Tedious But Well Worth It

So many farm related tasks can be exercises in monotony and tedium.  With hints of Spring in the air and a thaw underway we are driven with energy again that tends to wane somewhat in the winter months.  We have also noticed that as the new growing season approaches after a long winter, the things that require a lot of time and energy to accomplish and that we swear we will not do again, we are jumping eagerly into.

After a refreshing hike through the snow this morning to check our sap buckets, we decided it was time to finally get the bulk of our garlic from last season preserved.  Peeling hundreds of cloves can make you question your sanity motivation for doing such a task.

But then in a matter of a few hours the beautifully preserved cloves will be done, ready to be added to any number of dishes, or simply spread on a baguette, maybe with a little slice of goat cheese.  Its all about home grown and depth of flavor. so as we sit down to our spaghetti with garlic bread this evening, I know that though the work was tedious, it was well worth it!

A Garlicy Kind of Day

a little of the preserved garlic spread made an appearance at B's birthday dinner last night :)

Since it was going to be close to 90 degrees yesterday, we decided to give the tomatoes that are oh so close one more day on the vine.  So what should we do?  Working on getting our masses of garlic preserved seemed to be a good place to start.  A week or so ago we ordered an egg incubator so that we could try a batch of black garlic.  B filled it last night and by bed time we were confident that the temperature was regulating appropriately and we put it out on the porch.  Today the porch has the subtle smell of garlic wafting in the breeze.

I was messaged by the local grocery looking for more garlic (that was 60 heads that they sold in just shy of 3 weeks!)  I had another 35 heads that we dropped off today.

We peeled about 4 lbs worth of cloves and canned 6 half pints of preserved garlic.  Oh my goodness, this is the most decadent, spreadable, tasty stuff in the whole world, and I am tempted to use every last bit of our garlic to just make this!  We got the recipe from Hunter, Angler, Gardner, Cook site.  B does a lot of research on different things around the farm and time and time again, regardless of what he is looking for, this site pops up, and the advise thus far has been great!  As you can see the theme of the day was garlic, today....tomatoes!

Canning Tomatoes

 As you can see, our garlic did amazingly well this year! 

I have always thought of harvest in general, and tomato harvest specifically, and a race to get it all preserved.  We would get a ton of ripe tomatoes and dedicate an entire day or a whole weekend to processing everything.  Maybe that is because it is always a race against the clock here in the North to get enough ripe tomatoes at once to make that all happen.

This year they began ripening right on time, between the warm weather, and our pick of a couple of determinant types we are having volumes ripen, but staggered slightly to more an every other day time frame.  It has been a refreshing change to be canning a batch each night for a couple of hours, instead of the marathon to get them all done at once.  Trust me it is much more relaxed!  I have found that two cookie sheets of quartered Roma tomatoes will produce four quarts.  So far we have eight quarts done and another four that we made into sauce right away for consumption.  To give you a comparison, in the entire of last season (albeit a cool one) we had a total of six quarts of ripe roasted tomatoes; then of course 150 pounds that we processed into green tomato relish and sauce.  I must say that I am enthusiastic to be able to stock up and at this much more relaxed pace, it is the perfect way to settle into Fall!