After posting yesterday about my little part of the world, our doggies, and our garden, I thought I'd give you a double whammy of feel good posts.
Lucy was on gardening duty early this morning, and with that, comes the harvesting of any crops ready to eat.
Here's the bounty !
The tomatoes you see here, were the ones on the vine in yesterdays post. The green beans are 24 hours old (organically grown fresh food tastes so much sweeter, it really does). The cucumbers were last harvested 4 or 5 days ago, so what you see here is the cucumber produce since then.
(This is all down to Lucy's care and attention, so she deserves all the credit).
So, what do do with all these tomatoes...
Freeze 80% of them and leave the rest to ripen up for this weeks salads!
Here's what I did, prior to freezing...
1/ Chop the buggers up, and empty the seeds and squishy pits out.
(plus eject any tiny maggots out, that are in at least 25% of the tommy's. Butterfly larvae, apparently)
2/ Whack into a blender with skins. There's nutrition in them thar skins!
3/ Bring to boil (hardly bubbling - otherwise it destroys all the fantastic flavors)
4/ Let them cool before bagging them up, and sticking in the freezer.
They will last for months frozen and act as a ready to use base for dozens of Italian, Mexican, and Indian recipes.
I estimate that we made up around 4 regular size cans from this batch.
The cost?
Well, I do a rough running total as we go along. The more we produce the cheaper everything gets. These are the fixed costs at the beginning of the project, divided by the quantity, and costs, as if were buying from the markets.
(Due to our very cool farmer friend, we have no costs for fertilizer and soil/bedding etc.)
My running total obviously means that the unit cost of each veggie goes down, the more our garden produces.
So, based on today's total...
Drum roll.....
4 'cans' of fresh organic tomatoes , and a weeks worth of salad tomatoes
The green beans.
The cucumbers.
Approximately 50 cents, in total.
Not too shoddy, and much better tasting than 90% of any supermarket bought, 'fresh' vegetable.