First Crocus

My flower garden doesn't get much sun this early in the year, so my bulbs are always behind everyone else's. So excited yesterday to see the first bloom open out of the new bed of crocus I planted last fall!

A photo posted by Rachel Nelson (@liliesandlaurel) on Mar 11, 2015 at 3:23pm PDT

Happy Day!

Now I can start my list of the 100 must-have plants for next year's garden! Followed by the much more difficult task of pruning it down to the 10 I'll actually have room for...

All of our new items for 2015 are now available online! Click here to check them out: http://t.co/3MmSgysPXe pic.twitter.com/PpAMmC99i7
— Territorial Seed Co (@TerritorialSeed) December 19, 2014

When Life Gives You Green Tomatoes...

We had a cold, wet June this year, and it was late in the season before the ground dried out enough that I could put in the seedlings I'd started months before. Then, just when my tomatoes were doing well and some were almost ripe, the deer got into the vegetable garden and ate all of the tomatoes and the top 6 inches of most of the plants! I nursed them along, and the plants grew back faster as the weather heated up, but it was still the first week in September before I got my first ripe tomato. I threatened all the deer with death by garden trowel if they tried it again. (I'm sure they take me very seriously.)

The plants are all doing beautifully right now, and if we had three more months of warm weather on the way, I'd have row after row of home-canned tomatoes ready to get us through the winter, the way I'd planned.  As it is, every day I check the weather report to see whether the frost is likely to hit that night, or if it might hold off another week.

I made my first large harvest last week, before the rain hit, to pick all the ones that would end up bent onto the ground to rot when they got wet.  Any that were anywhere close to ripe, I put on the kitchen window sill, and we've been enjoying almost-vine-ripened tomatoes every day.  That still left me with a good 10 pounds of hard, green tomatoes, though. 

These were all from the smaller-fruiting plants (Principe Borghese, mostly) so they weren't great candidates for making fried green tomatoes (I'm planning to use the green Brandywines for that).  Luckily, I love pickles, relishes and chutneys, too, and they gave me great material for that.  I started out making some green tomato pickles; I forgot to take pictures of that, but I'm planning to make another batch soon.  Last weekend's project was a Green Tomato and Tart Apple Chutney, which gave me a chance to use some of the wild apples that I'd harvested, as well!

I'll be posting the recipe for my chutney tomorrow, so be sure to check back! Do you have any recipes you like to use for things that aren't quite ripe at the end of the growing season?