Welcome to this week’s homestead update.
Box of garlic
This week was fairly busy on the homestead, but there isn’t all that many things to write-up for my weekly status.
The garlic was ready to harvest. I pulled all the garlic from the garden and discovered that I didn’t have anyplace to cure it. I searched for additional baby gates to cure it on, but ended up making a big curing rack out of pine lumber and plastic poultry netting. The garlic needs to cure for a couple of weeks, then I’ll choose the seed garlic.
Tomatoes and okra
Here’s a shot of a small harvest one day this week. The okra is a burgundy okra that I saved the seeds from. It is coming in nicely. The oval-shaped tomatoes are some very small Amish paste tomatoes. The normal size of these tomatoes should be 3 or 4 times the size of these. The bigger tomato in the back is a Beefmaster tomato. My wife picked up the plants at some store up over the Pennsylvania line.
Canned crushed tomatoes
Wednesday I canned some crushed tomatoes. This is the way that I processed most of the tomatoes last year. It is easy to process them like this, but I’m hoping to can up some tomato paste or tomato sauce this Summer. That’s a much longer process and since I’ve never made paste, it will be quite an experience.
Other than having a slight break in the heat wave and continuing my battle with the Japanese beetles, that’s what has been keeping me busy.
