Preservation through pickling; week 18 in the vegetable garden

A salad made with vine-ripened red tomatoes, pickled green tomatoes and mozzarella pearls.

All those green tomatoes aren't going to ripen on the vine, so I tried my hand at pickling and frying them.

This past week I thinned out the tomato plants by cutting off branches with no flowers or tomatoes. I read that this directs energy into fruit production. I've also read that this allows the sun to fall on the fruits to hasten their ripening. It sounds good, but I don't know if that's science or folklore.

I picked enough red tomatoes to keep us going for another week. I also picked two pints of green tomatoes for a pickling experiment. I found a recipe online and followed it mostly. Instead of two portions of salt, I used one portion celery salt and one portion regular salt. I threw some sport peppers into the brine. Then I waited three days while the pickling liquid did its thing.

The spices just weren't right. My tomatoes need a little more flavor.

The results weren't bad. The green tomatoes were crunchy, but they were not the taste sensation I was expecting. The sport peppers taste OK, too. I'll try again with store-bought pickling spice and maybe brown sugar instead of white sugar. 

I also fried some green tomatoes this week, and they tasted pretty good. I saw on television the other night that you can just straight up grill green tomatoes, too. I'll give that a whirl.

Elsewhere in the vegetable garden, I transplanted some of the hyssop plants into the perennial garden, and I cut some zinnias for indoors. I noticed a couple of leaves of spinach are ready to pick and I saw two yellow squash were beginning to form. The pole beans are sporting flowers; it'll be a race against time to see if they set fruit in these cool days with diminishing sunlight hours.

Last week I bought two bags of mushroom compost. I didn't know how bad that stuff smells. It was in the back of the car for an hour while we drove home. I had to open the windows and cover the hatch, which dampened the aroma somewhat. Back home, I added two foot to the rose garden and dug the compost into that space. We're on the hunt for two or three more rose bushes.

There is always something to add, pull or relocate in the gardens.