Home Dried Tomatoes

Our garden has finally taken off. In the last two weeks we've picked eggplants, lemon cucumbers, green and golden zucchini, peppers, basil, and yes, many many heirloom tomatoes. I believe Neil has already been bragging about our latest haul over at microecos, but I'm going to show this picture too.

We are clearly overwhelmed. Especially since Neil is now off in China eating soaked chicken feet, leaving me with 12 plants worth of ripe tomatoes. Luckily California's Central Valley offers not only the perfect climate for growing vegetables (with, of course, loads of irrigation), but also the perfect one for drying them (for the same reason that we require irrigation). Last summer at the co-op, we turned an old futon into a drying rack by simply replacing the mattress with a door-sized screen. We dubbed this invention "the Fruiton" and it worked quite well once we ant-proofed it by coating the legs with wide bands of tanglefoot.

This year we had to get creative yet again, but this time we ended up with something smaller and simpler. We built a screen that would slide (somewhat) easily into the middle of our clothes drying rack, and then we plopped it into the sunniest spot in our yard. It's working rather well. We slice most of the cherry tomatoes we harvest in half, lay them face up on the rack, and in a few days they're dry.


The dry tomatoes go into a bag in the freezer to be eaten at a time when our tomato jungle is only a distant memory. It's so difficult not to eat them right off of the screen! I've definitely found that the cherry tomatoes are easier to work with than slices of larger tomato, which can sometimes end up too thin and dry or thick and messy. The promise of a gallon bag of sun dried tomatoes in the freezer definitely makes the prospect of fall and winter less distressing. Of course, I love the rainy season and the greens that come with it, but a little mention of the summer sun will certainly be welcome.

Honey Harvest

Our former home, Sunwise Co-op, is blessed with about four beehives. When I lived there, we had two. Then we managed to capture a neighborhood swarm, which led to some PR issues that I won't go into here. And now I think there are 4 hives, one of which lives in a beebox we put together ourselves.

Yesterday we harvested the honey, a process that I have always enjoyed.

Here Betta is lighting some dried sage in the smoker. The smoke is used to calm the bees down while we're working with them.



Here two of the hives have had their lids and top supers taken off so that we can steal their honey. The bees are crawling all over the top of the hives, wondering what's happened to their home.

Once we get the supers inside, the frames are taken out and gently warmed in the oven (the oven is not turned on... the heat from the pilot light is enough). This helps the honey flow more freely, which speeds up the harvesting process.

We gently scraped off of the honeycomb on one side of two frames, and insert them into the hand cranked centrifuge.






Neil scrapes the caps off of the frames, and Clyde (the dog) watches honey drain out of the centrifuge.

Two frames go into the centrifuge at a time. The honey is flung out of the comb and drips down the side of the centrifuge. Once in a while, we open up the spigot, and let the honey drip through a fine mesh strainer to catch any last bits of wax. Then we poured the filtered honey straight into jars.

We ended up with 8 gallons of honey. Eight gallons of honey. Neil and I got to take home one gallon for ourselves. That's quite a bit for two people and a dog. I have some recipes up my sleeve, but I can't wait to come up with more uses for all this honey.

Thank you Sunwise! For some backstory on Sunwise bee culture and some beautiful up close photos taken by a truly fearless photographer, please go to microecos.

The Tomato Jungle

I was very impressed with the two Isis Candy tomato plants we bought at the farmer's market this spring. Almost all the rest of our plants, which we started from seed, were very badly damaged in the freak April frost that we had this year. But the Isis Candies looked as bushy and green as ever. The rest of the plants bounced back for the most part, but I think it was too late.

The Isis Candy plants are out of control. We managed to get cages around them, but they've already moved well beyond those. They've engulfed all of the other tomato plants around them as well as the giant lavender we inherited from the previous occupant of our community garden plot. We can tell there are other tomato plants involved in this madness because there are different kinds of tomatoes in the jungle. You can see them if you spelunk into the center of the mess. And there are definitely some brandywine leaves in there. There even appears to be a volunteer summer squash plant growing in the middle.

Despite the over-verdant greenery, I do love the Isis Candy plants. The tomatoes are lovely... either a orangey-red or greenish-pink color, and very sweet. Plus, they ripen very quickly, since they are only slightly larger than typical cherry tomatoes. And this is good because our larger tomatoes are taking forever to ripen. This may be because of all the smoke that has been in the air. I've heard this theory. Or, it could be because we're not doing things properly. In any sense, I'm not sure I'll opt for the garden-by-chaos method next summer.