Tom Douglas

2010 Summer Garden Update/ by Scott Verdin, Serious Pie Server

In the summer of 2009, I planted random veggies in pots on my patio and was rather overwhelmed when faced with the results.  With too many veg to cook for dinner every night, I resorted to making pestos and sauces for the freezer, but I felt I should know how to pickle/can/preserve for the next year to add variety.

So, for Summer 2010, I thought I’d plan ahead and plant the veggies I could have fun with.  I planted little round stubby carrots and a mix of colorful carrots, rapini, four kinds of beans, leafy greens, and four kinds of tomatoes.  Guess what?  We had  what I think is the rainiest June since records started being kept and a sketchy summer overall.  Almost nothing even came out of the ground and if it did it drowned!  What’s with that???

I got one handful of purple string beans and four tomato plants with about 40 to 50 medium to large tomatoes which enjoyed staying green.  What have we learned from lemons?……How to make lemonade!

My dearest friend and Serious Pie coworker, Shannon Fadness, loves to pickle and can. In September, we bought some Romano beans from the ‘company store,’ and armed with a couple bottles of Prosecco,  Shannon came over to my house and we put up what I call Chili Dilly Beans, her very tasty recipe.  They turned out great! That was my first attempt.

So, to make a long story longer, I looked up recipes for pickled green tomatoes and bought my own canning equipment and went to work and put up some jars of pickled tomatoes with coriander, mustard, garlic, and a chili pepper.

What I learned…. Mother Nature has plans of her own.  You just deal with your garden as it grows.  And if I were planting to survive, it would be a pickled winter.

But the mystery of preserving isn’t a mystery after all.  I found out that canning/preserving is two basic things: Prepping the ingredients is step one and the canning process, step two.  I thought it was a difficult process, but while you can’t rush it, it was totally fun. And the results are a delight to see on my shelf and great to eat!

The photos: top left- twenty plus jars of chili dilly and a couple jars of tomato pickles

top right- tomatoes

center left- pickled green tomatoes

center right- “the beginning”

October 12th, 2010