Finally, finally, the rain has stopped. We’ve had four wonderful, sunny fall days. The leaves have turned and are all gold and red. Beautiful! Last Friday we had a pair of Whistling Swans stop for the morning on our beaver pond. We watched them glide around, enjoying their rest from their migration southward.

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Meanwhile, I’ve been (surprise!) canning like mad. I just got a batch of thick pizza sauce finished, two batches of sweet corn, spaghetti sauce with meat, and Mexican corn (sweet corn with diced green and red sweet peppers and onions). Our late apples are ripe now so I need to switch gears and get lots of apple stuff canned up. We really love our Chestnut crab with its large, sweet, juicy apples and the Frostbite apple with cracking crisp, unusually good flavor. Both are hugely productive also!

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I’m busy harvesting seeds from beans and tomatoes too. We are tremendously impressed with the Folsom Indian Ruin beans which are the biggest beans anyone has ever seen and also very productive. And yesterday I picked a batch of Enormous Plum paste tomatoes. Boy, oh boy, are they ever huge! We are focusing on more paste tomatoes this year as they can up so nice and folks need more of a choice than plain Romas. We’ve found several really great ones, including G. Chalmers Large Paste, Mia’s Italian Paste, Andes, Ten Fingers of Naples, and Speckled Roman.

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The blankety blank cows got into our north garden and gobbled up most of the crops out there. What a bummer! It took days to get over that one. But we did and you can bet that won’t happen again! But they didn’t get into our pig pasture garden and I’m canning Will’s Seneca Sunrise sweet corn. (Yes, we had a bountiful harvest for seed so I’m allowed to can up the pig pasture corn!

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Oh, by the way, Will’s head is healing well although he does have a monster head cold … unrelated. — Jackie

7 COMMENTS

  1. Matty,

    Boy, that’s a hard one! A couple of our new favorites are Speckled Roman, G. Chalmers Large Paste, Mia’s Italian paste and Enormous Plum. We’ve trialed many new-to-us paste tomatoes this year and most were huge successes!

  2. Reg,

    Thanks for the update. We always love to hear gardener’s success stories! The Hungarian Wax peppers are very productive. They are one of Will’s favorites.

  3. Great article! Which tomatoes make the best canned tomato sauce in your opinion? I want to pick up a couple packs of seeds from your site and am curious which ones you would suggest?

  4. Field update on the Hungarian Wax peppers from last spring. First up and actually had blossoms on them when set out. Five plants produced all we could use and more. Great for stir frys, also used in making a green chili base and found they will slip the skins when roasted like Anaheim peppers. These will be in the garden next year for sure.

  5. Angie,

    Yes, we will. We’re in full harvest mode right now and as soon as that lets up, I’ll update our website for sure.

  6. I’m working on a bean breeding project, and those Folsom beans just got added to the list of things to cross them with!

  7. Hi Jackie,
    Will you have any seeds from the Enormous Plum Paste Tomato for sale?
    I looked in the Seed Treasures Catalog and did not see it listed.
    Thank You
    Angie

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