All in all, it hasn’t been a bad summer in my vegetable garden. Strangely cool and mostly beautiful weather has given me tomatoes that just keep setting fruit at a nicely measured pace. Only once this summer did I find myself temporarily overwhelmed with tomatoes ripening all at once. That batch went into tomato soup.
I knew ripe carmellos and big beefs had recently begun to outpace what I was using, but I didn’t realize until I made a concerted effort to pick them all this morning that I had another 21 pounds to deal with somehow. The cool summer weather has given way to sizzling hot fall weather (did I mention this was a strange year?), so my usual fallback of slow roasting them in the oven just isn’t going to happen this week. My sunny kitchen is already the warmest room in the house, so I NEVER turn on the oven on hot days.
Instead, I prepped a big jelly roll pan of quartered, seeded tomatoes, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with garlic cloves, thyme and salt, and let them roast on my Weber gas grill all afternoon, with just the back burner turned on low. They’re looking and smelling great, and the only real disadvantage is that I can only do one pan at a time. Another batch tomorrow will give me four good-sized vacuum packed bags for the freezer.
The only other summer crop still going strong is basil. Most years it flowers and gets tough as soon as it gets really hot, but this year it still looks fresh and tastes great. I’m going to try to make pesto for the freezer this week.
My fall pole bean crop is blooming and beginning to form tiny beans. Sugar snap peas I planted a few weeks ago germinated poorly for some reason, so we replanted this morning. I hope it’s not too late to get a fall crop. And I’ve got half a box full of carrots just beginning to show their first true leaves.
The beast in the photo is Charlotte, who has had an enormous web between my sungold plants and the back fence (a distance of about 8 feet), for the past couple of months. We managed to stay out of each other’s way until yesterday, when I completely forgot and marched right through her web. Now I know how those flies feel.
