Welcome to the GRS Garden Project. Every month, my wife and I track how much time and money we spend growing food. This is the report for September 2011. (Here are the results for 2008 and the results for 2009. We rested in 2010.) This installment was written by Kris while I was packing for Peru.
Our late summer this year meant that our crops were delayed, but when the sunshine came, it came on strong! I was very busy in the kitchen in September, but not so busy in the garden itself.
An almond-pear tart
My records show that since the beginning of the month, I’ve preserved 126 pints of food for pantry and freezer, bringing my year-to-date total to over 263 pints (131 quarts). Not included in those numbers are the dried pears and plums I’ve been able to make from this year’s bumper plum crop from our tree and some of the 50 pounds of Bartletts shared by our neighbor, Roberta. And the fresh fruits and vegetables have meant I’ve purchased only lemons, limes, and onions at the store over the last month; of course, we all know J.D. has purchased pineapple, blueberries, and watermelon!
My pantry is now stocked with jars of applesauce, spiced pear sauce, and apple juice, apple butter, pear butter, pear-vanilla preserves, and plum-anise jam. The freezer has nine quarts of herbed tomato and onion pasta sauce and four pints of oven-roasted tomatoes with olive oil and sea salt. Added to the many pickled items and jams from earlier in the summer, we’re in good shape for the cold and gloomy Oregon winter months ahead! I’ve also made a good number of jams to give to friends for this year’s holiday gifts.
Italian prune plums from our tree
Starting to clean up for the season
On one of our last sunny September days, I tore out the bean bushes and cucumber vines. They probably would have produced a bit more (the beans were still flowering), but I was in a mood to clean. Out came the smaller of the two zucchini plants, the dried pea vines, and the gourd vine once I had harvested this year’s gourd crop. Other than that work, the only labor for the month was the time spent harvesting — about 5 hours total.
Potatoes from our garden
What’s left to come
I’ve only collected about half the potatoes and will dig the rest in October. There are still tomatoes on the vines, but our recent rains may make them split and rot before they ripen. And time will tell about the Concord grape crop as well. I’d love to make some Concord grape juice and jelly — we’re out of both — but without J.D.’s help to harvest it, it will be quite a project. And there are still a number of jalapenos and habaneros turning bright colors on my plants—waiting to be picked and turned in to something much too spicy for me to eat myself!
Tomato sauce, step one
After spending so many hours over a hot canning pot in September, I’m ready for the gardening season to end and the enjoying season to begin. Here’s our total harvest for the month:
- Bartlett pears: 5513 grams, 12.14 pounds @ $1.69/pound = $20.52
- Cucumbers: 3465 grams, 7.63 pounds @1.49/pound = $11.37
- New Potatoes: 3405 grams, 7.5 pounds @ 1.49/pound = $11.18
- Jonathan apples: 48 pounds @ $1.49/pound = $71.52
- Italian Prune plums: 16662 grams, 36.7 pounds @ $1.49/pound = $54.68
- Jalapeno peppers: 680 grams, 1.5 pounds @ $1.99/pound = $2.99
- Tomatoes: 32742 grams, 72.12 pounds @$1.99/pound = $143.52
- Zucchini: 12 at 50 cents apiece = $6.00
- Interlaken seedless green grapes: 2274 grams, 5.0 pounds @2.99/pound = $14.95
- Five decorative gourds: $2.50
That’s a grand total of $332.68 worth of produce in September! That’s a record harvest for any single month, and doesn’t include the 20 pounds of apples and 50 pounds of pears we picked up from friends. Maybe that’ll help make up for the slow year we’ve had so far. Let’s look at the annual totals.
Lunch – a bacon-tomato salad
Yearly Totals
Here are this year’s totals through the end of the month.
Final word
This garden project is not a formal experiment. Kris and I are long-time hobby gardeners, and we have set ways that we do things. This year, we’re trying to incorporate some new ideas from GRS readers, but most of the time we’ll do things the way we have for more than 15 years.
We’re not trying to be 100% organic (though we are mostly organic through our normal practices). Nor are we trying to be 100% frugal. Instead, we’re trying to see just what our garden costs and produces based on our normal habits. We hope the results of this experiment will help us find new ways to economize and to improve our crops.
You can read about my goals for this series in The year-long GRS project: How much does a garden really save?
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I don’t have a garden yet, but I love seeing these posts with your progress. There’s something satisfying about growing your own food. It’s great that you can have fruit trees!
For now, I rely on my local farmers’ market. I made freezer jam last weekend — still addicted after a post Kris wrote a couple of years back!
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It is great to see how bountiful your garden has been. We are in San Antonio and the drought has been very difficult. At least our fall tomatoes are all bearing fruit and the rest of our fall seeds are sprouting very nicely. Autumn is so much more forgiving on our garden. My fingers are crossed that this weather pattern improves. We love to garden, but this summer was just depressing.
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We try to grow tomatoes every year; this year was better but our plants still only bore a few. Our property has lots of mature trees and I think the main problem may be lack of sunlight. It is going to cost a boatload to get those trees cut down and removed!
We do have a lot of success growing basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage and tarragon though.
I’d love to learn more about growing vegetables successfully.
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Seems counterproductive to cut down those trees if you intend to be green.
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Nom!
This year was very bad for our garden. Weather pretty well decimated many things. The herb garden is flourishing though, and it looks like the sweet potatoes may be doing fine.
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I wish you were my neighbor!
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Both the almond-pear tart and the bacon-tomato salad look delicious. Any chance you could post the recipes?
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Hello Andrew~
The salad has no official recipe– just garden tomatoes, crumbled bacon and hunks of creamy blue cheese. Yum! If blue cheese is not your thing, it’s also great with feta.
Pear-Almond Cake
1 ½ cups sugar
¾ cup butter, melted
2 eggs
1 ½ tsp almond extract
1 ½ tsp vanilla
¼ tsp salt
1 ½ cup flour
2 sliced Bartlett pears, with peel on (you’ll use about 1 1/2 pears)
1 tbsp. sugar, for garnish
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and butter a 9″ or 10″ cake pan (I use a silicone pan).
2. Blend sugar and butter. Beat in eggs. Stir in extracts.
3. Add salt and flour and mix well.
4. Spread 1/3 batter into pan. Top evenly with sliced pears. Add rest of batter, spreading carefully so pears are not disturbed, and add more sliced pears on the top. Sprinkle with sugar.
5. Bake for 40-50 minutes, or until golden brown.
6. Cool completely on a wire rack before removing from pan.
This cake is also nice baked with a layer of Italian prune halves on the top instead of the pears.
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Thank you!
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I agree–the tomato bacon salad looks delectable and I’m going to make it this week. Your food photographs are really good, by the way.
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How much square footage do you guys have for this garden?
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These are easily my favorite posts!
What varieties of tomatoes are you growing? Do you compost the vines and such at the end of the year?
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Tyler– square footage is hard to calculate, many of the crops are intermixed with flower gardens and things like the grapes and fruit trees have their own spaces all over. The vegetable garden itself is about 25″ x 12″. We have 2/3 of an acre to work with.
This year’s tomato varieties: Beefsteak and Big Beef, Sungold (cherry), Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Kellogg’s Beefsteak (a yellow, but disappointing), 5 varieties of Roma/paste type for canning purposes, Crimson Cushion, and an Early Girl that turned out to be some mystery tomato instead.
Most of the cleanup for the vegetable garden goes in our yard waste container for curbside pickup that goes to the city compost.
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I live in an area which is semi-arid and only tomatoes and squash seem to be worthwhile to grow in the summer. Other crops like snow peas and beets do well in the winter, and in the late winter we have a lovely harvest of citrus. We all have to adapt to what grows well in our region. I remind myself of that whenever I start feeling garden envy…
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Have you considered aquaponics? I’ve seen it do wonders in arid locations like yours. Here’s one of the best sites I’ve seen on the topic (but they are located in Australia!) http://www.backyardaquaponics.com
I’m considering the IBC aquaponics where food is grown on the top layer and fresh water fish in the lower layer (and they feed off each other!) The water from the lower level full of the fish “nutrients” are cycled to the upper level of plants in the top level, which then filters the water and returns it to the “pond” below.
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If you’re growing pesticide free produce you’re lowballing your profit. My local co-op sells zucchini, summer squash and cucumbers for $3.50-$4/lb. And the cost of living in Albuquerque is supposed to be low.
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We’re using the prices we’d pay at our own organic produce stand, concurrent with our harvest. So you might see the price we use for green beans change over the summer, just like you would there. Agreed, though, that some places charge MUCH more– another reason to grow our own!
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Wow, you really have access to cheap good produce. Here farmers markets are boutique affairs. E.g., bunch of backyard weeds: $5–but nutritious! (yes, they are, but still…)
Anyway I’m thinking of growing in my roof if I stay in town. Anybody here trying that?
The container is a resin square about 4-5 feet per side with a dome tent frame. Has a cloth cover for the summer and a plastic one for winter. Hookups for hoses and a lock for the dome. Sells for about $300 and needs hoses, timer, a ladder… prolly $400 total.
Is it worth it from a monetary point of view? How long can it take me to break even if i’m growing, say, basil, parsley, rosemary, thyme, mint, chives, bell peppers? Obviously I’m not asking for precise figures but some ballpark guess… if it can be made. Labor is calculated at $0 though (“free workout”).
Thanks in advance, whatever the answer!
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Beautiful! Thank you for the post.
I was a total slacker in the garden and with the canner this year, but I am so jealous of your pear trees!
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Excellent post! Recently I’ve been thinking about growing some fruit and vegetables and it’s nice to see such details.
Your hobby is a great way to both save money and have fun watching your produce grow.
Out of your entire garden, if you were to choose the easiest and fastest things to grow, what would they be?
Nice post.
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I’m so envious of your garden produce! We live in the NE of England, at the coast, and whilst we don’t have viscious winters, neither do we have long warm summers (or any recognisable summer for someone who grew up in Oklahoma). We are currently growing kale, runner beans, beets and brussels sprouts. Our initial experiment with potatoes went well, but I feel they are so inexpensive (£5 for 50 pounds) it’s not worth the space. We aim to travel in a motorhome during large parts of the summer months, to warmer climates on the Continent, so we need really hardy, self-sufficient plants. I’m dreaming of container gardening around the motorhome, but haven’t tried that yet. The best thing about your records is seeing how little time you actually have to spend to come out with impressive amounts of food. Thanks so much for the inspiration.
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Hi! Could you please share the recipes you used to make all thecanned items. they sound so good. Thanks!
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Lisa and Kandace,
Mary W (comment below #23) is correct; these recipes come from one of my favorite blogs: Food in Jars. Here are links to the recipes I used in September. For basic items like applesauce, I use the Ball canning book as a base and then spice to my taste.
http://www.foodinjars.com/2010/09/slow-oven-roasted-roma-tomatoes/
http://www.foodinjars.com/2011/02/pear-vanilla-jam/
http://www.foodinjars.com/2011/09/urban-preserving-italian-plum-jam-with-star-anise/
(I used anise seed instead of star anise because that’s what I had in my cupboard)
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These posts make me yearn for a medium sized garden of my own. In the very limited space that we have, I’ve planted a curry tree and a few pots contain basil and mint. The produce does not have much pecuniary value but it is always great to have fresh leaves for a nice cup of basil tea or a glass of Mojito.
I plan on planting green chillies in a pot.
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Lisa – This obviously isn’t Kris but I think several of her recipes (pear vanilla jam, plum anise preserves) come from: food in jars dot com.
I found that site from a previous post of Kris’s so I know she reads it.
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I would also like to know about the roasted tomatoes in olive oil and sea salt. I know you can’t keep them in the fridge–how does it work freezing them? Do you freeze them in single servings?
Thanks.
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http://www.foodinjars.com/2010/09/slow-oven-roasted-roma-tomatoes/
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Normally I find the gardening posts dry and uninspiring. Especially ocnsidering you guys in Portland have such huge advantage of us desesrt dwellers (of course we get sun all year round – so it’s a trade I like). But this post was actually very inspiring. All you’re stuff looks and sounds delectably yummy. The biggest problem I had with canning before was actually eating the stuff I had canned – it was good – just not as good as fresh stuff. I have been trying to do more herbs as that is a no brainer for return on investment – especially fresh basil
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Wonderful post. What do you do with the gourds? I had a bumper crop one year and have been carting them around for three moves. They are fine as is but I’d like to hear what you do with yours.
I’ve chosen to live in small places with no garden for the last few years (California housing prices) and would love to have a small vegie & natives plot in retirement (somewhere in the Portland OR area).
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The picture of your pear tart reminded me of a recipe I haven’t made for years – a pear rosemary tart. It’s a lovely and unusual mix. I hope you try it and enjoy.
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Great garden and harvest you’ve got there! Seeing that pie convinced me this is a great day for baking!
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Hi! I envy your garden and the way you handle it, everything is accounted for. Anyway, there is a lot to learn from your experience. As for me, I have just started with gardening wit few vegetables in it like tomatoes, bell paper, succhini, and some herbs like oregano and basil.
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