The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 52- Tallying Tomatoes

This is this year’s last bowl of slightly more than 3 kg of tomatoes.

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Some of them still need a bit of ripening, but they all should get to a point where they are edible. So I added up all that I harvested this year, and the final number was pleasing – 27 kg.

The harvest was slightly more than last year, but from the greenhouse alone, it was slightly less than last year – last year, I had 25 kg just from the greenhouse. Which is perfectly understandable, because this year, I tried growing bell peppers in one part of the greenhouse instead of tomatoes, and I compensated for it by growing tomatoes outdoors under a shelter. And not only did I manage to shield them from blight, the ripening in buckets was successful more than I expected – virtually all the fruit ripened, and I harvested almost 10 kg of tomatoes this way.

Overall, I am satisfied with this crop. We have enough tomato sauce for pasta and tomato concentrate for pizza for a year.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 51 – Lecsó

I am currently suffering from extreme pain in my left calf and lower back, the cause unknown. Probably some form of sciatic nerve inflammation, although definitely not a slipped disk. I can walk, run, jump, and squat, but I cannot sit in a chair, and sitting down or standing up from sitting feels like I am being stabbed with a hot knife. Which means I cannot write much.

So at least a short recipe for food for which I can grow most of the ingredients myself, lecsó,

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This was probably the first food that I learned to cook myself. There are different recipes. Here is how we do it:

Soften finely-chopped onions in oil. Once they are glassy, add diced tomatoes and stir until they dissolve. Once the tomatoes are dissolved, add finely diced pepper to your taste – we are using sweet bell peppers here, but any kind will do. We also add bay leaf and black pepper. Let it simmer a bit, and add an egg or two. Mix in the eggs until they are cooked (the egg is optional)

We serve it with boiled potatoes and grilled sausage. When I was in college, I did make a completely vegan variant without the egg and with fried tofu, and it was delicious too. This year, I grew most of the ingredients myself; the only exceptions were black pepper, oil, and sausage (I still did not manage to get my hands on sausage seeds).

Now I am going to lie down again.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 50 – Walnut Windy Whammy

My back is giving me gyp again, and on top of that, we had horrendously bad weather over the weekend – raining all day and night, and extremely high winds during the day. Yesterday, I could at least hobble out and look under the walnut tree.

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Pain or not, those had to be collected and put to dry. Luckily, I am actually in less pain standing and walking than I am sitting, so it was not that big of a problem. We called a family friend to come by and take some for herself, too.

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Mostly, I work alone in the garden. Yesterday, my mom insisted on collecting the walnuts with me, and who is going to argue with old mom? She said she had fun and enjoyed the exercise, despite having undergone carpal tunnel surgery just two weeks prior.  She did give me permission to post this picture.

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At this time of the year, one room in the house is reserved for drying and ripening produce. It is the smallest room, and it usually serves as my leatherworking workshop. I built a drying rack in there – on the shelves I can put nuts, and around it I can hang bean pods that are not fully dry. A fan circulates the air, and an air dehumidifier runs in it 24/7, drawing 2-4 liters of moisture every day. It costs some money, but the alternative is composting it all – both beans and nuts are unlikely to fully dry outdoors in my climate, and trying to let them dry naturally indoors results in mold and rot.

The first few buckets of nuts that we collected before were approximately 70% of bad quality – those go to the bird feeder. Those that we gathered yesterday, however, are mostly good. Those will be dried, cracked, and then stored in jars, sold to friends, or made into oil, depending on how many there will be.

The Nutcranker works marvelously, btw.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 49 – Pumpkin Puréé

Making pumpkin purée á la mashed potatoes was my plan from the start of the year. And although my pumpkin harvest was pitiful this year, I did, in the end, get enough butternut pumpkins to try it out. I did not take any pictures, and the recipe is very simple. I handled them pretty much exactly as I would potatoes:

Cut circa 2000 kg butternut pumpkin into small cubes and boil in water for 10 minutes. Decant the water, add 150 g of butter and a spoonful of salt, and crush with a potato masher into a paste. Because pumpkins are less starchy than potatoes, adding milk or water is not needed.

The result looked remarkably like mashed potatoes. It had the same consistency, too. The flavor was very different, though, which is to be expected. We ate it with air-fried fish fingers, and I liked it. I am going to try it tomorrow with spicy sausage.

We were using pumpkins as ersatz potatoes in many foods for years, so this is just another recipe in the repertoire.

 

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 48 – Belated Butternut

This was the first time I was trying to grow butternut pumpkins, so I did not know exactly what to expect. I assumed they would behave similarly to the Hokkaido pumpkins. They did not. They started blooming late, and the first female flower showed up in the last week of August.

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I did not want to leave anything to chance, so I pollinated it myself. As I did with all subsequent female flowers that showed up. There were several, all but one in the pumpkin & beetroot patch opposite my greenhouse. The plants in the three sisters system remained stunted, just like corn and Hokkaido pumpkin did. Which leads me to believe that not only weather, but also the compacted soil contributed to those crops failing.

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With the plants blooming this late in the summer, I was prepared to write this crop completely off, but the fruits grew reasonably well, despite the weather getting colder.

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Just a few days ago, the plants were still going strong. There was slight yellowing of the leaves, but the leaves on top were still fresh green.

The improvised trellis worked well, so I will use that in the future too. However, the plants grew more vigorously than I expected and completely overshadowed the beets. I will have some beets, but it won’t be much. I think that had I planted the three sisters system on this piece of land, it would be successful.

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These last two nights we had the first autumn frost. Yesterday morning, the leaves of all the pumpkins wilted, and the plants were completely dead. I have harvested all the fruits at once.

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Overall, it was circa 7,5 kg of fruit, with two fruits having circa 1,5 kg each. Those two will probably keep for at least a few days and ripen further indoors. The rest needs to be used up asap. We used 1,5 kg to make tomato-pumpkin sauce, 1 kg to make soup for immediate consumption, and for the rest, we will think of something. I would like to try pumpkin purée à la mashed potatoes.

What did I learn? I need to do my best to get the seeds to germinate earlier. The germination was delayed almost a month, and that made all the difference. I shall try to plant the seeds earlier in the year and use bigger containers, so the plants can grow more freely before I can plant them outdoors. I can try for the three sisters system, but I must do so on my prime soil. I will probably make and write down plans for next year once this season is over.