden and allotment so as to avoid any wastage. Cue a week in the kitchen working my way through a variety of recipes taken from the internet, mostly to make use of the glut of unripe tomatoes we harvested this year.

The tomato plants had looked so promising early in the summer, though relatively cool and wet weather through July and August did not present ideal growing conditions and meant that we were left with a bumper crop of green tomatoes by the start of Autumn. Considering that the fruit had little chance of ripening further before the first frost, I picked the remainder at the start of last week and then spent several days making soups, salsas, chutney and basically throwing them into everything we have cooked over the past week, with varying degrees of success!

We all enjoyed the green tomato chutney best and stored up a couple of jars for Christmas. There are lots of chutney recipes available, though mine was based on Elise Bauer's recipe from simplyrecipes.com (I did need to substitute a few ingredients for ones I had to hand!). You can find the recipe at: https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/green_tomato_chutney/

I also placed a few tomatoes and a banana inside a cardboard box in an attempt to ripen them at home. I know it sounds a bit crazy but the ethylene gas given off from the banana should help the tomatoes to ripen. They also need warmth and, contrary to popular belief, don't need lots of sunlight to help them turn red. The process is explained well in the BBC Good Food website:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/how-ripen-tomatoes

The tomatoes hadn't ripened by the time I published this post but an update will follow!

In addition to the green tomatoes, we also ate the remainder of our autumn raspberries, courgettes and spring onions, made a paste with the final padron peppers and hastened to harvest our broccoli, as some of the very small number of plants we had managed to grow were starting to show signs of bolting (the flowers were taking on a yellow colouration).

Finally, we picked all six of our pumpkins and made our first Jack o'lantern with the children:

I am not generally a fan of pumpkin as a vegetable but hate to just throw away the scraped-out flesh as it seems such a waste. I therefore resorted to my well-used back up plan of "if you don't know what to do with it, throw it in a soup!". I did roast the flesh first with garlic, thyme and bay leaves and then used them to make a spiced winter soup that didn't turn out too bad, and I have another five pumpkins with which to perfect the recipe!

I also roasted half the seeds with salt, garlic and a touch of smoked paprika to make a healthy snack and the children used the rest of the seeds to make pumpkin seed jewellery. It turns out that pumpkin is a very versatile vegetable!

It really is satisfying to eat food you have grown yourself, though the frantic picking, pickling and cooking I have undertaken this week really did give me an appreciation of the work involved in more large scale production of fruit and vegetables.

Years ago, our traditions and festivals were so much more connected with farming and the production of food, and the autumn harvest season would mark a time of hard work and great celebration. One of my earliest memories is being at my grandparents' farm for the corn harvest when it was "all hands to the pumps" and all members of the family would be called in to help.

The word "harvest" is derived from the old English word for "Autumn", and the gathering of crops has been celebrated since Pagan times when a successful harvest really did mean the difference between life and death. The modern tradition of marking the harvest with a church thanksgiving service was introduced in 1843 by the Reverend Robert Hawker, who was known as something of an eccentric to his parishioners (e.g. he loved to wear bright colours, built a hut out of driftwood that now represents the smallest property managed by the National Trust and is said to have dressed up as a mermaid and once excommunicated his cat for catching mice on a Sunday!). Traditionally, the harvest festival service is held on or near the Harvest Moon (the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox) and includes collections of food for those in need.

I realise I have not talked much about the garden itself this week and the following flower pictures are therefore intended to get me back on track!

There does seem to be a good deal of scented flowers in bloom at the moment, such as the Daphne Odora, Viburnum x bodnantense and Evening Primrose in our own garden and the Mexican orange (Choisya spp.) that it currently flowering adjacent to a neighbour's gateway. It is true that plants that flower through the winter months do tend to be highly scented (I am thinking of plants like Sweet box (Sarcococca confusa), Winter honeysuckle and Wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) to name but a few). I guess they have evolved this way so as to lure the few insects that are around with their punchy scent.