The Garden in the Side Yard

Years ago after running out of room in the garden, I incorporated part of the lawn into what I call "the garden in the side yard."  I've been amending lots and lots of composted leaves and wood chip mulch and have improved the soil immensely.  We have 112 potato plants growing in this patch along with watermelons, cantaloupes and butternut squash on the very end where they can vine out.  You can't see them yet as they are just germinating, but I planted some Lemon Queen sunflowers in a long row alongside the potatoes.  The flowers are for the bees.  To the left, we have our muscadines and our thornless blackberries.

Just to the south is a small raised bed we call our herb garden.  It did not fare so well in our big freeze.  Our rosemary was probably at least 5 years old.  It is dead.  I've already planted another in its place since this photo was taken.

We thought the oregano was finished as well, but we were surprised and happy to see it coming back!

One thing that's not coming back is our Lemongrass.  The freeze finished it off, for sure.  It had made it for years and years, coming back in the spring, but not this spring.  I replanted some from some seed I had saved but none germinated.  I'm trying again with some purchased seed.  We'll see if we can get it growing.  We made a lot of lemongrass tea from this plant.  Hoping we can get another growing to take its place.

The two plants in the background are parsley that came up from seed.  It's very healthy and we use it often in cooking.  When it bolts, we'll let it go to seed again.  Then maybe it will come up again next year from seed.  

The two plants in the foreground are celery that Tricia started from the base of a store bought celery.

Finally, this plant.  This is an herb that is new to us.  We planted it from seed last year and it came up on its own again this spring.  It's French Sorrel.  I had never eaten it.  We really are enjoying it and eat some almost every day.

We'll pick about 10 leaves off of it and put on a slice of toasted homemade sour dough bread.  We then put a fried egg on top with a slice of provolone cheese topped with sliced avocado and another slice of sour dough bread.  It makes a great sandwich!

The Herb Patch

In all our years posting, I don't know if we've ever shown you our little herb patch.  Many years ago, we constructed a raised bed in the side yard with 2x12's and filled it with topsoil.  The idea was to plant herbs in one location to not take space out of the main garden.  We've kept this herb patch going for quite a while now.  We have a lot of different items in this bed.  We'll oftentimes come out and cut what we need and it's not that far of a walk back inside to the kitchen where the meal is being prepared.

Below you're looking at three separate celery plants.  They seem to be really happy and healthy.

Here is a close-up photo of the healthiest of the three.  If you've been following us, we planted these from store-bought celery stalks that we had eaten everything except a small 3 inch section of the base.  We rooted it in a cup of water and then transplanted it out here.  It's doing quite well.  We might get a bunch of celery after all.  This is our first time doing this.  

These two plants have similar leaves, but aren't celery.  These are flat Italian parsley.  These come in handy for gumbos.  We'll pick a bunch and the plants continue to re-grow.  We didn't plant these from seed.  They came up volunteer from last year's parsley plant that we allowed to go to seed.

This is French Sorrel and is two years old.  It continues to thrive.  I like to eat the leaves raw.  It has a unique taste.  We also put in salads.

This is lemon grass.  This group of plants was started from seed about three years ago.  We cut off bunches of it to make tea - either iced or hot.  It's delicious and has a real nice fragrance.  We aim to try to cook with it.  Lemon grass is used in lots of dishes, but we haven't tried any recipes yet.

Here is a pretty large rosemary plant.  It's four years old, I'm guessing.  We use rosemary quite often in cooking.  I love the fragrance.

Here is some ginger.  It is two years old.  The leaves look a little beat up.  I think it got hurt a little by the frost we had a couple of weeks ago.  I guess we'll need to dig it up.

And finally, here is what's left of the oregano.  This plant used to be quite large, but the drought this year really hurt the plant.  Where it used to fill up almost 1/4 of the entire bed, it's now just these small stragglers hanging on.  Hopefully it will recover.  We like its flavor in Italian dishes.

And that's a quick tour of the herb garden.  We'll plant some additional items in here in the spring.

More Things To Do With a Bumper Crop of Tomatoes

The 2018 crop of heirloom tomatoes are still coming in.  Numerous varieties.  Some big and fat.  Some little. Some deep, blood-red, some yellow, some orange and some almost black.  I have fun growing them.  Lately, however, when I bring yet another bucket full into the house, Tricia almost groans.

We've canned forty-something pints of diced tomatoes and about the same amount of tomato sauce. 

Tricia makes an Italian tomato salad that she likes and we've made numerous batches of pico de gallo.

Today we'll be drying some tomatoes in the food dehydrator.  It is a simple thing to do.  You simply core out the tomatoes and cut them into quarters and align them on the dehydrator trays.  I pack them in pretty tight.  They will shrink up.

You want to get them close together to make the most of the space that you have.

I'll liberally shake kosher salt over the tomatoes and then I went outside and picked a whole bunch of rosemary.  I skinned the needles off of the rosemary and sprinkled lots of it on top of the cut up tomatoes.

Once I have all the trays prepared and ready, it is time to get them dehydrating.

It takes only about a day for the tomatoes to be dried.  All of the water has been removed and it leaves behind a concentrated flavor of tomatoes, salt and rosemary that is like candy to eat!

We've made several batches.  Once totally dried, we store in mason jars and zip loc bags and snack on them.  I'm not a big fan of raw tomatoes, but dried tomatoes are quite good.

We have a few jars of dried seasoned, herbed tomatoes put aside and many more on the way!

The smaller tomatoes actually make the best dried tomatoes. 

Don't Get Perturbed About The Herbs

We cook with a lot of herbs. In order to have them in close proximity to the kitchen, we have them growing in terra cotta pots out on the back patio.  Right outside the french doors, we have oregano, parsley, and rosemary growing.  Most grow all year long.  Due to the quantity of plants and the size, our basil is located in the garden, so it is not as convenient.  Perhaps I'll grow a basil plant on the patio this spring for cooking purposes and leave the others in the garden for making pesto in large quantities like we frequently do.

Just this past weekend, I started a few pots of parsley, dill and cilantro seeds growing on the back patio.  Fresh parsley smells GREAT all cut up and we love to add bunches of it on top of a steaming bowl of gumbo.  When I was in the grocery store business, we would get some specialty mustard from a company called Inglehoffer.  They made different herbed mustards that came in little glass jars.  My favorite was a dill mustard and I'd like to make some of our own.  Another thing is recently I had a chicken sandwich with dill mayonnaise and although I loathe mayonnaise, it was pretty good.

Finally, cilantro.  We like it in pico de gallo and in Tricia's rice dishes.  Some people love it and some people hate it and say it tastes like soap and smells like stink bugs. This Article tells you why.  It is genetic.  It you hate it, chances are you have the OR6A2 gene that allows you to pick up the scent of aldehyde chemicals.  Those are found in both cilantro and soap.  I almost forgot mint!  We have mint growing out on the back patio as well.  Fresh mint hot tea is real good.

Parsley, Dill, Cilantro and Oregano (not as catchy as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)

Green Onions.  Now here is something that I can't get enough of.  I love to add a big, heaping handful on top of a big plate of red beans and rice and sausage.  So Good!  Although I planted a bunch of it from seed recently, they haven't germinated yet and we needed some for a recipe that Tricia was making.  Unfortunately, we had to run to the store and pick up a bunch of commercially grown green onions.

I usually cut the green onions all the way down to the roots and use the whole thing for cooking with, but here's the deal: if the green onions you purchased were in good shape (and why would you purchase them if they weren't), simply keep the roots wet and when you've snipped off the tops, plant them in your garden.  I just planted four of them yesterday as you can see below:

"Recycled" Green Onions

The green onions from the same purchased bunch that I put in the ground last week in the center below were already almost ready to be snipped and used to flavor delicious gumbos, soups, and rice and gravy.  

Grows in NO TIME!!

So while we patiently wait for our green onions planted from seed to grow, we'll have some 'recycled green onions' in inventory while we wait.  I'd like to try planting some other herbs this spring that we haven't used before - like fennel, sage, and thyme.  I also have some lemon balm that I'll get started in early spring.

Dehydrating Heirloom Tomatoes in Oven and in Dehydrator

Temperatures are in the mid-90's every day now with a heat index sitting over 100 degrees even at night. These temperatures and bug pressure signal the end of the 2014 Homegrown Tomato season.  We've had a nice crop and have been able to eat our bellies full, can a bunch of them in several forms and freeze a nice amount as well. To diversify the way we preserve the harvest, and encouraged by our success with drying figs, I wanted to try my hand at drying some tomatoes.  We had several containers of ripened tomatoes from about 14 different varieties that were sitting in the fridge begging for attention, so I obliged.

One of the containers of homegrown toms

Sun dried tomatoes is something that you see on the menus of many recipes.  I'm sure there is a way to dry them outside in the sun, but the obstacles are many.  I think the birds, bugs, flies, and other critters would devour them before they began to dry, so I researched how to dry tomatoes from many different websites and sort of combined different techniques.  I decided to do one batch in the oven using an Oven Drying Technique and then do one batch in the Food Dehydrator.  I'll show you what we did and critique the methods used at the end.

First thing you want to do is cut your tomatoes.  For a small one, just cut it in half. For a larger tomato, you can quarter it or cut it in eighths.  In both cases, you'll want to cut out the stem and core the tomato to remove the hard part in the middle.

Cutting up the tomatoes

The difficulty I faced is I was using many different varieties of tomatoes that were of all different sizes.  Due to the lack of uniformity, I could tell they were going to dry at different rates.  I loaded them on the trays of the Dehydrator.  I like the color differences in the red tomatoes and the yellow ones.

Tomatoes cut and arranged on the dehydrator trays

I also cut up and arranged the tomatoes on the trays that I was going to put in the oven to dry.  With either method, you want to ensure that there is sufficient airflow around the slices, so don't let any of them touch each other.

Toms arranged in trays for the oven drying method

I also like the color difference in the 'green shoulders' of the heirloom tomatoes contrasted against the red. For the oven drying method, I wanted to shake things up a little, so I sprinkled with some kosher salt and went out and picked some rosemary. After washing the rosemary, I pulled off a bunch of it and distributed on top of the cut tomatoes.

Rosemary on top

I set the Dehydrator at 135 degrees and plugged it in at 10 pm and let it run all night and all day long until I got back at 5 the next day.

Dehydrator is on...

For the oven method, I placed them on the middle shelf and set the oven on the lowest setting which for our oven was 170 degrees at 10 pm.  The directions said to leave it 10 - 20 hours (that's a wide range!), but it said to put the oven at 150.  Our oven's lowest setting is 170.  So, I left it on all night until 6 am, turned off the oven when I went to work and then turned it back on for 4 hours when I returned from work at 6 pm.

Oven is on...

You can see the before shot (above) and the after shot (below):

Oven Dried tomatoes

The smell coming from the dehydrator was nice, but the smell from the oven was a fragrant roasted rosemary scent that made me very hungry.  Here is a closer look: Notice how much they've shrunk in size.

Nice!

Now the way you tell that they're done is all dependent upon how 'wet' your tomatoes were, how thick/thin you cut them, and how well the air was able to circulate around them.  They shouldn't be crispy, but rather feel like a raisin, leathery, bendable, but not moist with any water.

Dehydrated

Here are six trays of dehydrated tomatoes using the dehydrator.  All were done perfectly as far as I could tell!  The oven dried method contained one row that was crispy and over-done, but these were eaten.  And Oh!  The flavor!  Delicious, candy-like, scrumptious, I might add...

Dried and Laid to the Side!

I removed them from the trays and packed them into Zip Loc bags, one for the oven dried and one for the dehydrator method, making sure that all the air was squeezed out of the bags.  The directions say to store them in the refrigerator sealed tightly where they will last for a few weeks.  You can also put them in the freezer, tightly sealed, where they will last for 9 - 12 months.

Oven-dried kosher salted with rosemary tomatoes bagged

Dehydrated with no spices or herbs bagged

Review/Critique:

The dehydrator method was more successful in getting uniform drying.  All were about as perfect as you can get them.  The oven-dried method dried inconsistently.  In the future I'll take the time to pick the ones out that are drying at a faster rate, so they don't completely dry out.  Additionally, the oven method, due to the ability to add salt and herbs, had the advantage regarding flavor.  Bottom line: I'll use both methods next year, perhaps using additional herbs like basil, oregano, and garlic for some extra bang.  These will be nice to snack on and cook with and added diversity to our methods of preserving the harvest.